Irish Jesuit Province

Good Country Days by R. W. HowReview by: Donal LinehanThe Irish Monthly, Vol. 78, No. 926 (Aug., 1950), p. 398Published by: Irish Jesuit ProvinceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20516235 .

Accessed: 14/06/2014 11:24

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Irish Jesuit Province is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Irish Monthly.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 91.229.248.154 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 11:24:44 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

IRISH MONTHLY

Broads. We could not but marvel, on concluding this book, at Richard

Hayward's remarkable versatility?actor, singer, antiquarian, historian, litterateur.

Criod?n O'Higgins

COUNTRY LIFE

Good Country Days. R. W. How. London: Hollis & Carter. 7/6. This is a well and pleasantly written book, with excellent photographs,

and should delight anyone with a genuine taste for country life. It is unusual, perhaps, that a book on such a subject should have so much in

it of almost antiquarian interest. Indeed, perhaps the most interesting parts are those which record the reminiscences of the author and of her father?the old flails and the fine harrowing with furze bushes, the

splitting of logs and rush-light making, and so much else that is either dead or dying out in English country life.

Whatever the economic advantages of the Combine reaper and har

vester, we cannot but miss the "

personal "

value of the old ways of

doing things and the beauty that went with them, so well described in these pages.

Reading Good Country Days tempts me to moralize. Books like it?

though not always up to its standard?seem to make their appearance in England almost weekly; a mark, as it were, of their appreciation over there of what most of them have lost. Perhaps we, too, in this country, could profitably turn a more appreciative eye on our own farms and

countryside, and discover anew therein a more solid core for our literature.

After all, we are primarily an agricultural people, and the basis for an Irish literature is Irish life. At present it would seem as though our educated

people, our writers, have lost contact with the land, and the status of

the farm has dropped accordingly. This should not be. Surely there is a call for more writing like that, say, of Stephen Rynne or Padraic

Colum? DONAL LlNEHAN.

398

This content downloaded from 91.229.248.154 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 11:24:44 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions