Life
b. 1883-?; b. Belfast; ed. Quaker School, Lisburn; Belfast YMCA, converted
to Catholicism; joined Irish Volunteers and was interned; edited The
Irishman; wrote letter to the Press declaring he had reverted to Unionism
in Spring of 1918; settled in England after 1920, and edited Plain
English, and then Plain Speech; issued A Short History of Celtic
Philosophy (1920), arguing that Irish thinkers from the Druids and Johannes
Scottus Eriugena to Berkeley and Hutcheson were in a single idealist tradition.
DIW IF DUB.
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Works
Poetry collections including Selected Poems (1917); Songs from
an Ulster Valley (1920), port.; New Poems (1927); also novels,
Vampire of Souls (1903); The Man with Thirty Lives (1910);
other works, The Pessimist, A Study of the Problem of Pain (1914)
[sic. DUB], part. autobiog., pseud A. Newman; Unknown Immortals of
Northern City of Success (Talbot 1917); Unconquerable Ulster,
foreword Edward Carson (1919); A Short History of Celtic Philosophy
(1920). IF supplies the biographical details but lists only Unknown
Immortals, studies of fantastic types, some in narrative form.
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Notes
British Library hols A Cure for Cant, satire on the atomic bomb [verse]
((JMcQ 1946), 24pp.; French Love (Cecil Palmer 1929), 286pp.; A Letter
to Coulson Kernahan (Brighton: J Beal and Son 1937), 14pp.; New Poems
and a Preface (Burns, Oates, & Co. 1927), viii, 70pp.; A Short History
of Celtic Philosophy, with notes by Prof. Eoin McNeill (Dundalk: Tempest;
Edinburgh: TN Foulis 1920), 116pp.; Sinn Féin (Belfast: R Carswell
& Son 1920), 72pp.; Sayings from a Ulster Valley (London: Grant Richards
1920), 95pp. [port.]; Unknown Immortals in the Northern City of Success
(Talbot; London: T Fisher Unwin 1917), 96pp.; Unconquerable Ulster (Belfast:
R Carswell & Son 1919), 98pp.; as A Newman, The Pessimist, A Confession
(London: David Nutt 1914), 312pp. [END]
His Short History of Celtic Philosophy was caustically reviewed by Forrest
Reid; see rep. in Notes and Impressions (Mourne Press 1942), suggesting
that it was ‘improbable that the Druids had thought out a profound
philosophy of their own’, adding that myths are an unsatisfactory
pool in which to fish for philosophy since ‘you may catch something,
but other fishers come along, fishers with quite different views, and
are invariably equally successful.’ (p.24.)
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)