SOME OF THE LEADERS.
Meanwhile the insurrection, like all its historical forerunners, has
been quelled in blood. It sounds rhetorical to say so, but it was not
quelled in peasoup or tisane. While it lasted the fighting was very
determined, and it is easily, I think, the most considerable of Irish
rebellions.
The country was not with it, for be it remembered that a whole army of
Irishmen, possibly three hundred thousand of our race, are fighting with
England instead of against her. In Dublin alone there is scarcely a poor
home in which a father, a brother, or a son is not serving in one of the
many fronts which England is defending. Had the country risen, and
fought as stubbornly as the Volunteers did, no troops could have beaten
them--well that is a wild statement, the heavy guns could always beat
them--but from whatever angle Irish people consider this affair it must
appear to them tragic and lamentable beyond expression, but not mean
and not unheroic.
It was hard enough that our men in the English armies should be slain
for causes which no amount of explanation will ever render less foreign
to us, or even intelligible; but that our men who were left should be
killed in Ireland fighting against the same England that their brothers
are fighting for ties the question into such knots of contradiction as
we may give up trying to unravel. We can only think--this has
happened--and let it unhappen itself as best it may.
We say that the time always finds the man, and by it we mean: that when
a responsibility is toward there will be found some shoulder to bend for
the yoke which all others shrink from. It is not always nor often the
great ones of the earth who undertake these burdens--it is usually the
good folk, that gentle hierarchy who swear allegiance to mournfulness
and the under dog, as others dedicate themselves to mutton chops and the
easy nymph. It is not my intention to idealise any of the men who were
concerned in this rebellion. Their country will, some few years hence,
do that as adequately as she has done it for those who went before them.
Those of the leaders whom I knew were not great men, nor brilliant--that
is they were more scholars than thinkers, and more thinkers than men of
action; and I believe that in no capacity could they have attained to
what is called eminence, nor do I consider they coveted any such public
distinction as is noted in that word.
But in my definition they were good men--men, that is, who willed no
evil, and whose movements of body or brain were unselfish and healthy.
No person living is the worse off for having known Thomas MacDonagh, and
I, at least, have never heard MacDonagh speak unkindly or even harshly
of anything that lived. It has been said of him that his lyrics were
epical; in a measure it is true, and it is true in the same measure that
his death was epical. He was the first of the leaders who was tried and
shot. It was not easy for him to die leaving behind two young children
and a young wife, and the thought that his last moment must have been
tormented by their memory is very painful. We are all fatalists when we
strike against power, and I hope he put care from him as the soldiers
marched him out.
The O'Rahilly also I knew, but not intimately, and I can only speak of a
good humour, a courtesy, and an energy that never failed. He was a man
of unceasing ideas and unceasing speech, and laughter accompanied every
sound made by his lips.
Plunkett and Pearse I knew also, but not intimately. Young Plunkett, as
he was always called, would never strike one as a militant person. He,
like Pearse and MacDonagh, wrote verse, and it was no better nor worse
than their's were. He had an appetite for quaint and difficult
knowledge. He studied Egyptian and Sanscrit, and distant curious matter
of that sort, and was interested in inventions and the theatre. He was
tried and sentenced and shot.
As to Pearse, I do not know how to place him, nor what to say of him. If
there was an idealist among the men concerned in this insurrection it
was he, and if there was any person in the world less fitted to head an
insurrection it was he also. I never could "touch" or sense in him the
qualities which other men spoke of, and which made him military
commandant of the rising. None of these men were magnetic in the sense
that Mr. Larkin is magnetic, and I would have said that Pearse was less
magnetic than any of the others. Yet it was to him and around him they
clung.
Men must find some centre either of power or action or intellect about
which they may group themselves, and I think that Pearse became the
leader because his temperament was more profoundly emotional than any of
the others. He was emotional not in a flighty, but in a serious way, and
one felt more that he suffered than that he enjoyed.
He had a power; men who came into intimate contact with him began to act
differently to their own desires and interests. His schoolmasters did
not always receive their salaries with regularity. The reason that he
did not pay them was the simple one that he had no money. Given by
another man this explanation would be uneconomic, but from him it was so
logical that even a child could comprehend it. These masters did not
always leave him. They remained, marvelling perhaps, and accepting, even
with stupefaction, the theory that children must be taught, but that no
such urgency is due towards the payment of wages. One of his boys said
there was no fun in telling lies to Mr. Pearse, for, however outrageous
the lie, he always believed it. He built and renovated and improved his
school because the results were good for his scholars, and somehow he
found builders to undertake these forlorn hopes.
It was not, I think, that he "put his trust in God," but that when
something had to be done he did it, and entirely disregarded logic or
economics or force. He said--such a thing has to be done and so far as
one man can do it I will do it, and he bowed straightaway to the task.
It is mournful to think of men like these having to take charge of
bloody and desolate work, and one can imagine them say, "Oh! cursed
spite," as they accepted responsibility.