WHO reading the newspaper on a Monday morning in June, 1925,

who could have attached importance to the short paragraph reporting that an

unknown man had collapsed in the street and died? There were incomparably

greater things: a commemoration in Ennis; the warm weather; racing at

Lewes; a golf championship; “The Gipsy Princess.”

In a moment the small matter was forgotten. But in the following year

appeared a twopenny life of that man: “Matt Talbot: A Dublin Labourer.”

Though the literary say that the Irish do not buy books they bought one

hundred and twenty thousand copies of this booklet in a few months. Everyone spoke

about him, and with reverential freedom a’ man who would know when to refuse

a last one would be rallied with “another Matt !“ And the interest continued. In

a few years the Archbishop of Dublin, to the joy of his faithful and to his own joy,

instituted the Enquiry, and, during the Congress, a great Cardinal with tears

kissed the floor of the room where Matt prayed.

[Photograph Of A Cheque for sickness benefit to Matt Talbot with his signature.]

To-day, Trinity Sunday, the eleventh anniversary of his death, there are many

thousands come to pray at his tomb. One might well be far away from a

cemetery this fine afternoon, but after fifteen minutes of walking by graves we

note, God help us, that birds sing here as gaily as anywhere else. The crowds

stream along the paths. “I always had a great belief in Matt.” “Eh, would you

mind tellin’ us the way to—” “Straight on. You’re right.” On a bench sit a man

and a woman, young Dublin workers, looking intently at the page as she reads

in a low voice “ . . . where he received Holy Communion during Mass.”

They are mainly poor, some obviously labourers in those quasi-sea clothes as

clean as the one suit can be made. There are no nursemaids to leave babies with,

and so they come too, and the scene is almost cheerful. And why not, indeed,

when the people come to honour one who was so lately of themselves, but who has

brought the hope of holiness, the mark of the True Church, to signify their city.

We go to see the city Matt worked and prayed in. The north-east corner ‘of the

city, though astride a thoroughfare to suburbs, is probably the least known to

the rest of Dubliners and appears to have been altered least by the great changes of

the last twenty years. It is ‘flat, often dingy and colourless despite its associa-

tion with the romantic sea: quays, yards, mills, docks, canals, railways, rows of

plain little houses, alleys of cottages, streets of residences fallen into gaunt

tenements. Matt moved from house to house within this area. Here he was born

in a cottage in a short and narrow street flanked by ramshackle yards and build-

ings. At the edge of it in a poor lane beside a church, where there is now a

prie-dieu that a cat dozes on and a shop with holy pictures and sweep tickets,

there is an inscription that is a panegyric in its simplicity: “ This is the place Matt

Talbot died, June 7th, 1925.”

His last room is near both. It is kept vacant now, but a month after his death

it was occupied by a family with that pressure that fills the slums almost as fast

as it can be relieved by housing schemes. The street is comparatively quiet this

Sunday morning. Groups of young men in fashions hat are only just old, talk on

the doorst, ps; children in their Sunday cleanliness shout and race about or (let

the truth be told) crowd about a man who is selling from a perambulator English

Sunday newspapers, one of them with a special article on “Mary Astor, by her

ex-husbànd.” Here in this room he had the comfortless bed; the dusty old chair,

repaired with twine and wire by himself; another chair, with its back gone, for the

wash-basin; three boxes for his books (how many have books worth keeping

that would fill three boxes?) ; large oleo- graphs of saints; certificates of member-

ship of pious associations : Pioneer, 1890, Third Order, 1891, Bona Mors, 1922; a

great crucifix; and in quaint print and yellow with age a framed “Prayer to

Jesus Crucified

 

 

[ St. Frances Xavier Church Gardiner Street Dublin]

dingy and colourless despite its association with the romantic sea: quays, yards,

mills, docks, canals, railways, rows of plain little houses, alleys of cottages,

streets of residences fallen into gaunt tenements. Matt moved from house to

house within this area. Here he was born in a cottage in a short and narrow street

flanked by ramshackle yards and buildings. At the edge of it in a poor lane

beside a church, where there is now a prie-dieu that a cat dozes on and a shop

with holy pictures and sweep tickets, there is an inscription that is a panegyric

in its simplicity: “ This is the place Matt Talbot died, June 7th, 1925.”

His last room is near both. It is kept vacant now, but a month after his death

it was occupied by a family with that pressure that fills the slums almost as fast

as it can be relieved by housing schemes. The street is comparatively quiet this

Sunday morning. Groups of young men in fashions hat are only just old, talk on

the doorst, ps; children in their Sunday cleanliness shout and race about or (let

the truth be told) crowd about a man who is selling from a perambulator English

Sunday newspapers, one of them with a special article on “Mary Astor, by her

ex-husbànd.” Here in this room he had the comfortless bed; the dusty old chair,

repaired with twine and wire by himself another chair, with its back gone, for the

wash-basin; three boxes for his books (how many have books worth keeping

that would fill three boxes?) ; large oleo- graphs of saints; certificates of member-

ship of pious associations : Pioneer, 1890, Third Order, 1891, Bona Mors, 1922; a

great crucifix; and in quaint print and yellow with age a framed “Prayer to

Jesus Crucified.”

 

Patron Saint of the. Diocese, where Matt prayed. on his way to and from work. At

the edge of the area is St. Francis Xavier’s, the ornate church of the Jesuit Fathers in

Gardiner Street, where Matt knelt every morning until the door was opened.

There is a surprisingly large congregation at the first Mass at 6.15: young and old;

well-dressed, seedy, poor; a soldier; quiet women in black clothes. Who are these

people who without obligation go to Mass at what to most of us must seem an

impossible hour? Many of them, no doubt, are anxious to attend Mass before

their day’s work begins at an early hour, but some of them must be under no

necessity as to the hour, and one feels that like Matt these loving souls are

impatient to join in the Church’s glory to God at the very dawn or even, in

winter, before the rainy night is gone.

I go to see an old friend of his who lived in a slum room near him but is now in a

flat in an artisans’ dwelling. (The dwelling was built, it may be confessed,

through the munificence of a brewer, but this fine, grave old man has the “pin”

in his coat !). It is one thing to read of an ascetic, but to sit down and talk to

a man who saw him every day and knew something of his holiness is alarmingly

real, though outside the clangour of the drays and the children is ceaseless. His

wife, who has that beauty and dignity that crowns noble old Irish women, tells

me that she met Matt a few times and was at his simple funeral, though she did

not know of his deep life. “He told his sister,” she confesses with a smile, “ that

he thought me a nice woman.” “And,” the husband nods approvingly, “it

wasn’t every woman Matt would talk

to. He’d talk to very fe*, only the few

religious women at the church.”

I am welcomed by a ~woman relative who ministered sometimes to him. There

is blunt kindness and no nonsense in this little house. “I’ll~ tell you the kind I

am. I’m quick and hasty, but I’m straight.” These virile phrases in Glynn’s

biography,” Don’t be always studying the gut” or “They (the saints) were great

girls “ have echoes here : So-and-so “dirtied his bib,” “Matt had words at

will about religion,” “ Indeed, it’s no surprise they made a wonder of him, for

he was a splendid man.” Though she might well be tired of visitors she tells

with vigour about him, how he gave to all the causes : the Missions, the Vincent

de Paul, the asylums, “everyone in need.” There is no photograph, but

she describes him. “Matt was a small neat man, and he used to wear a jerry

(bowler) hat; he had a brown moustache clipped at the lip! he was bald, but he

had a handsome oval face with dark blue eyes that were almost grey; and he had

fine white teeth even in his old age. He did not keep his eyes on the ground all the

time. When he spoke to you he looked you straight in the face. Matt turned his

eyes only from sin.”

Among such people one feels that Talbot is safe from the exuberance of

devotees. Here where they comfort the widow and fatherless and keep themselves

unspotted from the world there is t~he lovely taste of true religion. It was a

relative who had the candles extii~uished when they had been lit as at a shrine in

a room he had occupied. Here one can sense that most terrible thing in his life

—the first three months of conversion on which hung the whole forty shining years.

He was twenty-five and, impossible as it may seem, he had been drinking heavily

since he was twelve. And then suddenly he washes, goes to confession and takes

the pledge~ Chesterton has sakI~ that a workman can feel as deeply if not as

expressively as a poet, and who shall plumb the anguish of that poor young

man—the intolerable craving, the lone-

liness, how he avoided temptation, how he prayed for prayer? Here one can

 

begin weakly to understand ~how he bridged the centuries to St. Patrick and

St. Finbarr, how in this age of striving for plenty he wished to do with so little,

how in his long labouring life the only thing real to him was religion.

It is a natural anxiety on our part to wonder how a saintly person who lived in

the world would deal with the things that beset us. We can grasp the austerities,

the prayers, the scrupulous attention to duties, but what would he do about

monetary reform, the At Home, the cousin who is disgracing the family? We will

find no lesson but prayer. We can, if we will, be encouraged and inspired, but

we will find nothing cut and dried, and not even the saints can put us into boxes

labelled for Heaven. In Matt’s case we find that he was mute about the political

questions into which we plunged with the certainty of revelation ; he was mute even

about things that touched him closely, the claims of the workmen, though not

irrevocably so for it is told that he man” when he thought that injustice to

the men had been mistaken for duty to the boss. Possibly worse still we cannot

find that he ever objected to miserable architecture, theatrical church settings, or

the trills of a tenor who never heard of the Moti~ Pro~rio of Pope Pius X., and the

religious pictures that moved him to rapture would pain a lover of Christian

art.

Apparently he can be used for nothing but holiness, this servant of Action who

hid himself in prayer, who worked in a timber yard, but lived in a cell. He is

primarily, of course, an inspiration for his own poor, and it is idle to pretend

that they do not need him, for the spirit, now more than ever, ca4 be corroded in

the room as in the restaurant. But, mark you, he has lessons also for the

rest of the city. Matt Talbot is dishonoured if he is used by comfortable

bourgeois to keep the poor in their place and save the suburbs the trouble of doing

something. It is so easy and comforting to say, “Here is a humble workman who

rose to great heights under your very own conditions. And the light of the Sacred

Heart lamp will help you to bear the inevitable misfortunes of your state.” Rather

should they see in every workman, in every unemployed, another Matt, so that

nothing be left of the squalor and misery that surrounded him, so that real brother-

hood may come among men.   - Dennis Barry.