The Irish Priest; Or, What for Ireland?

There are some novels so poorly written and constructed that the critic winds up trying to argue that, surely, the failure must be intentional in some fashion.  Take, for example, The Irish Priest; Or, What for Ireland? (1847), a rare example of polemically ecumenical fiction.  Despite the "Preamble," which references the Famine and "falsifications" about the Irish, the novel neither takes current events as its subject nor spends much time on the physical sufferings of Ireland's poorest people (although they are certainly discussed more than once).  Instead, the novel provides a fragmentary and highly-fraught narrative devoted to Father Michael, a conscientious Catholic priest who, nevertheless, has no "vocation," but instead became a priest because "it was all that lay open to me" (51).  Appearing in the otherwise irrelevant Doctor's introduction as a "haggard and meagre" man clearly beset by "disappointment" (6), among other similarly gloomy emotions, Father Michael immediately dies--but not before convincing the Doctor that he is a "'good and pious man'" (10).  Of course, Father Michael leaves behind him a narrative of his life, to which the reader is duly subjected.  The reader who seeks a plot in this narrative is doomed to as much disappointment as Father Michael: it jumps about from topic to topic, from main narrative to inexplicably long inset narrative, and (most notably) from sudden death to sudden death.  This is not one of those books where characters make it to comfortable old age. Father Michael dies in his forties; his beloved childhood friend Marion dies suddenly of some mysterious disease (although not without speechifying at considerable length); his later friend Cornelia is saved from an awful marriage when her evil aristocratic suitor is killed in a duel; a mysterious "Charles," a former priest, sends letters to his beloved before dying of something or other; and Cornelia's saintly brother Cornelius ("C" names are at a premium in this novel--there's also a Conrad and a Cecilia) dies when he is mistaken for another landlord and murdered by a Ribbonman.  All of these characters undertake their adventures in uniformly high-flown prose, whether nostalgically reminiscing about the "turfy green" (98) or enthusing about the "multitudinous firmaments that make up the star-stream" (52), sometimes with disastrous results.  Strictly speaking, as one of its lone (and somewhat sardonic) Victorian reviewers suggests, the endlessly gushy (and mushy) prose, along with the fractured structure, suggest that the novelist was probably trying to imitate eighteenth-century sentimental fiction of the Man of Feeling variety.¹  If only it had been published in the eighteenth century, and not in 1847.

Nevertheless, as always, there are a couple of points of interest.  The first, as I said, is the novel's polemical ecumenicism.  On the one hand, the book is not exactly in favor of the priesthood as currently constituted: it repeatedly attacks clerical celibacy, suggests that Maynooth provides almost nothing useful for priests, and represents confession as an often hypocritical undertaking that is more emotionally traumatic for the beleaguered priest than anything else.  Father Michael, who is a priest solely because it's a job, is obviously "disappointed" in part because he can't marry.  On the other, there's no religious controversy and, indeed, nothing in the way of conversion experiences.  The Doctor's house in the beginning is represented as an open space of universal hospitality, a "home house" (5) that admits both the "Presbyterian minister and the priest" (5) alike.  Free of sectarian conflict, the Doctor's house, with its almost magical comings-and-goings of food and wine, is a kind of miniature utopia, one that anticipates Cornelius' much grander ideal estate in the end, with its happily co-existing and subsidized clergy: "Cornelius paid the rector his tithes, the priest his dues, the presbyterian minister his stipend, the methodist preacher his salary; for each was satisfied to receive his conventional hire, without driving the unwilling or coercing the destitute" (161).  In the novel's dream of clerical collaboration, denominational differences give way before the power of divine love, as celebrated as Father Michael's overlong sermon.  Enabled by the ideal landlord, rather than the state, the clergy abandon both conflict and competition in the service of a universalized (if diversified) faith, devoting their time to their congregations instead of their theological differences.  The Doctor's house, with its free inflow and outflow of gifts in the service of total hospitality (his friends are entitled to partake even when he's absent), thus turns out to model an ideal Irish polity, in which differences among (and between) Catholics and Protestants give way to sociable collaboration--but a collaboration which requires that the funding model be strictly impartial, privileging neither Established churches nor Dissenters.  Everybody can "eat," but nobody can demand to eat exclusively.  

Cornelius' utopian estate certainly requires a lot of outlay  As the reviewer rather dryly pointed out, Cornelius' death is "greatly to be regretted, as it deprives us of the opportunity of learning how the very beneficent plans of Cornelius would work."  (Or, more to the point, how they would be funded.)  His project, which involves subsidizing an advanced education, medical care, housing, optional relocation to deluxe colonial outposts, and, of course, religious instruction for all of his tenants, also includes giving the tenants "a direct interest in the fruits of their toil" (155).  The ultimate goal is social harmony, eliminating the bones of contention between landlords and tenants while simultaneously eliminating political agitators.  But Cornelius has something more grand in mind: one day, "the producer and the consumer, the creator of enjoyments and he who revels in them, shall be one and indivisible once more" (158).  Once again, the Doctor's house, in which all are entitled to comfort, returns in Cornelius' utopian (and milennialist) world, where contemporary class divisions give way before a new order of universal luxury--luxuries, however, for which everybody also works.  At the same time, by making the landlord the prime mover in social change, the novel suggests that transformation occurs only in the context of decentralized, face-to-face local relationships; it is key, that is, that utopian hospitality come from somebody.  This position is, in fact, part of the novel's sentimentalism: the landlord must learn to feel for his people.  Social change is paternalist in form (it comes from the top down), but only with the goal of eliminating paternalism altogether in favor of complete social unification.  As Cornelius' murder indicates, however, a bad landlord will produce tenants who feel badly (and, therefore, do bad things); Cornelius' utopia, however, is an estate of entirely good feeling.    In theory, given that the novel itself was supposed to raise money for Irish charities, the whole point of the narrative's elevated emotional temperature was to produce, at a remove, similar effects on its (English?) readership.

¹ "Literary Notice," Northern Whig, March 27, 1847: 4.