Born, at Kilkenny, 3 April 1798. Educated at private schools, 1802–10; at Kilkenny Coll., 1810–13. In 1813 to Dublin, to study drawing in Academy of Royal Dublin Society. Returned to Kilkenny, 1815. To Dublin 1820, to adopt literary career. Contrib. to “Limerick Evening Post” and other periodicals. “Damon and Pythias” produced at Covent Garden, 28 May 1821. Married Ellen Ruth, 27 Feb. 1822. “O’Hara” tales planned with brother Michael, 1822. To London, March 1822. On staff of “Literary Register,” July 1822 to May 1823. Ill health began, 1823. Tragedy, “The Prodigal,” accepted for Drury Lane, but not performed. Took his wife to France, and returned to London early in 1825. “Tales by the O’Hara Family,” written in collaboration with brother, first appeared April 1825. At Eastbourne, 1827; at Sevenoaks, 1827–29. To Blackheath, April 1829; to Boulogne, Aug. 1829, owing to ill-health. Wrote for magazines and theatre. Attacked by cholera, 1832. To Paris, 1833. Lower limbs paralyzed. Moved to London, thence to Dublin, 1835. Benefit performance in Dublin Theatre, 21 July 1835. To Kilkenny in Sept. 1835. Pension of £190 per annum, 1836. Tragedy “Sylla” (written in 1827), produced in Dublin, June 1837. Died, 13 Aug. 1842. Works: “The Celt’s Paradise,” 1821; “Damon and Pythias,” 1821; “Letter to the Committee appointed to appropriate a fund for a national testimonial, etc.,” 1822; “Revelations of the Dead-Alive” (anon.), 1824; “The Fetches” and collaboration in “John Doe,” in “Tales by the O’Hara Family” (anon.), 1825; “The Nowlans” and collaboration in “Peter of the Castle,” in “Tales by the O’Hara Family,” 2nd series (anon.), 1826; “The Boyne Water” (anon.), 1826; “The Anglo-Irish of the Nineteenth Century” (anon.), 1828; “The Denounced” (anon.), 1830; “Chaunt of the Cholera” (with M. Banim; anon.), 1831; “The Smuggler” (anon.), 1831; “The Bit o’ Writin” (with M. Banim; anon.), 1838. Posthumous: “London and its Eccentricities in the year 2023” (anon.), 1845. Life: by P. J. Murray, 1857.
Personal
During the twelve months succeeding this day Banim merely existed. The whole system seemed shattered. His head ached so violently, that in his paroxysms of pain his body rocked with an involuntary motion so violently that as his head rested upon his mother’s breast it required all the latter’s strength to curb the violent swaying of the sufferer. “It seemed,” he said, “as if the brain were surging through the skull from rear to front and from front to rear alternately.” He lost all anxiety for his profession, or for literature; no occupation could interest him; he could rarely be induced to leave the house; and when he did go abroad he quickly became wearied; he seldom spoke: and thus his first love laid the seeds of that frightful suffering which during the greater part of his existence rendered him one of the most miserable of men. The three nights of suffering and exposure to which at Anne D—’s decease he was subjected broke down the stamina of life, and left him at twenty years of age a victim to spinal disease, which but a few years later reduced him to a crippled body, whilst gifted with a mind active as ever genius possessed; his fate indeed was harder than that of Tantalus…. “No day passed without its term of suffering. For at two, or at most three hours after retiring to bed, he might, with the assistance of opiates, forget himself in sleep; he was sure to awake, however, after a short repose, screaming loud from the torture he suffered in his limbs, and along his spine; the attack continuing until exhaustion followed, succeeded by, not sleep, but lethargy of some hours’ continuance. This was not an occasional visitation, but was renewed night after night. It was not during the hours of darkness only that he suffered—frequently the pains came on in the day-time,—after he endured them all night long, if the weather lowered, or the atmosphere pressed heavily, they were present in the day: to say nothing of his decrepitude, few of his hours were free from agony.”
General
The author of the “O’Hara Tales” stands pre-eminent among the delineators of Irish character, and quite distinct from the mere painters of Irish manners. He goes to the very heart and soul of the matter. He is neither the eulogist nor the vilifier, neither the patronizing apologist, nor the caricaturist of his countrymen, but their true dramatic historian. Fiction such as his, is truer than any history because it deals not only in facts and their causes, but with the springs of motive and action. It not only details circumstances, but probes into and discovers the living elements on which circumstances operate. His Irishmen are not strange, unaccountable creatures, but members of the great human family, with a temperament of their own, marking a peculiar race, and his Irish women are in especial drawn with the utmost truth and depth of feeling. He knows well the sources of those bitter waters which have converted the impulsive, generous, simple-minded, humorous, and irascible race with whom he has to deal, into lawless ruffians, or unprincipaled knaves. He loves to paint the national character in its genial state, ardent in love, constant in friendship, with a ready tear for the mourner, and a ready laugh for the reveller, overflowing with gratitude for kindness, with open hand and heart, and unsuspicious as a child; and reversing the picture, to show that same character goaded by oppression and contemptuous injustice, into a cruel mocking demon in human form, or into some reckless, libertine, idle, hopeless, tattered rascal. The likeness cannot be disputed. The description carries internal evidence with it. Whoever has been in Ireland remembers illustrations of it, and begins to discover the how and the why of things which before puzzled him.
Of a certainty the tales of Mr. Banim were purely original. They had no precursors either in our language or in any other, and they produced accordingly the sort of impression, more vivid than durable, which highly-colored and deeply-shadowed novelty is sure to make on the public mind. But they are also intensely national. They reflect Irish scenery, Irish character, Irish crime, and Irish virtue, with a general truth which, in spite of their tendency to melo-dramatic effects, will keep them fresh and life-like for many a day after the mere fashion of the novel of the season shall be past and gone. The last of his works, especially, “Father Connell,” contains the portrait of a parish priest, so exquisitely simple, natural, and tender, that in the whole range of fiction I know nothing more charming.
Less imaginative and refined than Griffin, and wholly wanting in his humour, Banim was constituted to see the peasant only on his passionate and tragic side—only as he existed in storm and tumult, or the prostrations of deep distress; and with the special end he had in view—to rouse attention to his rustic subject—it cannot be doubted that his limitation was an enlargement of his power. It was the source of that intensity with which he reproduced the terrible struggles and convulsions of rural life, and lifted their sad realities up to the level of romance.
Banim had little humor, and his descriptions are often too detailed and elaborate; but, on the other hand, he possessed a vivid fancy, patriotic fervor, and great intellectual vigor…. They are among the most hearty, direct, and graceful specimens of epistolary correspondence in English literature. There is about them a simplicity, easy dash, and pointed brevity for which we look in vain among the letters of other famous authors.
Although his poems are few, John Banim is one of the most national and powerful of the Irish poets.
He delineated the national character in a striking manner, and his pictures of the Irish peasantry will doubtless live for many generations…. Full justice has been done to the realistic powers of Banim, one English critic acknowledging that he united the truth and circumstantiality of Crabbe with the dark and gloomy power of Godwin; while in knowledge of Irish character, habits, customs, and feeling, he was superior even to Miss Edgeworth or Lady Morgan. Had Banim possessed the hearty humour of a Lover or a Lever, he would have been saved from many of his literary excesses. As a delineator of life in the higher ranks of society, Banim conspicuously failed; his strength lay in his vigorous and characteristic sketches of the Irish peasantry, and these in their light and shade have something of the breadth and the strong effects of Rembrandt.
Where his songs are at all tolerable, they are full of fire and feeling, and written with a quite natural simplicity and strength. Such are the pieces here quoted. His chief fault is his general disregard of metrical laws…. His “Soggarth Aroon” is one of the most popular of Irish poems, and has found a place in many anthologies.
