The doctrine and proposals of Fintan Lalor stirred John Mitchel
profoundly. Mitchel was not a democrat by instinct, as Tone and Lalor
were; he was not a revolutionary by process of thought, as Tone and
Lalor were; he was not from the beginning of his public life a believer
in the possibility and desirability of physical force, as Tone and Lalor
were. He became all these things; and he became all these things
suddenly. It was as if revolutionary Ireland, speaking through Lalor,
had said to Mitchel, “Follow me,” and Mitchel, leaving all things,
followed. Duffy and others were amazed that the most conservative of the
Young Irelanders should become the most revolutionary. They ought not to
have been amazed. That deep and passionate man could not have been
anything by halves. As well expect a Paul or a Teresa or an Ignatius
Loyola to be a “moderate” Christian as John Mitchel, once that “Follow
me” had been spoken, to be a “moderate” Nationalist. Mitchel was of the
stuff of which the great prophets and ecstatics have been made. He did
really hold converse with God; he did really deliver God’s word to man,
delivered it fiery-tongued.
Mitchel’s is the last of the four gospels of the new testament of Irish
nationality, the last and the fieriest and the most sublime. It flames
with apocalyptic wrath, such wrath as there is nowhere else in
literature. And it is because the man loved so well that his wrath was
so terrible. It is foolish to say of Mitchel, as it has been said, that
his is a gospel of hate, that hate is barren, that a nation cannot feed
itself on hate without peril to its soul, or at least to the sanity and
sweetness of its mind, that Davis, who preached love, is a truer leader
and guide for Ireland than Mitchel, who preached hate. The answer to
this is--first, that love and hate are not mutually antagonistic but
mutually complementary; that love connotes hate, hate of the thing that
denies or destroys or threatens the thing beloved: that love of good
connotes hate of evil, love of truth hate of falsehood, love of freedom
hate of oppression; that hate may be as pure and good a thing as love,
just as love may be as impure and evil a thing as hate; that hate is no
more ineffective and barren than love, both being as necessary to moral
sanity and growth as sun and storm are to physical life and growth. And,
secondly, that Mitchel, the least apologetic of men, was at pains to
explain that his hate was not of English men and women, but of the
English thing which called itself a government in Ireland, of the
English Empire, of English commercialism supported by English
militarism, a thing wholly evil, perhaps the most evil thing that there
has ever been in the world. To talk of such hate as unholy, unchristian,
barren, is to talk folly or hypocrisy. Such hate is not only a good
thing, but is a duty.
When Mitchel’s critics (or his own Doppelganger, who was his severest
critic) objected that his glorious wrath was merely destructive, a thing
splendid in slaying, but without any fecundity or life-giving principle
within it, Mitchel’s answer was adequate and conclusive:
“... Can you dare to pronounce that the winds, and the
lightnings, which tear down, degrade, destroy, execute a more
ignoble office than the volcanoes and subterranean deeps that
upheave, renew, recreate? Are the nether fires holier than the
upper fires? The waters that are above the firmament, do they
hold of Ahriman, and the waters that are below the firmament, of
Ormuzd? Do you take up a reproach against the lightnings for
that they only shatter and shiver, but never construct? Or have
you a quarrel with the winds because they fight against the
churches, and build them not? In all nature, spiritual and
physical, do you not see that some powers and agents have it for
their function to abolish and demolish and derange--other some
to construct and set in order? But is not the destruction, then,
as natural, as needful, as the construction?--Rather tell me, I
pray you, which is construction--which destruction? This
destruction _is_ creation: Death is Birth and
‘The quick spring like weeds out of the dead.’
Go to--the revolutionary Leveller is your only architect.
Therefore, take courage, all you that Jacobins be, and stand
upon your rights, and do your appointed work with all your
strength, let the canting fed classes rave and shriek as they
will--where you see a respectable, fair-spoken Lie sitting in
high places, feeding itself fat on human sacrifices--down with
it, strip it naked, and pitch it to the demons; whenever you see
a greedy tyranny (constitutional or other) grinding the faces of
the poor, join battle with it on the spot--conspire,
confederate, and combine against it, resting never till the huge
mischief come down, though the whole ‘structure of society’ come
down along with it. Never you mind funds and stocks; if the
price of the things called _Consols_ depend on lies and fraud,
down with them, too. Take no heed of ‘social disorganisation’;
you cannot bring back chaos--never fear; no disorganisation in
the world can be so complete but there will be a germ of new
order in it; sans-culottism, when she hath conceived, will bring
forth venerable institutions. Never spare; work joyfully,
according to your nature and function; and when your work is
effectually done, and it is time for the counter operations to
begin, why, then, you can fall a-constructing, if you have a
gift that way; if not, let others do _their_ work, and take your
rest, having discharged your duty. Courage, Jacobins! for ye,
too, are ministers of heaven....
“I do believe myself incapable of desiring private vengeance; at
least, I have never yet suffered any private wrong atrocious
enough to stir up that sleeping passion. The vengeance I seek is
the righting of my country’s wrong, which includes my own.
Ireland, indeed, needs vengeance; but this is public
vengeance--public justice. Herein England is truly a great
public criminal. England! all England, operating through her
Government; through all her organised and effectual public
opinion, press, platform, pulpit, Parliament, has done, is
doing, and means to do, grievous wrong to Ireland. She must be
punished; that punishment will, as I believe, come upon her by
and through Ireland; and so will Ireland be _avenged_.”
This denunciation of woe against the enemy of Irish freedom is as
necessary a part of the religion of Irish nationality as are Davis’s
pleas for love and concord between brother Irishmen. The Church that
preaches peace and goodwill launches her anathemas against the enemies
of peace and goodwill. Mitchel’s gospel is part of the testament, even
as Davis’s is; it but reveals a different facet of the truth. A man must
accept the whole testament; but a man may prefer Davis to Mitchel, just
as a man may prefer the gospel according to St. Luke, the kindliest and
most human of the gospels, to the gospel of St. John.
Mitchel’s teaching contains nothing that is definitely new and his. He
accepted Tone; he accepted Davis; he accepted in particular Lalor; and
he summed up and expressed all their teaching in a language transfigured
by wrath and vision. Tone is the intellectual ancestor of the whole
modern movement of Irish nationalism, of Davis, and Lalor, and Mitchel,
and all their followers; Davis is the immediate ancestor of the
spiritual and imaginative part of that movement, embodied in our day in
the Gaelic League; Lalor is the immediate ancestor of the specifically
democratic part of that movement, embodied to-day in the more virile
labour organisations; Mitchel is the immediate ancestor of Fenianism,
the noblest and most terrible manifestation of this unconquered nation.
And just as all the four have reached, in different terms, the same
gospel, making plain in turn different facets of the same truth, so the
movements I have indicated are but facets of a whole, different
expressions, and each one a necessary expression, of the august, though
denied, truth of Irish Nationhood; nationhood in virtue of an old
spiritual tradition of nationality, nationhood involving Separation and
Sovereignty, nationhood resting on and guaranteeing the freedom of all
the men and women of the nation and placing them in effective possession
of the physical conditions necessary to the reality and to the
perpetuation of their freedom, nationhood declaring and establishing and
defending itself by the good smiting sword. I who have been in and of
each of these movements make here the necessary synthesis, and in the
name of all of them I assert the forgotten truth, and ask all who accept
it to testify to it with me, here in our day and, if need be, with our
blood.
At the end of a former essay I set that prophecy of Mitchel’s as to the
coming of a time when the kindred and tongues and nations of the earth
should give their banners to the wind; and his prayer that he, John
Mitchel, might live to see it, and that on that great day of the Lord he
might have breath and strength enough to stand under Ireland’s immortal
Green. John Mitchel did not live to see it. He died, an old man, forty
years before its dawning. But the day of the Lord is here, and you and I
have lived to see it.
And we are young. And God has given us strength and courage and counsel.
May He give us victory.
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