There is a portrait of John Shawe-Taylor by a celebrated painter in the
Dublin Municipal Gallery, but painted in the midst of a movement of the
arts that exalts characteristics above the more typical qualities, it
does not show us that beautiful and gracious nature. There is an
exaggeration of the hollows of the cheeks and of the form of the bones
which empties the face of the balance and delicacy of its lines. He was
a very handsome man, as women who have imagination and tradition
understand those words, and had he not been so, mind and character had
been different. There are certain men, certain famous commanders of
antiquity, for instance, of whose good looks the historian always
speaks, and whose good looks are the image of their faculty; and these
men copying hawk or leopard have an energy of swift decision, a power of
sudden action, as if their whole body were their brain.
A few years ago he was returning from America, and the liner reached
Queenstown in a storm so great that the tender that came out to it for
passengers returned with only one man. It was John Shawe-Taylor, who had
leaped as it was swept away from the ship.
The achievement that has made his name historic and changed the history
of Ireland came from the same faculty of calculation and daring, from
that instant decision of the hawk, between the movement of whose wings
and the perception of whose eye no time passes capable of division. A
proposal for a Land Conference had been made, and cleverer men than he
were but talking the life out of it. Every argument for and against had
been debated over and over, and it was plain that nothing but argument
would come of it. One day we found a letter in the daily papers, signed
with his name, saying that a conference would be held on a certain date,
and that certain leaders of the landlords and of the tenants were
invited. He had made his swift calculation, probably he could not have
told the reason for it, a decision had arisen out of his instinct. He
was then almost an unknown man. Had the letter failed, he would have
seemed a crack-brained fool to his life's end; but the calculation of
his genius was justified. He had, as men of his type have often, given
an expression to the hidden popular desires; and the expression of the
hidden is the daring of the mind. When he had spoken, so many others
spoke that the thing was taken out of the mouths of the leaders, it was
as though some power deeper than our daily thought had spoken, and men
recognised that common instinct, that common sense which is genius. Men
like him live near this power because of something simple and impersonal
within them which is, as I believe, imaged in the fire of their minds,
as in the shape of their bodies and their faces.
I do not think I have known another man whose motives were so entirely
pure, so entirely unmixed with any personal calculation, whether of
ambition, of prudence or of vanity. He caught up into his imagination
the public gain as other men their private gain. For much of his life he
had seemed, though a good soldier and a good shot, and a good rider to
hounds, to care deeply for nothing but religion, and this religion, so
curiously lacking in denominational limits, concerned itself alone with
the communion of the soul with God. Such men, before some great
decision, will sometimes give to the analysis of their own motive the
energy that other men give to the examination of the circumstances
wherein they act, and it is often those who attain in this way to purity
of motive who act most wisely at moments of great crisis. It is as
though they sank a well through the soil where our habits have been
built, and where our hopes take root and are again uprooted, to the
lasting rock and to the living stream. They are those for whom Tennyson
claimed the strength of ten, and the common and clever wonder at their
simplicity and at a triumph that has always an air of miracle about it.
Some two years ago Ireland lost a great aesthetic genius, and it may be
it should mourn, as it must mourn John Synge always, that which is gone
from it in this man's moral genius. And yet it may be that, though he
died in early manhood, his work was finished, that the sudden flash of
his mind was of those things that come but seldom in a lifetime, and
that his name is as much a part of history as though he had lived
through many laborious years.
July 1, 1911.