Gerald Griffin was born in Limerick, Ireland, December 12, 1803. His family emigrated to United States about 1820, but he remained with an elder brother, who lived at Adare. His earliest poems were contributed to the Limerick newspapers. In 1823, with a manuscript tragedy entitled “Aguire,” he went to London as a literary adventurer. But he could get no manager to put the play upon the stage, and with another, entitled “Gisippus,” he was no more fortunate. He sustained himself by writing for magazines, and soon acquired a brilliant reputation. In 1827 he published “Holland Tide,” and “Tales of the Munster Festivals,” stories of Irish peasant life; and in 1828 “The Colleen Bawn; or, The Collegians,” his best known and most powerful novel, which has been dramatised as “The Colleen Bawn.” His subsequent publications were “The Invasion,” “The Rivals,” “The Duke of Monmouth,” a second series of “Tales of the Munster Festivals,” “Tracey’s Ambition,” “Tales of the Five Senses,” and “Tales of the Jury-Room.” In the last mentioned, an Irish jury, together with an interloper who had been accidentally locked up with them, spent a night in telling stories and singing songs by turns around…. Griffin joined the society of the Christian Brothers in 1838, and died in Cork, June 12, 1840. After his death his tragedy of “Gisippus” was brought out at Drury Lane Theatre with great success. His works, edited with a memoir by his brother, have been published in New York in ten volumes, including one volume of poems.

Personal

  Until within a short time back I have not had, since I left Ireland, a single moment’s peace of mind; constantly running backwards and forwards, and trying a thousand expedients, only to meet disappointments everywhere I turned…. I never will think or talk upon the subject again. It was such a year that I did not think it possible I could have outlived, and the very recollection of it puts me into the horrors…. When I first came to London my own self-conceit, backed by the opinion of one of the most original geniuses of the age, induced me to set about revolutionising the dramatic taste of the time by writing for the stage. Indeed, the design was formed and the first step taken (a couple of pieces written), in Ireland. I cannot with my present experience conceive anything more comical than my own views and measures at that time. A young gentleman totally unknown even to a single family in London coming into town with a few pounds in one pocket, and a brace of tragedies in the other, supposing that the one will set him up before the others are exhausted, is not a very novel, but a very laughable delusion. I would weary you, or I would carry you through a number of curious scenes into which it led me.

  About two years after he set off gaily for London with “Gisippus” and I know not how many other plays in his pocket, for his only resource, and his countryman John Banim for his only friend. He was not yet twenty, poor boy, had hardly left his father’s roof, and he set out for London full of spirits and of hope to make his fortune by the stage. Now we all know what “Gisippus” is—the story of a great benefit, a foul ingratitude, suffering heaped upon suffering, wrong upon wrong, avenged in the last scene by such a pardon, such a reconciliation as would draw tears from the stoniest heart that ever sat in a theatre. We all know the beauty of “Gisippus” now; for after the author’s death that very play, in Mr. Macready’s hands, achieved perhaps one of the purest successes of the modern drama. But during Gerald Griffin’s life it produced nothing but mortifications innumerable and unspeakable. The play and the poet were tossed unread and unheard from actor to actor, from manager to manager, until hope fainted within him, and the theatre was abandoned at once and forever.

  Thus lived and died one whom it would be faint praise to call one of the brightest and purest ornaments which this century has given to English literature. The various creations of his fancy will long hold a high place in the hearts of all who admire the beautiful and revere the good; but the moral of his own life is the noblest heritage he has left us. True to the instincts of his Catholic birth and training, he passed through the temptations of sorrow, poverty, and vanities of a great city for years, preserving his faith unshaken and his morals unsullied; with courage and tenacity of purpose, the attributes of true heroism, he surmounted obstacle after obstacle, which easily have daunted older and stronger men, till he reached a proud position in the literature of his country; and when surrounded by all that is supposed to make life valuable—personal independence, devoted friends, and worldly applause—he gently and after mature self-examination took off his laurels, laid them modestly on the altar of religion, and, clothed in the humble garb of a Christian Brother, prepared to devote his life to unostentatious charity. Even his very name, that he once fondly hoped to write on the enduring tablets of history, he no longer desired to be remembered; for on the plain stone that marks his last resting-place in the little graveyard on the monastery is engraved simply the words, BROTHER JOSEPH. DIED JUNE 12, 1840.

  “Lie lightly on him, earth”—on the dust of one who found the struggle for fame so bitter that he resigned it in very weariness of heart when victory was well-nigh within his grasp. I knew Griffin when I was like him—a young man toiling hard for a future. John Banim—who had, between sickness, disappointment, and poverty, something like the lot of a literary martyr to endure himself—was his useful adviser and steadfast friend; and at Banim’s house I met him more than once. He was then a delicate, or, rather, a refined-looking young man, tall and handsome, but with mournful eyes, and that unmistakable something which prognosticates a sad life and an early death. He had come to London at the age of nineteen, with some poems in his pocket and an unfinished tragedy. For a long time he continued to pick up a precarious living by literature, struggling with absolute poverty, without friends, without prospects—almost without hope. Sickened by numberless disappointments, brought face to face with actual starvation—for it had come to that, when a friend once discovered him, and ascertained that he had been three days without food—his pride yet held him back from seeking the aid that relatives he had left in Limerick would certainly have tendered, could he have prevailed on himself to make known to them his extremity of distress. Banim—himself hardly in better circumstances proffered help, and it was rejected. At last—too late—“The Collegians” and “The Munster Festivals” found their way into print, and to success; then their author’s dreary path was lighted up with the first dawning of fame. Too late—for, though the struggle was at an end, it had crushed him. He determined to burn his manuscripts and write no more, but withdraw himself from the world. Alas! even while he was preparing for long years of penance and prayer, Death came and removed him to heaven.

  The success of “The Collegians” led to the writing of a number of novels, essays, poems, etc., to the pleasantest of social associations, and to all those pleasures which Griffin as a lad of eighteen facing the world had longed to enjoy. Just how and when the idea of suddenly renouncing them all and entering a religious order came to him his biographer has not stated, but I may venture to quote the opinion given me by Mr. Aubrey De Vere. He assured me that the leading idea in Gerald Griffin’s mind was that writing fiction was injurious to his own standard of thought and feeling, and that his higher inspiration was for a life devoted to charitable works. He began to criticise his own novels unsparingly, declaring that he found in some of them tendencies which he disapproved. He was nervous over this, anxious for the work even of a missionary, but by no means either morbid or fantastic in his views, as some of his critics have averred. When he decided to join the Christian Brotherhood to devote himself to a life of simple usefulness, of teaching the poorer classes, and also of writing religious works, he was in the calmest and serenest frame of mind. The call had reached him, and it was not to be resisted or denied. One who lived in the same order years later told me that those among the Christian Brothers who remembered him declared that never was a more joyous or happy spirit among them. He had studied law, theology, and metaphysics; he had mingled with the leading spirits of the day; he had talked philosophy with the followers of Voltaire and Hume; he had listened to every sort of opinion that floated through the London he called his home, and he had of late years been met more than half-way by fame and pecuniary success. There was no depression in his decision, no sudden phase of feeling that there was a tremendous heroism or sacrifice in the step he contemplated. It was as clearly a necessity to him and the scheme of life and salvation he proposed to himself as if it had been a Saul who, listening to the voice in the heavens, answered, “My Lord and my God.”

  One day his brother found the fireplace black with the cinders of papers recently burned. He had just destroyed the whole of his manuscripts, verse and prose alike, and answered all inquiries by stating that he had devoted the rest of his life to the instruction of little peasant boys, as one of the “Christian Brothers”—the humblest of all religious communities. He laboured assiduously for a few years at Cork; and there, some years later, I saw his grave, and heard his fellow-labourers declare that if Ireland had ever had a saint, Gerald Griffin was one.

General

  Written as it was [“Gisippus”] in his twentieth year, I do not hesitate to call it one of the marvels of youthful production in literature. The solid grasp of character, the manly depth of thought, the beauties as well as defects of the composition (more than I can here enumerate), wanted only right direction to have given to our English drama another splendid and enduring name. In little London coffee-houses, on little slips of paper, this tragedy was written. But he could get no hearing for it.

  Griffin was certainly a man of genius; a man having a certain inborn aptitude, which is not the result of education and industry…. It became active in Griffin while he was very young; indeed, when Griffin gave up literature, he was still young, so that Griffin was always a young author; and yet we might say that he was always a ripe one. From the first, he displayed a certain masculine vigor altogether different from the feebleness which sometimes characterizes the compositions of young writers, who afterwards become remarkable for their strength…. He had an inventive and bold imagination: to this his power and variety in the creation of character bear witness. He had great fulness of sensibility and fancy, as we observe in the picturesqueness of his style, and in his wealth of imagery. He delighted in outward nature, and is a fine describer of it; but, like Sir Walter Scott, he never describes for the sake of description, but always in connection with human interest and incident. He excels in the pathetic: but it is in passion that he has most power; strong natural passion, and such as it is in those individuals in whom it is strongest and most natural,—individuals in the middle and lower ranks of life, especially in the middle and lower ranks of Irish life…. His genius, too, was of the most refined moral purity, without sermonizing or cant; and when we reflect that guilt and sin and passion, low characters, vulgar life, and broad humor, are so constantly the subjects with which it is concerned, this purity is no less remarkable than it is admirable.

  As a poet, Griffin is remarkable for the beauty of his delineations of natural scenery, his elevation of sentiment and purity of conception. His lyrics remind us of Moore, and are scarcely inferior to some of the best of that immortal bard’s in feeling and choiceness of metaphor; but being somewhat deficient in rhythm, they have never found much favor in the drawing or concert-room, “A Place in thy Memory, Dearest,” “My Mary of the Curling Hair,” and one or two others excepted.

  A poet, on the one hand, who has both passion and imagination, he can portray some of the most terrible as well as affecting of human struggles; a humorist on the other, he possesses that rarer quality which is both the medium of reality and source of insight into character. But for the strong religious convictions which tore him from the world at the moment his brilliant powers were arriving at maturity, there is very little doubt he would have become the national bard of Ireland, and have enriched our English literature with some of its noblest modern additions. It would be hard indeed to limit the possibilities of one who could write such a play as “Gisippus” before he had reached the age of twenty, and produce, only five years afterwards, such a romance as “The Collegians.”… The genius of Gerald Griffin was eminently dramatic. This was shown in the spirit of his stories, so many of which were adapted to the stage, and in the fact that all his earliest and most prized attempts were plays…. More a poet than a patriot, more affected by what was universal and enduring in his countrymen than what was special and political under the influence of passing systems, whilst feeling deeply the peasant’s condition, he was less attracted to his sphere than to that of his own order—the rural middle class of Ireland, with its comparative culture and tranquility, and which had also its romance in its traditions of strange events, that had roused at times its slumbering passions and lashed a peaceful current into momentary surges. Of such traditions were the stories of the “Collegians” and the “Aylmers”—pathetic memories that had long been cherished in remote and quiet neighbourhoods,—tenuous and delicate foundations, but on which the concreting touch of genius could build—at least in one case—an imperishable structure.

  His novels are of a more sustained merit than those of the O’Hara Family, if they do not equal them in detached passages. His poetry, with the exception of his tragedies, was all occasional, and in its fine feeling and frequently admirable felicity is evidence of what he might have accomplished with more leisure and a spirit less perturbed with an incessant and painful struggle for existence.

  “The Collegians” established his reputation. This book is perhaps now more widely known by the popular play of the Colleen Bawn, which was founded upon it, than by its own attractions. But the story is the least satisfactory part of it, and the sketches of life and the character to be met with in the book are infinitely more worth the reader’s while than the melodramatic fate of Eily O’Connor, and the despair and misery of her lover. Not even Miss Edgeworth’s account of the successive squires of “Castle Rackrent” sets forth the wild groups of Irish gentry with so trenchant a touch as that with which Griffin represents his Cregans and Creaghs in their noisy carouses: and his peasants of all descriptions are full of humour and life—more individual and displaying a more intimate knowledge than those of Miss Edgeworth.

  “The Collegians” has been frequently reprinted, and presents the best picture existing of Irish peasant life—at once the most vivid and the most accurate. Its comic parts are the most comic, and its tragic the most tragic, to be found in Irish literature.

  Had he given to the stage the tragic realities of life around him, such as he gave to his novels, he might have formed a successful national drama. His riper mind found fresher paths. It should be counted to him that he was the first to present several of our folk-customs, tales, and ancient legends in English prose. In poetry his longer pieces fail in freshness, vigour, and local colour; they are conventional compositions, carefully worked, with pleasing imagery and pensive reflections. In his lyrics, however, where his native genius is free, he is at his best, impassioned at times (though never passionate), tender, delicate, yet strong with a certain dramatic grasp of his subject. There is a curious prudence, somewhat Edgeworthian, in certain of his verses, which controls passion and may be due to the influence of a Quaker lady whose friend he was.