DUBLIN, _Tuesday, Feb. 14th._--I left Abbeyleix this morning for Dublin,
in company with Mr. and Mrs. Henry Doyle. Mr. Doyle, C.B., a brother of
that inimitable master of the pencil, and most delightful of men,
Richard Doyle, is the Director of the Irish National Gallery. He was
kind enough to come and lunch with me at Maple's, after which we went
together to the Gallery. It occupies the upper floors of a stately and
handsome building in Merrion Square, in front of which stands a statue
of the founder, Mr. William Dargan, who defrayed all the expenses of the
Dublin Exhibition in 1853, and declined all the honours offered to him
in recognition of his public spirited liberality, save a visit paid to
his wife by Queen Victoria. The collection now under Mr. Doyle's charge
was begun only in 1864, and the Government makes it an annual grant of
no more than £2500, or about one-half the current price, in these days,
of a fine Gainsborough or Sir Joshua! "They manage these things better
in France," was evidently the impression of a recent French tourist in
Ireland, M. Daryl, whose book I picked up the other day in Paris, for
after mentioning three or four of the pictures, and gravely affirming
that the existence here of a gallery of Irish portraits proves the
passionate devotion of Dublin to Home Rule, he dismisses the collection
with the verdict that "_ce ne vaut pas le diable_." Nevertheless it
already contains more really good pictures than the Musée either of
Lyons or of Marseilles, both of them much larger and wealthier cities
than Dublin. Leaving out the Three Maries of Perugino at Marseilles, and
at Lyons the Ascension, which was once the glory of San Pietro di
Perugia, the Moses of Paul Veronese, and Palma Giovanni's Flagellation,
these two galleries put together cannot match Dublin with its Jan Steen,
most characteristic without being coarse, its Terburg, a life-size
portrait of the painter's favourite model, a young Flemish gentleman,
presented to him as a token of regard, its portrait of a Venetian
personage by Giorgione, with a companion portrait by Gian Bellini, its
beautiful Italian landscape by Jan Both, its flower-wreathed head of a
white bull by Paul Potter, its exquisitely finished "Vocalists" by
Cornells Begyn, its admirable portrait of a Dutch gentleman by Murillo,
and its two excellent Jacob Ruysdaels. A good collection is making, too,
of original drawings, and engravings, and a special room is devoted to
modern Irish art. I wish the Corcoran Gallery (founded, too, by an
Irishman!) were half as worthy of Washington, or the Metropolitan Museum
one-tenth part as worthy of New York!
The National Gallery in London has loaned some pictures to Dublin, and
Mr. Doyle is getting together, from private owners, a most interesting
gallery of portraits of men and women famous in connection with Irish
history. The beautiful Gunnings of the last century, the not less
beautiful and much more brilliant Sheridans of our own, Burke, Grattan,
Tom Moore, Wellington, Curran, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, O'Connell, Peg
Woffington, Canning, and Castlereagh, Dean Swift, Laurence Sterne are
all here--wits and statesmen, soldiers and belles, rebels and royalists,
orators and poets. Two things strike one in this gallery of the "glories
of Ireland." The great majority of the faces are of the Anglo-Irish or
Scoto-Irish type; and the collection owes its existence to an
accomplished public officer, who bears an Irish name, who is a devout
Catholic, and who is also an outspoken opponent of the Home Rule
contention as now carried on.
The gallery is open on liberal conditions to students. Mr. Doyle tells
me that a young sister of Mr. Parnell was at one time an assiduous
student here. He used to stop and chat with her about her work as he
passed through the gallery. One day he met her coming out. "Mr. Doyle,"
she said, "are you a Home Ruler?" "Certainly not," he replied
good-naturedly. Whereupon, with an air of melancholy resignation, the
young lady said, "Then we can never more be friends!" and therewith
flitted forth.
A small room contains some admirable bits of the work of Richard Doyle,
among other things a weird and grotesque, but charming cartoon of an
elfish procession passing through a quaint and picturesque mediaeval
city. It is a _conte fantastique_ in colour--a marvel of affluent fancy
and masterly skill.
I found here this morning letters calling me over to Paris for a short
time, and one also from Mr. Davitt, in London, explaining that my note
to him through the National League had never reached him, and that he
had gone to London on his woollen business. I have written asking him to
meet me to-morrow in London, and I shall cross over to-night.
LONDON, _Wednesday, Feb. 15th._--Mr. Davitt spent an hour with me
to-day, and we had a most interesting conversation. His mind is just now
full of the woollen enterprise he is managing, which promises, he
thinks, in spite of our tariff, to open the American markets to the
excellent woollen goods of Ireland. He has gone into it with all his
usual earnestness and ability. This is not a matter of politics with
him, but of patriotism and of business. He tells me he has already
secured very large orders from the United States. I hope he is not
surprised, as I certainly am not, to find that the Parliamentarian Irish
party give but a half-hearted and lukewarm support to such enterprises
as this. Perhaps he has forgotten, as I have not, the efforts which a
certain member of that party made in 1886 to persuade an Irish gentleman
from St. Louis, who had brought over a considerable sum of money for the
relief of the distress in North-Western Ireland, into turning it over
to the League, on the express ground that the more the people were made
to feel the pinch of the existing order of things, the better it would
be for the revolutionary movement.
The Irish Woollen Company will, nevertheless, be a success, I believe,
and a success of considerably more value to Ireland than the election of
Mr. Wilfrid Blunt as M.P. for Deptford would be.
As to this election, Mr. Davitt seems to feel no great confidence. He
has spoken in support of Mr. Blunt's candidacy, and is hard at work now
to promote it. But he is not sanguine as to the result, as on all
questions, save Home Rule for Ireland, Mr. Blunt's views and ideas, he
thinks, antagonise the record of Mr. Evelyn and the local feeling at
Deptford. I was almost astonished to learn from Mr. Davitt that Mr.
Blunt, by the way, had told him at Ballybrack, long before he was locked
up, how Mr. Balfour meant to lock up and kill four men, the "pivots" of
the Irish movement, to wit, Mr. O'Brien, Mr. Harrington, Mr. Dillon, and
Mr. Davitt himself. But I was not at all astonished to learn that Mr.
Blunt told him all this most seriously, and evidently believed it.
"How did you take it?" I asked.
"Oh, I only laughed," said Mr. Davitt, "and told him it would take more
than Mr. Balfour to kill me, at any rate by putting me in prison. As for
being locked up, I prefer Cuninghame Graham's way of taking it, that he
meant 'to beat the record on oakum!'"
If all the Irish "leaders" were made of the same stuff with Mr. Davitt,
the day of a great Democratic revolution, not in Ireland only, but in
Great Britain, might be a good deal nearer than anything in the signs of
the times now shows it to be. Mr. Parnell and the National League are
really nothing but the mask of Mr. Davitt and the Land League. Mr.
Forster knew what he was about when he proclaimed the Land League in
October 1881, six months or more after he had arrested and locked up Mr.
Davitt in Portland prison. This was shown by the foolish No-Rent
manifesto which Mr. Parnell and his associates issued from Kilmainham
shortly after their incarceration, and without the counsel or consent at
that time of Mr. Davitt--a manifesto which the Archbishop of Cashel,
despite his early sympathies and connection with the agrarian agitation
of 1848, found it expedient promptly to disavow. It would have been
still more clearly shown had not Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Forster parted
company under the restiveness of Mr. Gladstone's Radical followers, and
the pressure of the United States Government in the spring of 1882. But
after the withdrawal of Mr. Forster, and the release of Mr. Davitt, the
English lawyers and politicians who led Lord Spencer and Sir George
Trevelyan into allowing the Land League to be revived under the
transparent alias of the National League, gave Mr. Davitt an
opportunity, of which he promptly availed himself, to regain the ground
lost by the blundering of the men of Kilmainham. From that time forth I
have always regarded him as the soul of the Irish agitation, of the war
against "landlordism" (which is incidentally, of course, a war against
the English influence in Ireland), and of the movement towards Irish
independence. Whether the agitation, the war, and the movement have gone
entirely in accordance with his views and wishes is quite another
matter.
I have too good an opinion of his capacity to believe that they have;
and when the secret history of the Chicago Convention comes to be
written, I expect to find such confirmation therein of my notions on
this subject as I could neither ask nor, if I asked, could expect to get
from him.
Meanwhile the manliness and courage of the man must always command for
him the respect, not to say the admiration, even of those who most
sternly condemn his course and oppose his policy.
Born the child of an evicted tenant, in the times when an eviction meant
such misery and suffering as are seldom, if ever, now caused by the
process--bred and maimed for life in an English factory--captured when
hardly more than a lad in Captain M'Cafferty's daring attempt to seize
Chester Castle, and sent for fifteen years by Lord Chief-Justice
Cockburn into penal servitude of the most rigorous kind, Michael Davitt
might have been expected to be an apostle of hate not against the
English Government of Ireland alone, but against England and the English
people. The truculent talk of too many of his countrymen presents
Ireland to the minds of thoughtful men as a flagrant illustration of the
truth so admirably put by Aubrey de Vere that "worse than wasted weal is
wasted woe." But woe has not been wasted upon Michael Davitt, in this,
that, so far as I know (and I have watched his course now with lively
personal interest ever since I made his acquaintance on his first visit
to America), he has never made revenge and retaliation upon England
either the inspiration or the aim of his revolutionary policy. I have
never heard him utter, and never heard of his uttering, in America, such
malignant misrepresentations of the conduct of the English people and
their sovereign during the great famine of 1847, for example, as those
which earned for Mr. Parnell in 1880 the pretty unanimous condemnation
of the American press. How far he went with Mr. Parnell on the lines of
that speech at New Ross, in which murder was delicately mentioned as "an
unnecessary and prejudicial measure of procedure" in certain
circumstances, I do not know. But he can hardly have gone further than
certain persons calling themselves English Liberals went when the
assassins of Napoleon III. escaped to England. And he has a capacity of
being just to opponents, which certainly all his associates do not
possess. I was much struck to-day by the candour and respect with which
he spoke of John Bright, whose name came incidentally into our
conversation. He seemed to feel personally annoyed and hurt as an
Irishman, that Irishmen should permit themselves to revile and abuse Mr.
Bright because he will not go with them on the question of Home Rule, in
utter oblivion of the great services rendered by him to the cause of
the Irish people "years before many of those whose tongues now wag
against him had tongues to wag." I was tempted to remind him that not
with Irishmen only is gratitude a lively sense of favours to come.
I find Mr. Davitt quite awake to the great importance of the granite
quarries of Donegal. He is bestirring himself in connection with some
men of Manchester, in behalf of the quarries at Belmullet in Mayo,
which, if I am not mistaken, is his native county. This bent of his mind
towards the material improvement of the condition of the Irish people,
and the development of the resources of Ireland, is not only a mark of
his superiority to the rank and file of the Irish politicians--it goes
far to explain the stronger hold which he undoubtedly has on the people
in Ireland. "Home Rule," as now urged by the Irish politicians,
certainly excites much more attention and emotion in America and England
than it seems to do in Ireland. It seems so simple and elementary to
John Bull and Brother Jonathan that people should be suffered to manage
their own affairs! Yet the North would not suffer the South to do
this--and what would become of India if England turned it over in
fragments to the native races? The Land Question, on the contrary,
touches the "business and bosom" of every Irishman in Ireland, while it
is so complicated with historical conditions and incidents as to be
troublesome and therefore uninteresting to people not immediately
affected by it. If I am right in my impressions the collapse of the
National League will hardly weaken the hold of Mr. Davitt on the Irish
people in Ireland, and it may even strengthen his hold on the agrarian
movement in Wales, England, and Scotland, unless he identifies himself
too completely in that collapse with his Parliamentary instruments. On
the other hand, the triumph of the National League on its present lines
of action would diminish the value for good or evil of any man's hold
upon the Irish people, for the obvious reason that by driving out of
Ireland, and ruining, the class of "landlords" and capitalists, it would
leave the country reduced to a dead level of peasant-holdings, saddled
with a system of poor-rates beyond the ability of the peasant-holders to
carry, and at the mercy, therefore, of the first bad year. The "war
against the landlords," as conducted by the National League, would end
where the Irish difficulty began, in a general surrender of the people
to "poverty and potatoes."