From the somewhat picturesque assemblage of Irish political agitators
emerges the figure of one in many ways the most picturesque, and, in
most, the greatest of them. The period (1775–1847) of O’Connell’s
activities discloses him as one of the generation that came in with
Scott and Wordsworth--children of the overlapping centuries, whom
shortly the French Revolution was to stir to many things strange to the
world of 1775.
The facts of O’Connell’s life arrange themselves concisely from his
birth, August 6, 1775, from a good family of County Kerry; his French
education at S. Omer and Douay; and his legal sojourn at the customary
Lincoln’s Inn; to his call to the Irish Bar (May 19, 1798), and the
beginning of his identification with the Irish cause. From his speech
in 1813 in defence of Magee,--the basis of this selection,--this
identification became ever more complete. It was in 1823 that he
founded the “Catholic Association.” In 1828 he was elected to
Parliament from County Clare, but was not allowed to take his seat.
He stood again, was again elected; and, in 1830, just at the acme of
his popularity, at last entered Parliament unchallenged. Now followed
within and without the Commons the struggle for Irish liberties
that is almost synonymous with the name O’Connell. The year 1843
marks the high tide of his system of agitation by mass-meetings--the
“Monster-Meetings,” so-called. This device of popular _propaganda_ was
O’Connell’s own; and probably none have ever swayed more temperately
than he the mighty forces of a Celtic audience, obedient to the
incitations of impassioned oratory. For the most part in the open air
and in the countryside O’Connell would draw from a radius of many miles
a serious, sympathetic, and--strange to say--sober host of peasantry,
in whom his voice woke infallibly the sense of race and religion
as things to be fought for, not with the obvious musket, but with
orderly combination, moderate measures, and all that a tempered and
single-minded zeal could do. The Irish people had long hailed him as
their “Liberator”; he was the leader to whom they looked for Catholic
Emancipation and the repeal of the forced union with Great Britain; and
yet it is not the least tribute to O’Connell’s powers that he was able
to restrain a people laboring under acknowledged wrongs, and racially
prone to insurrection, from any serious appeal to arms. The Government
of that day was not moved by such considerations. The sequence of the
“Monster-Meetings” was that O’Connell was arrested and tried on what
must now appear a trivial charge of treason. He was even convicted;
but the sentence failed to receive the approval of the House of Lords.
Although clear of his difficulties, the man was broken, his superb
powers gone; and like a true Catholic he had the wish to die at Rome.
Before he left England he appeared again in Parliament and tried to
speak--his fine voice sunk to a husky whisper. The report in “Hansard’s
Parliamentary Debates” of the day’s proceedings, in reference to this
episode, is laconically significant; it runs--“Mr. O’Connell was
understood to say * * *” On his journey, the “Liberator” died May 5,
1847, at Genoa, whence his body was returned. But in response to a
rhetorical instinct that was medieval, Celtic, and yet, one feels,
in this case not unjustifiable, his friends caused his heart to be
embalmed and sent to Rome, where it rests in the eternal sanctuary of
Saint Agatha.
The character of O’Connell challenges the biographer. In everything,
perhaps, save his love for moderation, the man was Celtic; and every
one does not care for the Celt. Surely he had the defects of the
race: improvidence, unbounded invective, a speech too prodigal of
epithet and ornament, the ultrasanguine temperament, and, more or
less, the histrionic pose. Oppose to these that, as a Catholic, under
great provocations, he was tolerant; as an agitator, moderate in his
programme; as a man, generous, high-spirited, and, after a convivial
youth, notably temperate. Manifestly it is a character that lends
itself to the old-style biography of balance. The easiest estimate of
it is to say outright that O’Connell was pure demagogue; but if so,
he was one of the greatest. He lived in a time when the conduct of
political discussion knew no amenities. It was the day of slander,
innuendo, high words for high words, and then--the duel. For the high
words, see O’Connell’s reported speeches almost anywhere; as for the
duelling, he had killed his man at the outset of his prominence, and
lived a life of repentance for it. No man, it appears as we read the
diatribes of the day, has been more soundly abused in English: his
replies seem almost to strain the language of abuse. Thus it is that
to the modern taste his style so often strikes a false note, and seems
a crude mixture of passion and prejudice unworthy of a fame so great.
Therefore O’Connell can least of all men be judged merely by his own
words: the critic has always to remember the place and the moment,--the
crowded, sympathetic court-room, the biased judge and hostile jury; or
the myriad; upturned faces on a green hillside, mobile to each turning
of the rhetorical screw. At such hours O’Connell must have yielded to
his own art; the orator was subordinated to oratory, and often said
ridiculous things.
It was all of a character with O’Connell’s temperamental _intensity_.
In the usual sense of the word, then, he cannot be called a
demagogue--a mere puppet of the popular will. When the people and
O’Connell had two minds about a question, it was not the “Liberator”
who changed. Thus, for his opposition to Trades Unions, he was
mobbed and hooted in the very streets of Dublin. Nor did he take the
demonstration seriously; he knew his people too well for that. In a
word, his appeal and influence were racial rather than parochial; he
must be counted not as a great politician, or even statesman, but as
one of the “shepherds of the people,”--in Mr. Gladstone’s phrase, an
_ethnagogue_.
His genius found its play in a complete and overwhelming attack of any
project: the maxim, μηδὲν ἄγαν, was never its game. As a young man, he
forged early to the front of his profession; as he gained freely, so
he was always in debt; and when, as one of the leading advocates of
Ireland, the ambition of O’Connell looked farther and saw, as one must
fancy, a higher art in agitation, he abandoned the certain prosperities
of a legal career and left at his death barely £1000. He was a man of
emotions, then, subject to moods and aberrations; best at _ex tempore_
effort; poorly read--singular to state--even in Irish history; and if a
great orator, surely an orator with something of the actor there. His
name will be cherished among his people as one in whom their wrongs
found an eloquent and imperative voice; the world will be disposed
to regard him as a fine example of the partly ineffectual, partly
admirable type Reformer, whose particular programme, as yet but half
realized, was, in Mr. Lecky’s words,[A] “to open in Ireland a new
era, with a separate and independent Parliament and perfect religious
equality.”
[A] “Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland,” N. Y., 1872, p. 226.