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Professor Max Drennan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 October 2024

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The scholarship and wit, the lovable personality and frank geniality of the late Professor Drennan have been spoken of in two notices in the Times, the month of his death, January, 1935.

Therein, too, it is noted that, in his England, at seventeen he adopted Catholicism “with characteristic enthusiasm.” From these convertites there is much matter to be learnt, said Jaques. There is; and from their wandering away; and from their return. ‘Twas so with Drennan, truly a wanderer from his birth. Bom in home county Banbury, he had taught in Ceylon under the Oblate Fathers, and had been in the United States before I first knew him, when he and I taught together, in Canada in 1903. Later he was Professor of English in Galway, at the time of the European War and of the Irish Rising of 1916. And, last of all, he was in Johannesburg (from 1917), where for nigh twenty years he lived; and where he died. In South Africa he said he at last found a home wherein he could settle down. But he kept in touch with England, as a member of the Authors’ Club, London; which he joined, he said, “in the impossible event of my going over.” And he was a not infrequent jester in Punch. His humour, if it had a distinctive touch, may, perhaps, be said to be specially English; although Protestant Irish, seemingly all Celtic, was his descent. Persons of mind have praised M.D.’s Punch pieces. In Canada, he was The Canadian Month’s “Eno Poppyhock,” with his “Olla Podrida,” finding “irrational” the almanack's June 25 succeeding June 24. “It is also monotonous. Why should April 2nd always follow April 1st? Is there any reason why it should?

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1935 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 He was collaterally descended from the Ulster Presbyterian 1798 poet, William Drennan (1754–1820), so proud of having first used “the Emerald Isle,” in his poem Erin, “When Erin first rose”; “that rebellious but beautiful song, said Moore (v. Brooke and Rolleston's Treasury of Irish Poetry in English, p. 25).

2 Published recently by Longmans.

3 In The Irish Rosary, Feb. 1935.

4 It was said by Victor Hugo, and doubtless by many another, that if God is forgotten, then sorrow makes for fierceness; and suffering spells despair. I re‐read, at the moment, Begbie's The Lady next Door, pp. 238–9: “I was conscious of a certain envy, in my commerce with the peasants of Ireland; for, if their poverty is afflicting, it does not embitter them; it seems to purify and sweeten them; and if their toil is hard, it is at least never out of partnership with hope.”