Patrick Augustine Sheehan (1852-1913)

[ See Patrick Maume, “Canon Patrick Sheehan”, in the Dictionary of Irish Biography (RIA 2009) - online; see extracts - infra.
Much detail has been added to this notice thanks to James O’Brien in correspondence with RICORSO during June-Aug. 2024. ]

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[ Download: Copies in The Graves of Kimorna or, A Story of ’67 (1913)
are available in RICORSO Library > Irish Classics as .htm, pdf. or .doc. ]

Early Essays and Lectures (London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1906), vii, 354pp. [2pp. ads.] - CONTENTS: Essays: Religious Instruction in Intermediate Schools; In a Dublin Art Gallery; Emerson; Free-thought in America; The German Universities; The German and Gallic Muses; Recent Augustinian Literature; The Poetry of Matthew Arnold; Recent Works on St. Augustine; Aubrey de Vere (a study). Lectures: Irish Youth and High Ideals: The Two Civilisations; The Fiftieth Anniversary of O’Connell's Death; Our Personal and Social Responsibilities; The Study of Mental Science; Certain Elements of Character; The Limitations and Possibilities of Catholic Literature.

Canon Sheehan’s Short Stories (London: Burns & Oates 1908), 167, 16pp.; ill. [8 lvs. of pls. by M. Healy]. [see contents] I. Spoiled priest; II. A Thorough Gentleman; III. The Monks of Trabolgan; IV. Rita, the Street Singer; V. Remanded.

‘The German Universities, II’, in Irish Ecclesiastical Record, Vol. VII (1886): ‘Sheehan’s article on the German universities cited Dr. Pusey’s view that those institutions are given over to rationalism, and remarks on the difference between the early Kant of the Critique of Pure Reason which persuaded many to atheism and the later religious Kant. A footnote on the subject quotes at length from Lord Acton’s article on George Eliot in The Nineteenth Century (March 1885) where he writes: “From Jonathan Edwards to Spinoza she went over at one step. The abrupt transition may be accounted for by the probable action of Kant, who had not then become a buttress of Christianity”. Lord Acton reports that Eliot was “seized with a burst of gratitude” when “she stood before his statue in Berlin”, adding “but she hardly became familiar with her later works.” In an earlier sentence of the passage quoted, Lord Acton writes to Sheehan’s purpose: “One of out ten Englishmen, if there be ten, who read him in 1841, nine got no further than the Critique of pure reason, and knew him as the dreaded assailant of popular evidences.” (Italics Sheehan’s; ftn., p.624.) Sheehan forms the judgement that “German savans, compressing their ideas within the limits of one faculty, grew cramped and illiberal in the pursuit of knowledge” (p.626), and afterwards speaks of an “unconscious against the Protestant doctrine that the Bible was the sole rule of faith [...] losing the spirit of the Divine Word in too critical an examination of the letter.” (p.627.) [Available online; accessed 31.10.2011.]

Index of Publications available at Internet Archive with inks supplied by Clare County Library The Graves at Kilmorna, A Story of ’67 by Patrick Augustine Sheehan Published in 1918, Longmans, Green and co. (New York [etc.]) Statement: by the Rev. Canon P. A. Sheehan. Pagination: 3 p. l., [3]-373pp. Genre: Fiction; Subject: Fenians — Fiction. Available at Internet Archive [copy held at UCSB] The Blindness of Dr. Gray; or, The Final Law by Patrick Augustine Sheehan Published in 1909; Longmans, Green & Co. (NY [... &c.]) - new imp. 1932. Pagination: vi, 488pp. Available at Internet Archive [copy held at UCLA] C L A R E L I B R A R Y

See RICORSO editions ... The Graves of Kilmorna: A Story of ’67 (1915; 1918 edn.) - as .htm, pdf. or .doc.

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Commentary
Sean O’Faolain, ‘Even in our day readers of Canon Sheehan’s excellent novel, The Blindness of Doctor Gray, will recognise the familiar priest of the old school, the stern moralist for whom “the Law” was a second god.’ (The Irish, 1947, p.97.)

George Moore, ‘Fr. Sheehan’s last masterpiece advocates all Ireland becoming one great monastery’ (Hail and Farewell! Salve, London: [q.pub.] 1912, p.121).

Benedict Kiely, ‘Canon Sheehan: The Reluctant Novelist’, in A Raid into Dark Corners (Cork UP 1999), pp.181-91: ‘What he meant those two early novels to be was a warning to young men of the dangers to faith of an exclusively secular education. (p.184.). […] If we are to consider Sheehan as a novelist, and there is little point in considering him as anything else, since his work as a parish priest did not differ from the work of other zealous priests and would not in itself call for a critical consideration … then we can see the real triumph of failure in those two novels about Geoffrey Austin. They were a long, hard apprenticeship. When they were ended, he was never again completely blinded by books, neither by their merits nor their moral dangers, and he was better able to look at his people and his scene as a novelists should. […] Yet even in the middle of The Triumph of Failure comes this luminous passage foretelling better things. It is an reflection attributed to the unworthy and absurd Geoffrey: / The high regions of speculative thought are, like Alpine altitudes, too thin for man to breathe in for long periods of time. There is a craving of the heart for human fellowship, as well as a thirst of the mind for knowledge; and what is said of solitude is true of study - that but an angel or a beast can tolerate its continuance. I confess life was taking on new lights and colours since I became interested in the little drama of human feelings and passions; and whilst I thirsted for the unattainable heaven of pure thought, I felt that the very pricks and stings of human passion give life a zest to which my solitary life had as yet been a stranger. I believed now that the best of all existences here below is a compound of action and thought, a steady practical interest in the welfare of the race, and occasional breathing moments of silent conference with the eternal.’ (p.186.) [Cont.]

Benedict Kiely (‘Canon Sheehan: The Reluctant Novelist’, in A Raid into Dark Corners, 1999) - cont.: Kiely quotes the prologue to Luke Delmege: ‘Was it not said of Balzac that he dug and dragged every one of his romances straight from the heart of some woman? “Truth is stranger than [188] fiction”. No! my dear friend, for all fiction is truth - truth torn up by the roots from bleeding human hearts, and carefully bound with fillets of words to be placed there in vases, of green and gold, on your reading-desk, on your breakfast table. Horrid? So it is. Irreverent? Well a little.’ Kiely comments: ‘Well, now we know that he has accepted the horribleness and the irreverence that must be if novels have to be written at all.’ (p.188-89). Further: ‘Paradoxically he was, it might seem, made a novelist in spite of himself, in spite of the Geoffrey Austin in him, by the intervention of the Irish people, including their priests, and by his mystical love for the land of Ireland. … The Fenians, who owed so little to the Irish clergy, had, because of their mystic self-sacrifice, their helpless devotion to an idea that was not material, a faithful champion in the pastor of Doneraile […/] Sheehan was more severe in his denunciations of the people and the country than the harshest of the realists who were to come. The Irish priest then (perhaps still in some places), because of his training and of the way in which the people looked up to him, thundered from the clouds and knew it; whereas the Irish writer who was merely a writer was never allowed to forget that he was nothing more than a man and, in Ireland, no a very desirable type of humanity.’(p.190.)

James H. Murphy, ‘Guinan and Sheehan: “False Standard of Modern Progress”’, Catholic Fiction and Social Reality in Ireland, 1873-1922 (Conn: Greenwood Press 1997): ‘The tone is nationalistic but only in as much as nationalism is common as a servant of religion and it is anti-British but only in as much as Anglicisation is common as an instrument of modernisation. It would be incorrect to conclude from this, therefore, that Sheehan was an advocate of Catholic Ireland in terms similar to those of [Joseph] Guinan. Two things, in particular, distinguish his vision from that of Guinan. First, an Irish Catholic nation is of interest to the speaker not because it would insulate Ireland from the outside world, in its own comfortable paradise, but because it might be Of use in a universal struggle. Second, such a Catholic Ireland is not a present reality, it is an ideal state that has yet to be achieved. In fact the novels are highly critical of Catholic Ireland as it actually exists. Its present reality is not that of Guinan’s peasants.’ (p.120.)

Rolf & Magda Loeber, with Anne Mullin Burnham, A Guide to Irish Fiction, 1650-1900 (Dublin: Four Courts Press 2006) - Introduction: ‘The Munster author Canon Patrick Sheehan counter-attacked the critics by writing that “we have no Catholic reading public because constructive criticism [our emphasis] is unknown”. Instead, he stated, “we have a good deal of negative criticism ...”’ (Sheehan, Literary Essays and Poems , Dublin, n.d, p.76; Lober, p.lxv.)

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References
D. J. O’Donoghue, The Poets of Ireland: A Biographical Dictionary (Dublin: Hodges Figgis & Co 1912); lists poems, Cithara Mea, poems (Boston 1900), and poems in Irish Monthly; his brother D. B. Sheehan, bank clerk in Cork, wrote for The Nation and United Ireland in the 1880s.

Stephen Brown, ed., Ireland in Fiction (Dublin: Maunsel 1919), lists Geoffrey Austin, Student (Dublin: Gill 1895; 5th edn.1908); The Triumph of Failure (Burnes & Oates [1899]); My New Curate [1899] (Boston 1914), Do. another edn. (Cork: Mercier 1989); Luke Delmege ([1901] new ed., Longmans 1915); Glenanaar [1905] (London: Longmans 1915); Lost Angel of a Ruined Paradise [1904] (London: Longmans 1915); The Spoiled Priest and Other Stories (London: Gill, Burnes & Oates 1905); Lisheen, or The Test of the Spirits ([1907] new ed. London: Longmans 1914); The Blindness of Dr. Gray, or The Final Law [1909] (London: Longmans 1914); Miriam Lucas [1912], new ed. Longmans 1914); The Graves of Kilmorna (London: Longmans 1915). DIL corrects bibliographical details and adds My New Curate (Boston 1900); Under the Cedars and Stars (Browne & Nolan 1903), essays; A Spoiled Priest and Other Stories (Unwin 1905); Early Essays and Lectures (London: Longmans 1906); Parerga (London: Longmans 1908); Sermons, ed. M. J. Phelan (Dublin: Maunsel 1920); The Literary Life and Other Essays (Maunsel & Roberts 1921); Poems (Maunsel & Roberts 1921); Tristram Lloyd, completed by Rev. Henry Gaffney (Talbot 1929);The Literary Life and Other Essays (Dublin 1921).

Justin McCarthy, gen. ed., Irish Literature, ed. (Washington: University of America 1904); gives extract from Luke Delmege.

Belfast Public Library holds var. edns. of Blindness of Dr. Gray ([?]1970); Glenanaar, a story of Irish Life (1930); Graves of Kilmorna (1930); The Intellectuals, an Experiment in Irish Club-life (1911); Lisheen (1930); Literary Life Essays, poems (1930); Lost Angel of a Ruined Paradise (1904); Luke Delmege (1930); My New Curate (1930); Poems (1921); [The] Queen’s Fillet (1930); A Spoiled Priest (1930); Tristram Lloyd (1930); Under the Cedars and the Stars (1905).

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Quotations

The Beauty of Summer (Cork: Mercier edn. 1973): ‘Across that bight of sea sleep the three islands that link us with the past, and whose traditions, were we otherwise, would shame us. They are Aran-na-Naomh, Arran of the Saints ... a place for the hermit and the saint; and mark you ... the hermit and the saint must again resume their rightful places in the economy of new orders and systems! You cannot do without them. They symbolise ... comfort without wealth, perfect physical health without passion, love without desire ... clean bodies, keen minds, pure hearts - what better world can the philosopher construct, or the poet dream of?’ (pp.46, 48-49; quoted in Luke Gibbons, ‘Synge, Country and Western: The Myth of the West in Irish and American Culture’, in Transformations in Irish Culture, Field Day/Cork UP 1996, pp.23-35; p.29.)

The Literary Life and Other Essays (Dublin 1921): ‘God be with the good old times, when the hedge-school masters were as plentiful as blackberries in Ireland when the scholars took their sods of turf under their arms for school seats; but every boy knew his Virgil and Horace and Homer as well as the last ballad about some rebel that was hanged ... when the Kerry peasants talked to each other in Latin; and when they came up to the Palatines in Limerick, as harvestmen in the autumn, they could make uncomplimentary remarks and say cuss-words ad libidum before their master’s face, and he couldn’t understand them for they spoke the tongue of Cicero and Livy – the language of the educated world.’ (p.52, quoted in W. B. Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition, IAP 1976, pp.27-28.)

Irish Ballad Literature: ‘Yes! There’s the finest touch in all ballad literature. The thought of the old motherland has paralysed them. They remember all — her mountains, her lakes, her valleys, her seas! They recall her long night of suffering, redressed only by her indomitable Constancy. And they remember, how near they were to victory. Oh! If they only had hearkened to the voice of their Bishop and that Franciscan friar who told them to hold out to the last! But it is of no use. They were misled and deceived; and their only hope is now, to flash their sabres tomorrow in the breasts of the Dutchmen! Poor fellows! poor fellows!” (The ‘grave but kind’ Myles Cogan, assistant-teacher, in Graves of Glenmorna, 1918 Edn. p.8 [Chap. 1].)

‘Free Thought in America: The Sects and the Church’, in The Irish Ecclesiastical Record (Sept. 1884): ‘The Church must always be in advance of the world. The priest must lead the flock. And his spiritual instructions will carry all the more weight when it is understood that the pastor is a man of culture and refinement, and that his condemnation of new and fanciful theories comes from his belief founded on fair and exhaustive reading, that they are utterly untenable. […] Men will reverence knowledge wherever found, and the natural abilities of the scholar may lead many souls to acknowledge the supernatural mission of the priest.’ ( p.730; cited by Ruth Fleischmann, ‘Knowledge of the World as the Forbidden Fruit: Canon Sheehan and Joyce on the Sacrificium Intellectus’, pp.127-37; in Donald E. Morse, et al., eds,. A Small Nation’s Contribution to the World, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1993, p.135.)

A Fenian funeral: On 2 April 1867 Cannon Sheehan witnessed the funeral procession of Peter O’Neill Crowley, who had been shot in Kilclooney Wood near Mitchelstown during the Fenian rising of 5th March. The funeral procession passed from Mitchelstown down to the seashore at Ballymacoda and Sheehan’s account is recorded in his Moonlight of Memory: ‘I remember well the evening on which that remarkable funeral took place. It was computed that at least 5,000 men took part in the procession and shouldered the coffin of the dead patriot over mountain and valley and river until they placed the sacred burden down there near the sea and under the shadow of the church at Ballymacoda. I remember how a group of us young lads shivered on the college terrace at Fermoy and watched the masses of men swaying over the bridge, the yellow coffin conspicuous in their midst. we caught another glimpse of the funeral cortege as it passed the Sergeant’s Lodge, then we turned away with tears of sorrow and anger in our eyes.’ (Pádraig Ó Maidín, ‘Pages from an Irishman’s Diary: This Period Then’, in Éire-Ireland, 6, 1, Spring 1971, pp.27-34; p.30.)

Geoffrey Austin: Student (1895), warns of the dangers of college education without religious training, leaving the orphan title-character unfitted for life and careless of eternity. In a sequel, The Triumph of Failure (1899), a sequel which was much better received, Austin encounters Charles Travers who sets about organizing a Catholic revival and dies a failure after being hounded with trumped up charges but whose courage kindles a religious revival in the British Empire. Inspired by him, Austin turns from his classical studies to join a Catholic order sworn to poverty.

Luke Delmege: A Novel (1901), in which an intellectual curate, returning from England, undergoes a painful process of self-recognition. Motivated by reforming zeal, Luke is blind the traditional virtues of rural Ireland and brings misfortune on himself and others. A sentimental sub-plot argues that the best priests are those whose are humility brings salavation to depraved men and fallen women.

Glenanaar: A Novel of Irish Life (1905) is based Daniel O’Connell’s successful defence of men accused of agrarian crimes in Doneraile, Co. Cork. Terence Casey, a grandson of an informer, flees to America but returns to Ireland having made his fortune. He saves a local hurling team and reveals his identity to a conciliatory parish priest. The narrative of mother’s ostracism during the Famine occupies several some chapters. Elsewhere, Casey proposes to a woman who agreed to marry him before he left and who now gives her daughter’s hand to him in marriage. (R. J. Ray dramatised the novel in The Casting out of Martin Whelan (1910); trans. in German as Das Christtagskind.

Note: Glenanaar is based on ‘Doneraile Conspiracy’ of 1829 in which Daniel O’Connell saved four prisoners condemned to death and some 17 others who were tried as a result of determined efforts by the local ascendancy to stamp out agrarian crime, following an attack led by George Bond Low on a landlord called Dr Norcott. Before his trial William Burke rode to Derrynane and convinced O’Connell to appear for the defendants. O’Connell exposed the perjured witnesses in court-room before udges Torrens and Pennefather and the Attorney General John Doherty who summed up. Those charged were acquitted but nevertheless a wider round-up resulted in the condemnation of others, afterwards commuted to transportation. (See Dictionary of Irish History, ed. Hickey and Doherty, 1979).

Lisheen, or The Test of the Spirits (1907), recounts the experiences of Bob Maxwell, a young landlord in Kerry during the 1890s who lodges incognito with his tenants and witnesses their eviction by his own estate-agent. Maxwell marries the daughter of an enlightened English neighbour and learns the importance of improving methods on the part of landlords. The novel ends with a sensational narrative involving an Indian concubine, a fire, rescue and a drowning intended to illustrate the promote and conservative idea of paternalist philanthropy in land relations.

Miriam Lucas (1912): The title-character is robbed of her family estate by an unscrupulous guardian; she takes the side of the workers in his transport company who are induced to strike by an agent provocateur, but when a priest who pleads with them is killed she halts the strike and leaves for America where she works as a journalist in the slums. There she encounters a dying old woman, newly released from prison, who turns out to be her mother, earlier driven from the family estate for converting to Catholicism. Miriam is ultimately restored to her property with the help of kindly Protestants.

The Graves at Kilmorna: A Story of ’67 (1915) centered on Myles Cogan and James Halpin, a miller’s son and a school-teacher and in a midland town, who hold officer rank in the Fenian Army during the 1867 Rising with the intention less of winning a Republic (which they consider impossible) than turning the people away from the corrupt parliamentary party and save the nation from ‘putrefaction’ through their own blood-sacrifice - whether death or imprisonment await them. Halpin is shot in action and Cogan is captured, tried, and sentenced ten years in Dartmoor Prison. Returning to Ireland in Book II of the novel, he debates Irish history with those around him and is killed by a drunkard at an election meeting, to be buried afterward alongside Halpin: Father James, who is a quietly presides over the narrative at every point, says in the concluding sentences: “There they lie; and with them is buried the Ireland of our dreams, our hopes, our ambitions, our love. There is no more to be said. Let us go hence!” By way of romantic plot, Mary Carleton, a friend of Myles’ sister Agnes, betrays him to the police inspector in order to save him from worse in the intended “rising” and informs Halpin that she has done so to avoid his being identified as the betrayer - a fact which Halpin imparts to Cogan in the final phase of their friendship, before Halpin dies in his arms on the field of battle. [BS]

[ Note several longer and shorter allusions to Irish revolutionaries and patriots incl. Charles Kickham, Robert Emmet, Thomas Francis Meagher, John Mitchel (as Mitchell), Thomas Clarke Luby, and James Stephens, et al. See also note on Kilmorna House - infra.]

In Graves of Kilmorna, Myles Cogan, released from prison, returns to his home-town in an unnamed county of Southern ireland to find that his fellow-prisoner McDermot is instigating a campaign of agrarian violence in a spirit of historical revenge on the part of the Fenians and the nation. Myles is now determined to uphold the principle of non-criminal patriotism and characterises his own share in the Rising of 1867 as a contribution to the pride and honour of the nation - a repudiation of the “putrefaction’ of jobbery in the electoral system operated by the Irish Parliamentary Party - undertaken without hope or even wish of separation from the English crown. He tells McDermott that Irish people have no reason to repudiate the English crown which provides security for their property but McDermott, from a poor agrarian (peasant) background who has seen his own parents being evicted, has no time for that middle-class view of things. For Myles, it seems that the other has chosen the ignoble option of revenge and his respect for him is shattered.

In discussing the point with Father James, Myles says of his own comrades: ‘They never soiled their flag with crime. The wild justice of revenge was never a Fenian virtue!’ (p.232.) Even Father James paused over this to consider the violence of the men of 1867 which led to the execution of the Manchester Martyrs: ‘That’s all very well, Myles,’ said Father James, after congratulating the writer on his loyalty to his fellows. ‘But what about Clerkenwell? and what about the Phoenix Park?’ To this Myles responds with a disclaimer regarding the idiocy of the ‘two or three fellows’ involved in the bombing and the subsequent killing of a policeman and similarly disowns what the priest calls ‘that supreme crime in the Phoenix Park’ (p.233.): ‘As to the Invincibles, they were no more Fenians than you are’ - citing their youth which disqualifies them from membership of the Fenian Movement, stricto sensu. In this way, Sheehan gives countenance to both the motive of purification and that of revenge in Irish republican separatism - though clearly marking the fact that Myles Cogan and his friend James Halpin had “never entertained’ the idea of separatism. (p.222) - much to McDermot‘s disgust. Clearly, if anything, Sheehan does believe that a form of generational blood-sacrifice is necessary to ‘purify’ the Irish race and nation - the idea which Fr. James quotes from ‘old Longinus’, thus: ‘To fail in great attempts is yet a noble failure!’  I like the heroes of lost causes!” Indeed, this is the concept which affords the title for a very different book in his Triumph of Failure (1900) - from which, indeed, Ruth Dudley Edwards derived the title of her 1977 critical biography of Patrick Pearse.

Like much of the political and moral language circulating in Sheehan’s novel - including strictly contemporary references to Ruskin and Carlyle in respect of the wider British and Irish culture of the 1867 Rising - the phrase ‘wild justice’ must certainly have enjoyed a good deal of contemporary use. it may even have been applied, as Myles suggests, to the agrarian violence of the period and this will bear further examination. In 1930 the Irish Writer - a Protestant clergyman by profession - issued Wild Justice, a fiction study of agrarian crime. Today it is, perhaps, best known as the title of thriller-novels by Wilbur Smith (1992), Philip Margolin (2000) and not less than ten other fiction-authors. It is also a recurrent title for works on the abuse of wild life on the planet - e.g., the highly-praised Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals (2009) by Marc Beckoff with Jessica Price and for a work of global politics by Cormac Cullinan entitled Wild Law: A manifest for Earth Justice (2003). Then there is Susan Jacoby’s remarkable study entitled Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge (1983) which embraces examples of the theme from Euripedes’ Hecuba onwards. Finally, for our purposes, there is an essay by the philosopher Gerry Wallace entitled simply ‘Wild Justice’ which appeared in Philosophy (July 1995, pp.363-375).

Wallace begins by quoting Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice who makes the case for the identical humanity of Jews and Gentiles but ends rather shockingly with this line: ‘And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?’ - a line, which, in the context of Israel’s present campaign against Hamas in Gaza must ring a loud peal of cultural and political bells today. Wallace then poses the question raised by the apparent discord between the celebrated plea for some kind of multi-cultural tolerance and the justification of revenge in the concluding line: ‘How can something as barbaric as revenge figure in a humane plea for moral equality?’ He goes on to suggest that ‘[i]n real life revenge seems to be making a moral comeback’ as illustrated not only by cinema - which depicts women settling scores as often as men - but also in numerous actual cases of individuals talking the law into their own hands which he mentions. (p.363.) However this stands today, it is certainly a key question in relation to the history of rebellion in Ireland up to and including the recent Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ where revenge stood out with sectarian hatred as the dominant forces behind the murder of some four thousand people whose lives were taken by ‘freedom fighters and - albeit in lesser numbers - by their opponents between 1972 and 1999. [BS 10.04.2024.]