unsuccessful patriot than an uninventive and unauthoritative lover.
Emmet in hiding near the Priory, between the no-rising and the arrest,
had his almost certain chances of escape; but he could not persuade
the girl, born, like Hamlet, to a tragic inaction, to strike hands
with him and make the dash for liberty. Habit sat too heavily on her
defrauded spirit, and insufficient faith in herself kept her where she
was. The secrecy of their relations seems to have hurt and weakened
her. She could no more stand up then against her father’s displeasure
than she could part long after with dejection and a sort of remorse,
when the face of her outer world had beautifully, almost miraculously,
changed. And Emmet loved her as she was, a day-lily on a drooping stem.
To quarrel with them because no fleet-footed horse, as in a novel,
pranced by night to Rathfarnham to bear them away together, is to
quarrel with a perfected sequence. To mark the look of this Robert,
hungry for the heroic, the look of this Sarah, mystical as twilight, is
but to forecast casualties. Perhaps as every soul has a right to its
own kind of welfare and happiness, so it has a right to its own kind of
sorrow. The second alternative suits the innocent, although it shocks
the moral sense of most persons far more than would the choice of error
instead of truth. To be an Emmet at all meant to get into trouble for
advanced ideals. To be a Curran meant to have a keen intelligence
always besieged hard, and eventually overcome, by melancholia, as John
Philpot Curran’s was at the end, as Richard Curran’s was in his prime.
Emmet and the young creature of his adoration were hardly used; but
Fate chose not ill for them. A _révolution manquée_ with an elopement;
expatriation with a marriage certificate; a change of political front
with the parental blessing—all look somehow equally incongruous and
out of key with those sensitive faces elected, let us say, to better
things. Their story, with all deductions which can be made, has already
done something to deepen the sense of human love in the world, and to
broaden the dream of human liberty. Perhaps either of those games may
be considered as always worth the candle.
Rashness, and the immediate ruin consequent upon it, two things which
men can taste, smell, handle, hear, and see, are not redeemed, in their
opinion, by anything so unsubstantial as motive. History, a tissue of
externals, cannot afford to take account of that. Hence it falls out
that certain spirits are finally given over, with their illegitimate
deeds in arm, to folk-lore and balladry. Of these are Charlotte Corday,
and John Brown of Ossawatomie, and Robert Emmet. There is no need of
exculpating them in the forum of the people, where they were never held
to be at fault; and exculpation is a waste of words to the rest of us.
We understand too well what social havoc these pure-eyed hot-hearted
angels bring in their wake, when they condescend to interfere with
our fixed affairs. They call into being in their own despite our most
self-protective measures: measures, in short, which amount to an
international coalition against the undesirable immigrant. Relentless
inhospitality to such innovators, in every generation and in every
clime, is the habit of this planet. Such as our affairs are, we do not
seem to wish them made over into duplicates of those of the Kingdom of
Heaven. The executed meddlers, however, often take on an unaccountable
posthumous grace, and may even be approached upon anniversaries in a
mood none other than that of affectionate congratulation. The anomaly
of our own situation has passed with their death: though they never
change, we grow up in time to be Posterity, and to see with them the
ultimate correlations of things, in a region of intellectual space
where nothing goes by its old name. To be unbiassed and Irish is to
love Robert Emmet; to be generously English is to love him; to be
American is to love him anyhow.
“Aristogeiton! here is for thy sword
A myrtle of Mount Vernon, plucked this day.”
THE END
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
Edinburgh & London
* * * * *
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The name in the original MS. was probably Burrowes.
[2] The bracketed words are conjectures of the present writer. The MS.
has suffered greatly from the damp, so as to be practically illegible
in places.
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Note: Page 84, “n” changed to “in” (in a very clever)