By SHANE LESLIE.
Irish leaders have proved far-famed but not long-lived. Their short
and strenuous careers have burnt out in their prime, and their ends
have been such as attend conflagrations. More often they have left a
pall than a light in the heavens, for the most brilliant lives in
Irish history have led to the most tragic deaths. The Destiny which
allotted them impossible tasks has given them immortality on the
scenes of their glorious failure.
They differ from leaders of other countries, who divide the average
pittances of success or ill success on the road to honored
retirement. Few of the heroes among modern nations have left such
vivid and lasting memory as "the strong men of Ireland." During the
nineteenth century their lore and cult have traversed the whole world
in the wake of the great emigrations. Whether they failed or
succeeded in wresting the independence and ideals of Ireland for a
while from the fell clutch of circumstance, they live with their race
forever.
Under Plantagenet and Tudor rule, the Irish leaders presented a
sullen but armed resistance. A never completed invasion was met by
sporadic raids and successive risings. A race of military outlaws was
fashioned, which accounts for much in Irish character today.
Previously the Irish, like all Celtic civilization, was founded on
the arts, on speech, and on law, rather than on war and feudalism.
Even Irish militancy was crushed in the Williamite wars, and the
race, deprived of its original subsistence as well as of its acquired
defense, sank into the stupor of penal times. Those who should have
been leaders of Ireland became marshals of Austria and France.
Gradually it was learnt that the pen is mightier than the sword and
the human voice more potent than the sound of cannon--and the
constitutional struggle developed, not without relapse and reverse.
To Dean Swift must be attributed the change in the national weapon
and the initiation of a leadership of resistance within the law,
which has lasted into modern times. Accident made Swift an Irishman,
and a chance attempt to circulate debased coins in Ireland for the
benefit of a debased but royal favorite made him a patriot. Swift
drove out Wood's halfpence at the pen-point. He shamed the
government, he checked the all-powerful Walpole, and he roused the
manhood of Ireland towards independence in legislation. He never
realized what a position history would give him. To himself he seemed
a gloomy failure, to his contemporaries a popular pamphleteer, but to
posterity he is the creator of public conscience in Ireland. He was
the father of patriotic journalism, and the first to defend Ireland's
rights through literature. Though his popularity was quenched in
lunacy, his impress upon Irish politics remains as powerful and
lasting as upon English literature.
Within the so-called Irish parliament sprang forth the first of a
long line of orators, Henry Flood. He was the first to study the
Constitution for purposes of opposition. He attacked vice-regal
government in its own audit-house. Pension and corruption he laid
bare, and upon the people he breathed a spirit of independence.
Unfortunately he was not content with personal prominence. He
accepted office, hoping thereby to benefit Ireland. His voice became
lost to the higher cause, and another man rose in his stead, Henry
Grattan. The American war tested the rival champions of Liberty.
Flood favored sending Irish troops, "armed negotiators" he called
them, to deal with the revolted colonists. Grattan nobly reviled him
for standing--"with a metaphor in his mouth and a bribe in his
pocket, a champion against the rights of America, the only hope of
Ireland and the only refuge of the liberties of mankind." Flood
collapsed under his ignoble honors. He was not restored by returning
to patriotic opposition. Grattan's leadership proved permanent
politically and historically. His name connotes the high water-mark
of Irish statesmanship. The parliament which he created and whose
rights he defined became a standard, and his name a talisman and a
challenge to succeeding generations. The comparative oratory of
Grattan and Flood is still debated. Both after a manner were unique
and unsurpassed. Flood possessed staying power in sheer invective and
sustained reasoning. Grattan was fluent in epigram and most inspiring
when condensed, and he had an immense moral advantage. The parliament
which made him a grant was independent, but it was from one of
subservience that Flood drew his salary. Henceforth Grattan was
haunted by the jealous and discredited herald of himself. A great
genius, Flood lacked the keen judgment and careless magnanimity
without which leadership in Ireland brings misunderstanding and
disaster. In the English House he achieved total failure. Grattan
followed him after the Union, but retained the attention if not the
power of Dublin days. Neither influenced English affairs, and their
eloquence curiously was considered cold and sententious. Their
rhapsody appeared artificial, and their exposition labored. The
failure of these men was no stigma. What is called "Irish oratory"
arose with the inclusion of the Celtic under strata in politics.
Burke's speeches were delivered to an empty house. Though he lived
out of Ireland and never became an Irish leader in Ireland, Burke had
an influence in England greater than that of any Irishman before or
since. The beauty and diction of his speech fostered future
parliamentary speaking. Macaulay, Gladstone, Peel, and Brougham were
suckled on him. His farthest reaching achievement was his treatment
of the French Revolution. His single voice rolled back that storm in
Europe. But no words could retard revolution in Ireland herself.
Venal government made the noblest conservative thinking seem treason
to the highest interests of the country. The temporary success of
Grattan's parliament had been largely won by the Volunteers. They had
been drilled, ostensibly against foreign invasion, but virtually to
secure reforms at home. Their power became one with which England had
to reckon, and which she never forgave. Lord Charlemont, their
president, was an estimable country gentleman, but not a national
leader. A more dashing figure appeared in the singular Earl of
Bristol. Though an Irish bishop and an English peer, he set himself
in the front rank of the movement, assuming with general consent the
demeanor and trappings of royalty. He would not have hesitated to
plunge Ireland into war, had he obtained Charlemont's position. But
it was not so fated.
After forcing parliamentary independence the Volunteers meekly
disbanded, and the United Irishmen took their place. The brilliancy
of Grattan's parliament never fulfilled national aspirations. Bristol
was succeeded by another recruit from the aristocracy--Lord Edward
Fitzgerald. With Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet he has become legendary.
All three attained popular canonization, for all three sealed their
brief leadership with death.
Lord Edward was a dreamer, an Irish Bayard, too chivalrous to
conspire successfully and too frankly courageous to match a
government of guile. Tone was far more dangerous. He realized that
foreign invasion was necessary to successful rebellion, and he
allowed no scruple or obstacle in his path. He washed his hands of
law and politics entirely. To divert Napoleon to Ireland was his
object and the total separation of Ireland his ambition. The United
Irishmen favored the invasion, which the Volunteers had been formed
to repel. The feud between moral and physical force broke out. The
failure of the sterner policy in 1798 did not daunt Emmet from his
ill-starred attempt in 1803. He combined Lord Edward's chivalry with
some abilities worthy of Tone, but he failed. The failure he redeemed
by a swan-song from the dock and a demeanor on the scaffold which
have become part of Irish tradition.
After the Union, Irish leaders sprang up in the English House, which
Pitt had unwittingly made the cockpit of the racial struggle. Far
from absorbing the Irish element, the Commons found themselves forced
to resist, rally, and finally succumb.
The Irish House cannot be dismissed without mention of Curran. He was
a brilliant enemy of corruption and servility. O'Connell said "there
was never so honest an Irishman," which may account for his greater
success as a lawyer than a politician. To be an Irish leader and a
successful lawyer is given to no man. For the former the sacrifice of
a great career is needed. This sacrifice Daniel O'Connell was
prepared to make. His place in history will never be estimated, for
few have been so loved or hated, or for stronger reasons. Never did a
tribune rising to power lift his people to such sudden hope and
success. Never did a champion leave his followers at his death and
decline to more terrible despair. Friend and foe admit his immensity.
He was the greatest Irishman that ever lived or seemingly could live.
In his own person he contained the whole genius of the Celt. Ireland
could not hold his emotions, which overflowed into the world for
expression. He rose on the crest of a religious agitation, but,
Emancipation won, he had the foresight to associate the Irish cause
with the advent of Reform and Liberalism throughout Europe. He
sounded the notes of free-trade and anti-slavery. What he said in
parliament one day, Ireland re-echoed the next. To her he was all in
all, her hero and her prophet, her Messias and her strong deliverer.
On the continent he roughly personified Christian Democracy.
In public oratory O'Connell introduced a new style. Torrential and
overwhelming as Flood and Grattan had never been, he proved more
successful if less polished. The exaggerations of Gaelic speech found
outburst in his English. Peel's smile was "the silver plate on a
coffin", Wellington "a stunted corporal", and Disraeli "the lineal
descendant of the impenitent thief."
It sounds bombastic, but in those feudal forties it rang more
magnificent than war. Single-voiced he overawed the host of bigots,
dullards, and reactionaries. Unhappily, he let his people abandon
their native tongue, while teaching them how to balance the rival
parties in England, the latter a policy that has proved Ireland's
fortune since. He loosed the spirit of sectarianism in the tithe war,
and he crushed the Young Ireland movement, which bred Fenianism in
its death agony. But he made the Catholic a citizen. Results
stupendous as far-reaching sprang from his steps every way.
The finest pen-sketch of O'Connell is by Mitchel, who says, "besides
superhuman and subterhuman passions, yet withal, a boundless fund of
masterly affectation and consummate histrionism, hating and loving
heartily, outrageous in his merriment and passionate in his
lamentation, he had the power to make other men hate or love, laugh
or weep, at his good pleasure."
Yet during his lifetime there lived others worthy of national
leadership. O'Brien, Duffy, and Davis played their part in England as
well as in Ireland. Father Mathew founded the Temperance, as Feargus
O'Conor the Chartist, movement. And there was an orator who
fascinated Gladstone--Sheil.
Father Mathew succeeded in keeping many millions of men sober during
the forties until the great Famine engulfed his work as it did
O'Connell's. To him is due, as a feature of Irish life, the brass
band with banners, which he originally organized as a
counter-intoxicant.
Feargus O'Conor founded Radical Socialism in England. As the Lion of
Freedom, he enjoyed a popularity with English workmen approaching
that of O'Connell in Ireland. He ended in lunacy, but he had the
credit of forwarding peasant proprietorship far in advance of his
times.
Sheil was a tragic orator--"an iambic rhapsodist", O'Connell called
him--who might have been leader, did not a greater tragedian occupy
the stage. And Sheil was content to be O'Connell's organizer. Without
O'Connell's voice or presence, he was his rhetorical superior,
excelling in irony and the by-plays of speech for which O'Connell was
too exuberant. Shell's speeches touch exquisite though not the deep
notes of O'Connell, whom he criticized for "throwing out broods of
sturdy young ideas upon the world without a rag to cover them." He
discredited his master and his cause by taking office. The fruits of
Emancipation were tempting to those who had borne the heat of the
day, but there was a rising school of patriots who refused
acquiescence to anything less than total freedom.
The Young Irelanders reincarnated the men of "ninety-eight." They
were neither too late nor too soon. They snatched the sacred torch of
Liberty from the dying hands of O'Connell, who summoned in vain old
Ireland against his young rivals. But men like Davis and Duffy
appealed to types O'Connell never swayed. He could carry the mob, but
poet, journalist, and idealist were enrolled with Young Ireland. For
this reason the history of their failure is brighter in literature
than the tale of O'Connell's triumphs. To read Duffy's "Young
Ireland" and Mitchel's "Jail Journal", with draughts from the _Spirit
of the Nation_. is to relive the period. Without the Young
Irelanders, Irish Nationalism might not have survived the Famine.
Mitchel, as open advocate of physical force, became father to
Fenianism. An honest conspirator and brilliant writer, he proved that
the pen of journalism was sharper than the Irish pike. Carlyle
described him as "a fine elastic-spirited young fellow, whom I
grieved to see rushing on destruction palpable, by attack of
windmills." Destruction came surely, but coupled with immortality. He
was transported as a felon before the insurrection, while his
writings sprang up in angry but unarmed men.
Mitchel and O'Connell both sought the liberation of Ireland, but
their viewpoint differed. Mitchel thought only of Liberty; O'Connell
not unnaturally considered the "Liberator." His refusal to allow a
drop of blood to be shed caused Young Ireland to secede. Only when
death removed his influence could the pent-up feelings of the country
break out under Smith O'Brien. If Mitchel was an Irish Robespierre,
O'Brien was their Lafayette. His advance from the level of dead
aristocracy had been rapid. From defending Whigs in Parliament he
passed to opposition and "contempt of the House." He resigned from
the Bench from which O'Connell had been dismissed, became a Repealer,
adding the words "no compromise," and finally gloried in his treason
before the House. His next step brought a price upon his head.
Grave and frigid, but inwardly warmhearted and passionate, O'Brien
had little aptitude for rebellion. But the death penalty (commuted to
transportation) which he incurred went far to redeem his forlorn
failure. Mitchel, who shared his Australian imprisonment, left a fine
picture of "this noblest of Irishmen, thrust in among the
off-scourings of England's gaols, with his home desolated and his
hopes ruined, and defeated life falling into the sere and yellow
leaf. A man, who cannot be crushed, or bowed, or broken; anchored
immovably upon his own brave heart within; his clear eye and soul
open as ever to all the melodies and splendors of heaven and earth,
and calmly waiting for the angel, Death."
The Irish cause was not revived until the Fenian movement. Disgust
with the politicians drove the noblest into their ranks. In Stephens
they found an organizing chief, in Boyle O'Reilly a poet, and in John
O'Leary a political thinker, men who under other conditions had
achieved mundane success. The Fenians were defended by Isaac Butt, a
big-hearted, broad-minded lawyer, who afterwards organized a party to
convince Englishmen that Repeal was innocuous, when called "Home
Rule." The people stood his patient ways patiently, but when a more
desperate leader arrived they transferred allegiance, and Butt died
of a broken heart.
Parnell took his place and began to marshal the broken forces of
Irish democracy against his own class. Butt had been a polite
parliamentarian, reverencing the courtesy of debate and at heart
loving the British Constitution. Parnell felt that his mission lay in
breaking rather than interpreting the law. The well-bred House stared
and protested when he defied their chosen six hundred. Parnell faced
them with their own marble callousness. He outdid them in political
cynicism and out-bowed them in frigid courtesy, while maintaining a
policy before which tradition melted and a time-honored system
collapsed. In one stormy decade he tore the cloak from the Mother of
Parliaments, reducing her to a plain-speaking democratic machine.
Through the breach he made, the English labor party has since
entered.
He united priest and peasant, physical and moral force, under him. He
could lay Ireland under storm or lull at his pleasure. His
achievement equalled his self-confidence. He reversed the Irish land
system and threw English politics out of gear. With the balance of
power in his hand, he made Tory and Radical outbid each other for his
support. He was no organizer or orator, but he fascinated able men to
conduct his schemes, as Napoleon used his marshals. On a pregnant day
he equaled the achievement of St. Paul and converted Gladstone, who
had once been his gaoler. Gladstone became a Home Ruler, and
henceforth English politics knew no peace.
Parnell stood for the fall and rise of many. Under his banner Irish
peasants became human beings with human rights. He felled the feudal
class in Ireland and undermined them in England. Incalculable forces
were set to destroy him. A forged letter in the _Times_ classed him
with assassins, while an legal Commission was sent to try his whole
movement. It is history that his triumphant vindication was followed
by a greater fall. The happiness of Ireland was sucked into the
maelstrom of his ruin. He refused to retire from leadership at
Gladstone's bidding, and Ireland staggered into civil war. The end is
known--Parnell died as he had lived. Of his moral fault there is no
palliation, but it may be said he held his country's honor dearer
than his own, for he could not bear to see her win even independence
by obeying the word of an Englishman.