An Irish poet; born at Ballyshannon, March 19, 1828 (?); died at Hampstead, near London, Nov. 18, 1889. Having for some years been an officer in the Customs, he became assistant editor of Fraser’s Magazine in 1871 and succeeded Froude as editor in 1874, when he also married Helen Paterson, the illustrator and water-color artist. His graceful poems excel in descriptions of Irish scenery and life; some of them were illustrated by Rossetti, Kate Greenway, and other distinguished artists. Prominent among his works is “Lawrence Bloomfield in Ireland” (1864), a narrative poem on contemporary Irish life.
Personal
D. G. R., and I think W. A. himself, told me, in the early days of our acquaintance, how, in remote Ballyshannon, where he was a clerk in the customs, in evening walks he would hear the Irish girls at their cottage doors singing old ballads, which he would pick up. If they were broken or incomplete, he would add to them or finish them; if they were improper, he would refine them. He could not get them sung till he got the Dublin “Catnach” of that day to print them, on long strips of blue paper, like old songs; and if about the sea, with the old rough woodcut of a ship on the top. He either gave them away or they were sold in the neighbourhood. Then, in his evening walks, he had at last the pleasure of hearing some of his own ballads sung at the cottage doors by the crooning lasses, who were quite unaware that it was the author who was passing by.
“He had,” as Mr. W. M. Rossetti tells me, “a good critical judgment; he was a man who could pounce on defects in a poem.” Madox Brown described him as “keen and cutting.” It will be seen in the course of these letters that Rossetti not only sought his criticism of his poetry, but often acknowledged its justice. Coventry Patmore was scarcely less eager to have his opinion, but was not so willing to submit to it.
General
What do you think of the gratuitous slight put upon you and me in Kingsley’s notice of “Maud?” I would not change “Tamerton Church Tower,” a poem by Patmore, nor, if I was the author of it, “The Music Master” for fifty “Mauds.”
The man has a true spirit of song in him, I have no doubt of it; and my opinion, I am happy to say, is confirmed by Carlyle in his letter to A. which I only do not forward because, from his letter, it does not appear that I am at liberty so to do. Carlyle also mentions some work of Allingham’s (I have not seen it myself—it is possibly some preface to his projected work on Ireland) in these following terms—“Your pleasant and excellent historical introduction might, if modesty would permit, boast itself to be the very best ever written perhaps anywhere for such a purpose. I have read it with real entertainment and instruction on my own behoof, and with real satisfaction on yours—so clear, so brief, definite, graphic; and a fine genially human tone in it.”
We find spontaneity in the rhymes of Allingham, whose “Mary Donnelly” and “The Fairies” have that intuitive grace called quality,—a grace which no amount of artifice can ever hope to produce, and for whose absence mere talent can never compensate us.
Mr. Allingham says his “works” claim to be “genuine in their way.” They are free from all obscurity and mysticism, and evince a fine feeling for nature, as well as graceful fancy and poetic diction.
Mr. Allingham is a poet of an “equal mind,” to whom verse is, indeed, a natural mode of expression, but whose emotion does not generally find utterance until it has been nursed by musing and mellowed by reflection. He is, nevertheless, one of the most spontaneous of singers determining to err on the side of nature rather than on that of art, and more careful to keep his gift pure than to cultivate it to the utmost. If he excells at all, it is in modesty. He is not the only poet who has shone in “his place” and been “content;” but he is surely the first who has been satisfied to compare himself to a gooseberry…. Of Mr. Allingham’s essay as a dramatist, after the pathetic appeal of its Prologue that the audience should try to like it, we would not say harsh things if we could; but, in truth, it is not easy to like or dislike it very much…. As to his lyrics, so in his play, Mr. Allingham shows no great ambition, flying low and falling light.
To feel the entire fascination of his poetry, it is perhaps necessary to have spent one’s childhood, like the present writer, in one of those little seaboard Connaught towns. He has expressed that curious devotion of the people for the earth under their feet, a devotion that is not national, but local, a thing at once more narrow and more idyllic. He sang Ballyshannon and not Ireland. Neither his emotions nor his thoughts took any wide sweep over the world of man and nature. He was the poet of little things and little moments, and of that vague melancholy Lord Palmerston considered peculiar to the peasantry of the wild seaboard where he lived…. The charm of his work is everywhere the charm of stray moments and detached scenes that have moved him; the pilot’s daughter in her Sunday frock; the wake with the candles round the corpse, and a cloth under the chin; the ruined Abbey of Asaroe, an old man who was of the blood of those who founded it, watching sadly the crumbling walls; girls sewing and singing under a thorn tree; the hauling in of the salmon nets; the sound of a clarionet through the open and ruddy shutter of a forge; the piano from some larger house, and so on, a rubble of of old memories and impressions made beautiful by pensive feeling. Exquisite in short lyrics, this method of his was quite inadequate to keep the interest alive through a long poem.
Was an Irish poet, of much taste, but of no great power. His inspiration is strangely fitful and uncertain, and after his removal to London, in consequence of the success of his earlier verses, it seemed almost wholly to desert him.
Though not ranking among the foremost of his generation, Allingham, when at his best, is an excellent poet, simple, clear and graceful, with a distinct though not obtrusive individuality. His best work is concentrated in his “Day and Night Songs” (1854), which, whether pathetic or sportive, whether expressing feeling or depicting scenery, whether upborne by simple melody or embodying truth in symbol, always fulfil the intention of the author and achieve the character of works of art. The employment of colloquial Irish without conventional hibernicisms was at the time a noteworthy novelty. “The Music Master” (1855), though of no absorbing interest, is extremely pretty, and although “Laurence Bloomfield” will mainly survive as a special document, the reader for instruction’s sake will often be delighted by the poet’s graphic felicity. The rest of Allingham’s poetical work is on a lower level; there is, nevertheless, much point in most of his aphorisms, though few may attain the absolute perfection which absolute isolation demands.
