Not everyone that lives in a hermitage is a hermit. And not every hermit is hermit hearted. As for me, I have only two qualities in common with the real (or imaginary) hermit who once lived (or did not live) in this place: I am poor and I am merry. Now, all hermits are poor, and all hermits, unless they are frauds, are merry. I am visibly poor, but am merry only in an esoteric or secret sense, exhibiting to the outer world an austerity of look and speech more befitting my habitation than my heart. Understand that, however harshly I may express myself in the comments and proposals I shall from time to time make here, I am in reality a genial and large-hearted person, and that if I chasten my fellows it is only because I love them.
I have, as I have suggested, some proposals to make. The first is that we who are determined to rehabilitate this nation should commence working towards that end instead of arguing. The Nationalist movement in Ireland has degenerated into a debating society. In all our national or quasi-national organs we argue as to what a nation is, what nationality, what a Nationalist. As if definitions mattered! Our love of disputation sometimes makes us indecent, as when we argue over a dead man's coffin as to whether he was a Nationalist or not, and sometimes makes us ridiculous, as when we prove by a mathematical formula that the poet who has most finely voiced Irish nationalism in our time is no Nationalist. As if a man's opinions were more important than his work! I propose that we take service as our touchstone, and reject all other touchstones; and that, without bothering our heads about sorting out, segregating, and labelling Irishmen and Irishwomen according to their opinions, we agree to accept as fellow-Nationalists all who specifically or virtually recognise this Irish nation as an entity and, being part of it, owe it and give it their service. This will
This thing of service merits to be dwelt upon. Ireland, in our day as in the past, has excommunicated some of those who have served her best, and has canonised some of those who have served her worst. We damn a man for an unpopular phrase; we deify a man who does a mean thing gracefully. The word to us is ever more significant than the deed. When a man like Synge, a man in whose sad heart there glowed a true love of Ireland, one of the two or three men who have in our time made Ireland considerable in the eyes of the world, uses strange symbols which we do not understand, we cry out that he has blasphemed and we proceed to crucify him. When a sleek lawyer, rising step by step through the most ignoble of all professions, attains to a Lord Chancellorship or to an Attorney-Generalship, we confer upon him the freedom of our cities. This is really a very terrible symptom in contemporary
When such commercial transactions are concluded I think the less said about them the better. I would not pursue these men as traitors, for I do not think they were ever with us. But I do think that an effort should be made to prevent rebel cities like Cork from honouring their mean success. Is it too late, even now, to expunge their names from the roll of freemen? Let someone in Cork look to it.
This generation of Irishmen will be called upon in the near future to make a very passionate assertion of nationality. The form in which that assertion shall be made must depend upon many things, more especially upon the passage or non-passage of the present Home Rule Bill. In the meantime there is need to be vigilant. Yet, every day we allow insults to the nation to pass, forgetting that every fresh stripe endured by a slave makes him so much more a slave. There comes to a slave, as there comes to a tortured child or to a tortured animal, a time when stripes seem normal and it is easier to endure than to protest. Any underling of British government can now lay hands on Ireland with impunity; only now it is no longer necessary to deal heavy stripes—a delicate and facetious slap in the face is a sufficient symbol of over-lordship. One Mr. Justice Boyd sneered at the Irish language from the Bench in Belfast a few weeks ago; one would have thought that there were enough Gaels in Belfast to prevent the fellow from being heard in his own court the next day until he had apologised. The National Council of Sinn Fein recently sent an anti-enlisting
I am aware that some of the courses I recommend are open to the objection that they would land some people in gaol. But gaol would do some people good.
Symbols are very important. The symbol of a true thing, of a beneficent thing, is worthy of all homage; the symbol of a false thing, of a cruel thing, is worthy of all reprobation. A gibbet has come to be the noblest symbol in the world, because it symbolises the noblest thing that has ever been done among men. The red coat of a soldier, a gallant thing in itself, has come
A nation should exact similar respect for its symbols. Free nations do. They salute their flags with bared heads; they hail with thundering cannon the nincompoops that happen to be their kings. A man with whom you would not sit at meat if he were a private individual, whom you would cut every time you saw him approaching you in the street, receives your homage, and justly receives your homage, when he symbolises the majesty of your nation. A man whom, as an individual, you would consider too insignificant to be an object of your dislike, becomes an object of holy hatred when he symbolises some evil thing that oppresses you or yours. No one in Ireland either likes or dislikes George Wettin; yet every true man of Ireland hates, or should hate, to see his not very intellectual features on a coin or on a stamp, for they symbolise there the foreign tyranny that holds us. A good Irishman
I know an old woman who never passes a soldier without railing at him. As a girl she made bullets for the Fenians, moulding them out of the leaden lining of tea cases. During the half century that has gone by, while our fathers and we have been parleying with the English, she has cherished in her heart an enduring hate. I saw her a few weeks ago as she went by the Wellington Barracks on her way to the Wolfe Tone Aeridheacht, and as she passed the sentry at the gate she paused and said something bitter to him. I would not have done that. I could not even if I would. Neither could you. A strong man would regard it as futile; a man with a sense of humour would regard it as ridiculous, just as most men regard the demonstrations of the Suffragettes. Yet I think the women are right and not we. At the root of that old woman's demonstration against the stolid sentry was an instinct profoundly true. She is in revolt against the evil thing that holds her country, and of that evil thing the sentry is the symbol. She is
Of the nation's symbols the most august is her language, and it is a measure of Ireland's degradation that she can endure to see her language derided by a Mr. Justice Boyd and that she can discuss the propriety of selling it for £10,000 a year to a Mr. Secretary Birrell. Ireland has lost the sense of shame. Her inner sanctities are no longer sacred to her. Keating (whom I take to be the greatest of Irish Nationalist poets) used a terrific phrase of the Ireland of his day: he called her ‘the harlot of England’. Yet Keating's Ireland was the magnificent Ireland in which Rory O'More planned and Owen
As long as Ireland is unfree the only honourable attitude for Irishmen and Irish women is an attitude of revolt. It is base of us to be quiescent. It is base not only for the nation, but for each individual in the nation: each of us is guilty of a personal baseness, each of us suffers a personal stigma, as long as this thing endures. When we go to Wolfe Tone's grave next Sunday we should remember with bitterness that we suffer the ignominy which he died rather than endure. If we mean to go on suffering it, we have no business going in pilgrimage to that dead man's grave. If we do not really mean to carry on his work, why disturb the quiet of Bodenstown with protestations?
I said last month that this generation of Irishmen will be called upon in the near
Once I knew a Bishop who used to devote the greater part of his spare time to writing Limericks in competition for prizes offered by newspapers. You will find it difficult to imagine a Bishop writing Limericks. One imagines a Bishop in his spare hours writing biblical commentaries or cultivating a neat garden in which the characteristic flower is lily-of-the-valley. And yet my Bishop was a saint. The not very apostolic occupation of his leisure had its origin in an apostolic simplicity and charity. The Bishop had a little niece of whom he was very fond, and the ambition of the little niece's life was to win one of the large prizes offered by London newspapers for clever Limericks. The good Bishop sent in a vast number of Limericks in his niece's name, and if he or she won a prize (which, I am sorry to say, neither of them ever did), half the money was to be spent in sending the little niece on a pilgrimage to Lourdes and the other half
At that time I was not a hermit, and was not versed in the wise foolishness of saints. From the Bishop's and from other instances I have since elaborated this piece of wisdom: when a good man does an inexplicable thing there is always a motive creditable to his goodness. Men's follies are often more symptomatic of their virtues than of their vices. Apply this to those round about you, in your home, in your office, in your organisation: apply it to the busy-bodies and the fools who appear to be making a mess of everything you are interested in, from your breakfast to your country, and you will come to respect them for their very blunders, to love them for their lunacy. You prefer your eggs well boiled. Your wife insists on serving them to you half raw. This is not perverseness on her part: she knows that
I love and honour Douglas Hyde. I have served under him since I was a boy. I am willing to serve under him until he can lead and I can serve no longer. I have never failed him. He has never failed me. I am only one of many who could write thus, who at this moment are thinking thus. But probably my service has been longer than that of most, for it began when I was only sixteen; and perhaps it has been more intimate than that of all but a very few, for I have been in posts that required constant communication with him for fifteen years. It has, too, been my privilege to be the first fosterer of many who are now serving under him—pupils of mine, now pupils of his in the National University or young workers in the Gaelic League; and these form a new bond between him and me. Thus by service given and service received I have earned the right to say here the things I am about to say. I can speak to him at once as
Or rather, since it has become the fashion to write Open Letters to Douglas Hyde, I will write him an Open Letter. I will commence: ‘My dear Hyde,—Among God's gracious gifts to you, perhaps the most gracious, at any rate the most useful, is your gift of humour. You have always had a great Homeric laugh. I call upon you to laugh it now. I could show you much matter for laughter in these noises and irrelevancies that disturb you. . .Laugh, my dear Craoibhin. Laugh your great genial laugh. It will ease the situation. Bulfin used to say that O'Daly's smile would split the ceiling at 24 Upper O'Connell Street. Let your laughter shake the Clock Tower in Earlsfort Terrace’.
[Footnote: The Clock Tower, I observe, has since collapsed.]
To be quite serious, laughter is what is required just now. A shout of laughter that will roll out from the Ard-Fheis at Galway
For my own part, I have found the need of laughter in order to preserve my sanity. And you, Craoibhin, have counselled sanity. There is one piece of sanity that I have learned from being a schoolmaster. Always remember that in a school you have to deal with boys, not cherubim. An enthusiastic teacher often makes the mistake of forming an ideal picture of schoolboy virtue, and is shocked and disheartened when he finds that his actual pupils fall far below his ideal.
I wonder whether this schoolmaster's wisdom might not be of service to Dr. Hyde. He must try to remember that those around him are men, not archangels. They are men with all the little lovable and unlovable weaknesses of men, and without any of the vision and strength of angels. And he must
Thus much to Dr. Hyde. To those on whose behalf I appeal to his magnanimity I say only this: O ye of little sense, know ye not when ye have got a good captain for a good cause? And know ye not that it is the duty of the soldier to follow his captain, unfaltering, unquestioning, seeing obedience in the bond of rule? If ye know not this, ye know not the first thing that a fighting man should know.
I have been considering the ways of chafers and dragon-flies. During the long summer they are my only entertainment in this wilderness. The dragon-flies make a pageant for me in the noon tide splendour:
Your beetle has in him many of the contradictions of the artist. In seemly black, he appeals to you as shy and retiring; suddenly, while you are sympathetically examining him, he splits up the middle, shocking you at first with the indecency of the act, but soon displays hidden wings as though he were an angel in disguise, and then, waving wild arms (like a Yeats making a speech), whirls into ecstasies, and is gone with multitudinous and iridescent whirr of wings and wing-cases. This is nature's symbolling forth of the divina insania of the poets. It were perhaps too curious to assign certain beetles to certain poets and dramatists as their types and figures, associating for instance the Necydalis Major, long and graceful, with Mr. Yeats, the familiar Coccinella, pleasant and comfortable looking, with Lady Gregory, the
- Swarms of bees and chafers, the little musicians of the world,
A gentle chorus.
Upon the dragon-fly a literature might be written. The dragon-fly is one of the most beautiful and terrible things in nature. It flashes by you like a winged emerald or ruby or turquoise. Scrutinise it at close quarters and you will find yourself comparing its bulky little round head, with its wonderful eyes and cruel jaws, to the beautiful, cruel head of a tiger. The dragon-fly among insects is in fact as the tiger among beasts, as the hawk among birds, as the shark among fish, as the lawyer among men, as England among the nations. It is the destroyer, the eater-up, the cannibal. Two dragon-flies will fight until nothing remains but two heads. So ferocious an eater-up is the dragon-fly that it is said that, in the absence of other bodies to eat up, it will eat up its own body until nothing is left but the head, and it would doubtless eat its own head if it could; a feat which would be as remarkable as the
Of the doings of men only rumours reach me in this solitude. I have heard faint echoes of laughter at Galway, and am pleased to think that the Gael has not entirely lost his sense of humour: a catastrophe which I had feared, for Dr. Hyde had been talking about his aunt's will and Mr. Griffith had been advising Dr. Hyde as to how to conduct a movement to success. The Irish-speaking crowd surging around the brake in Galway square recalls one to the realities of the movement, and to the field that is lying fallow. I want a missionary, a herald, an
Books sometimes find their way to this remote place, and fortunately books, even very profane books, are not forbidden by my rule. This month I have received a good book and a bad book. The good book is indeed one of the holy books of Ireland: no other than John Mitchel's Jail Journal, the last gospel of the New Testament of Irish Nationality, as Wolfe Tone's Autobiography is the first; John Mitchel's Jail Journal nobly presented, supplemented by an additional chapter of his Out of Jail Journal, enriched with good notes and portraits, and introduced by Arthur Griffith in a finely-written
I agree with one who holds that John Mitchel is Ireland's greatest literary figure—that is, of those who have written in English. But I place Tone above him both as a
I was wrong in speaking of my second book as a bad book. It is a good book, lovingly written, but it is spoiled by a profane preface. I am speaking of Maurice Moore's life of his father and of George Moore's preface thereto. The soldier has told the facts of his father's life (I wish he had not called him ‘an Irish Gentleman’) simply and well, and the novelist has tried to suggest that his father was not an ‘Irish gentleman’ but an Irish blackguard. Many Irish gentlemen have indeed been blackguards, but I do not think George Henry Moore was one. In a mean and difficult time he worked manfully for Ireland; and towards the end of his life he was willing to become
It is not amusing to be hungry; at least (for I desire to be moderate in my language), it is not very amusing. Though hunger be proverbially good sauce, one may have too much
Poor Marie Antoinette did not quite grasp the situation in France. In the end they grasped her and hurried her to the guillotine. If Marie Antoinette could have got at the peasant's point of view there might have been no French Revolution. There are only two ways of righting wrongs: reform and revolution. Reform is possible when those who inflict the wrong can be got to see
It is, of course, easy for me, a well-fed hermit, to write with detachment about hunger. It is always easy for well-fed persons to take detached views of such things; indeed, sometimes the views of the well-fed on these matters are so detached from their subject as to have no relation to it at all. If I were hungry, I should probably
Personally, I am in a position to protest my respectability. I do all the orthodox things. My wild oats were sown and reaped years ago. I am nothing so new-fangled as a socialist or a syndicalist. I am old fashioned enough to be both a Catholic and
I calculate that one-third of the people of Dublin are underfed; that half the children attending Irish primary schools are ill-nourished. Inspectors of the National Board will tell you that there is no use in visiting primary schools in Ireland after one or two
These are among the grievances against which men in Dublin are beginning to protest. Can you wonder that protest is at last made? Can you wonder that the protest is crude and bloody? I do not know whether the methods of Mr. James Larkin are wise methods or unwise methods (unwise, I think, in some respects), but this I know, that here is a most hideous wrong to be righted, and that the man who attempts honestly to right it is a good man and a brave man.
Poverty, starvation, social unrest, crime, are incidental to the civilisation of such states as England and America, where immense masses of people are herded into great Christless cities and the bodies and souls of men are exploited in the interests of wealth. But these conditions do no to any extent exist in Ireland. We have not great cities; we have not dense industrial populations; we have hardly any ruthless capitalists exploiting immense masses of men. Yet in Ireland we have dire and desperate poverty; we have starvation; we have social unrest. Ireland is capable of feeding twenty million
Before God, I believe that the root of the matter lies in foreign domination. A free Ireland would not, and could not, have hunger in her fertile vales and squalor in her cities. Ireland has resources to feed five times her population: a free Ireland would make those resources available. A free Ireland would drain the bogs, would harness the rivers, would plant the wastes, would nationalise the railways and waterways, would improve agriculture, would protect fisheries, would foster industries, would promote commerce, would diminish extravagant expenditure (as on needless judges and policemen), would beautify the cities, would educate the workers (and also the non-workers, who stand in direr need of it), would, in short, govern herself as no external power—nay, not even a government of angels and archangels— could govern her. For freedom is the condition of sane life, and in slavery, if we have not death, we have the more evil thing which the poet has named Death-in-Life. The most awful wars are the wars that take
There are incongruities which are humorous, and there are incongruities which are disgusting. All humour has its source in incongruity, but so has all sin. Sometimes the humour of an incongruity is so great that we overlook the fact of its wickedness; sometimes the wickedness of an incongruity is so apparent that only a saint can laugh at its humour (for your saint laughs at things whereat your man of less sanctity, which means of less charity and less humility, is scandalised). There are obvious incongruities at which everyone, from a saint to a solicitor, will at least smile. Thus, when one hears a noble air of Gounod's sung to such words as ‘My wife stole a hell of a lump of beef’;
But there are incongruities which disgust, or at any rate ought to disgust. A millionaire promoting Universal Peace is such an incongruity; an employer who accepts the aid of foreign bayonets to enforce a lock-out of his workmen and accuses the workmen of national dereliction because they accept foreign alms for their starving wives and children, is such an incongruity; a public body in an enslaved country which passes a resolution congratulating a citizen upon selling himself to the enemies of that country, and upon making a good bargain of it, is such an incongruity; an Irish Nationalist, unable to pull the trigger of a gun himself, who sneers at the drillings and rifle-practices of Orangemen, is such an incongruity. The Eastern and the Western Worlds are indeed full of incongruities of this sort; each of them matter for a play by a Synge.
To dilate a little on one of them. It is now the creed of Irish nationalism (or at least of that Irish nationalism which is vocal
It is symptomatic of the attitude of the Irish Nationalist that when he ridicules the Orangeman he ridicules him not for his numerous foolish beliefs, but for his readiness to fight in defence of those beliefs. But this is exactly wrong. The Orangeman is ridiculous in so far as he believes incredible things; he is estimable in so far as he is willing and able to fight in defence of what he believes. It is foolish of an Orangeman to believe that his personal liberty is threatened by Home Rule; but, granting that he believes that, it is not only in the highest degree common sense but it is his clear duty to arm in defence of his threatened liberty. Personally, I think the Orangeman with a rifle a much less ridiculous figure than the Nationalist without a rifle; and the Orangeman who can fire a gun will certainly count for more in the end than the Nationalist who can do nothing cleverer than make a pun. The superseded Italian rifles which the Orangemen have imported may not be very dangerous weapons; but at least they are
I am not defending the Orangeman; I am only showing that his condemnation does not lie in the mouth of an unarmed Nationalist. The Orangeman is a sufficiently funny person; and he is funny mainly because he is so serious. He has no sense of incongruity; in his mind's eye he sees without smiling Cardinal Logue sending Protestant worthies to the stake and Sir Edward Carson undergoing the fatigues of a campaign—things which will never be. At least, I think not; for Cardinal Logue is kindly and humorous, and Sir Edward Carson is a lawyer with a price. The Orangeman's lack of a sense of the incongruous is sometimes painful. In Belfast they are selling chair cushions with Sir Edward Carson's head embroidered upon them; which is pretty much as if a man were to emblazon the arms of his country upon the seat of his trousers. One should not put a sacred emblem where it is certain
But the rifles of the Orangemen give dignity even to their folly. The rifles are bound to be useful some day. At the worst they may hasten Sir Edward Carson's final exit from Ulster; at the best they may crack outside Dublin Castle. The Editor of Sinn Féin wrote the other day that when the Orangemen fire upon the King of England's troops it will become the duty of every Nationalist in Ireland to join them: there is a deal of wisdom in the thought as well as a deal of humour. Or negotiations might be opened with the Orangemen on these lines: You are erecting a Provisional Government of Ulster—make it a Provisional Government of Ireland and we will recognise and obey it. O'Connell said long ago that he would rather be ruled by the old Protestant Ascendancy Irish Parliament than by the Union Parliament; " and O'Connell was right," said Mitchel. He certainly was. It is unquestionable that Sir Edward Carson's Provisional Government would govern Ireland better than
A rapprochement between Orangemen and Nationalists would be difficult. The chief obstacles are the Orangeman's lack of humour and the Nationalist's lack of guns: each would be at a disadvantage in a conference. But a sense of humour can be cultivated, and guns can be purchased. One great source of misunderstanding has now disappeared: it has become clear within the last few years that the Orangeman is no more
I was once stranded on a desert island with a single companion. When two people are stranded on a desert island they naturally converse. We conversed. We sat on a
Yet we had one interest in common. There was at the bottom of my heart a memory which a course of Intermediate education (by some miracle of God's) had not altogether obliterated. I had heard in childhood of the Fenians from one who, although a woman, had shared their hopes and disappointment. The names of Stephens and O'Donovan Rossa were familiar to me, and they seemed to me the most gallant of all names: names which should be put into songs and sung proudly to tramping music. Indeed, my mother (although she was not old enough to remember the Fenians) used to sing of them in words learned, I daresay, from that other who had known them; one of her songs had the lines—
and although I did not quite know who O'Donovan Rossa was or what his deed had been, I felt that he must have been a gallant and kingly man and his deed a man's deed. Alice Milligan had not yet made the ballad
- Because I was O'Donovan Rossa,
And a son of Gráinne Mhaol
- You have heard of O'Donovan Rossa
From nigh Skibbereen;
You have heard o' the Hawk 'o the Hill-top,
If you have not seen;
You have heard of the Reaper whose reaping
Was of grain half green:
Such were the men among us
In the days that have been.
None of my school-fellows had ever heard of those names; and if our masters had heard them they never mentioned them. O'Connell we heard about; and one day that stands out in my memory, Parnell's name was mentioned, for a master came into the room and said: ‘Well, boys, they say Parnell is dead—the dirty fellow.’ We all grew very still, for we were all Parnellites; and we wondered why he should be called a dirty fellow, and thought it a cruel thing. That was before the Juggernaut car of the Intermediate had rolled over us, and we still retained most of the decent kindly instincts with which we had been born. Had it happened four years later we should probably
But behold me on the beach of my desert island with my priest beside me. And my priest, as I found out when we began to talk about serious things, had known the Fenians, had made something of a stir in Fenian times, had even been called the Fenian priest! I do not know whether he had ever been a Fenian; but I know that all the Fenians of a countryside used to go to confession to him in preference to their own parish priests; and it was said that he had a Sodality of the Sacred Heart composed to a man of sworn Fenians: probably an exaggeration. But this I can vouch for, that he loved the name and fame of the Fenians, and he spoke to me, till his voice grew husky and his eyes filled with tears, of their courage, of their loyalty, of their enthusiasm, of their hope, of their failure. ‘Stephens should have given the word,’ he said; ‘we'll never be as ready as we were the night he escaped from Richmond Prison. We've lost our manhood since’. It was the first year of the Boer War. ‘Look at the chance we have now’, he
For, after all, may it not be said with entire truth that the reason why Ireland is not free is that Ireland has not deserved to be free? Men who have ceased to be men cannot claim the rights of men; and men who have suffered themselves to be deprived of their manhood have suffered the greatest of all indignities and deserved the most shameful of all penalties. It has been sung in savage and exultant verse of a fierce Western clan that its men allowed themselves to be deprived of their sight by a
It is not reasonable to expect that the Almighty will repeal all the laws of His universe in our behalf. The condition on which freedom is given to men is that they are able to make good their claim to it; and unarmed men cannot make good their claim to anything which armed men choose to deny them. One of the sins against faith is presumption, which is defined as a foolish expectation of salvation without making use
I regard the armed Orangemen of North-East Ulster as potentially the most useful body of citizens Ireland possesses. In fact, they are the only citizens Ireland does possess at this moment: the rest of us for the most part do not count. A citizen who cannot vindicate his citizenship is a contradiction in terms. A citizen without arms is like a priest without religion, like a woman without chastity, like a man without manhood. The very conception of an unarmed citizen is a purely modern one, and even in modern times it is chiefly confined to the populations of the (so-called) British Islands. Most other
My priest on my desert island spoke to me glowingly about the Three who died at Manchester. He spoke to me, too, of the rescue of Kelly and Deasy from the prison van and of the ring of armed Fenians keeping the Englishry at bay. I have often thought that that was the most memorable moment
It has penetrated to this quiet place that some of the young men of Ireland have banded themselves together under the noble name of Irish Volunteers with intent to arm in their country's service. I am inclined to doubt the rumour. It has an air of inherent improbability. I could have believed such a report of any generation of young Irishmen of which I have read; but of the generation that I have known I hesitate to believe it. It is not like what they would do. Previous generations of young Irishmen (if what our fathers have told us be true) were foolish and
Fortunately, we live in a more cultured as well as in a more religious age. We have studied Dynamics and know that firearms are dangerous; we have studied Political Economy and know that it is bad economy to expend money upon a national armament, seeing that we already pay the British Army to fight for us; we have studied Ethics and know that it is unlawful to rise against an established government. We have also cultivated a sense of decorum and a sense of humour. We see that militarism is not only wrong but, what is worse, ridiculous; and we should (very properly) hesitate to go out
My knowledge that all this is so makes me doubt the rumour that a considerable number of young Irishmen have resolved to take arms and to train themselves in the use of arms. The improbability is increased when I come to examine the details of the report. Thus, a Provisional Committee including university professors, schoolmasters, solicitors, barristers, journalists, aldermen, public servants, commercial men, and gentlemen of leisure, is spoken of. I have never known persons of that sort to do anything more exciting than talk over tea and scones in the D. B. C. There are among those classes in Dublin many who are quite fearless—in debate; many who are extraordinarily prompt—in retort; a few who are really able and vigorous—in smashing their opponents' arguments. That such men would turn aside from the realities of dialectics to the theatricalities of military preparation seems highly unprobable. When it is added that the Provisional Committee includes United Irish Leaguers, Hibernians, Sinn Féiners, Gaelic
Consider the dislocating effect of such a movement. In the first place, it would make Home Rule, now about to be abandoned in deference to armed Ulster, almost a certainty; in a second place, should Home Rule miscarry, it would give us a policy to fall back upon. Again, it would make men and citizens of us, whereas we are quite comfortable as old women and slaves. Furthermore, it would unite us in one all-Ireland movement of brotherly co-operation, whereas we derive infinite pleasure from quarrelling with one another. The comfortable feeling that we are safe behind the guns of the British Army, like an infant in its mother's arms, the precious liberty of confuting one another before the British public and thus gaining empire-wide reputations for caustic Celtic humour and brilliant Celtic repartee—these are things that we will not lightly sacrifice. For these privileges have we not cheerfully allowed our population to be halved and our taxation to be quadrupled? Enough said. Volunteering is undesirable. Volunteering is impossible. Volunteering is dangerous.
It would appear that the impossible has happened (as, indeed, when one comes to think of the matter, it nearly always does), and that the young men of Ireland are learning again the noble trade of arms. They had almost forgotten that it was a noble trade; and when the young men of a nation have reached so terrible a depth as to be unconscious of the dignity of arms, one will naturally doubt their capacity for any virile thought, let alone any virile action. Hence my scepticism of last month. I who am as a babe, believing all things and hoping all things, felt it difficult to believe this. One is disillusioned so often. Once when I was a boy a ballad-singer came to the farmhouse in which I was living for a time in a glen of the Dublin hills. He had ballads of ‘Bold Robert Emmet’ and ‘Here's a Song for Young Wolfe Tone’; and he told me that in secret places of the hills Fenians had drilled and, for all he knew, were drilling
And my naive deduction was very nearly right. If the Fenians were not all dead, the Fenian spirit was dead, or almost dead. By the Fenian spirit I mean not so much the spirit of a particular generation as that virile fighting faith which has been the salt of all the generations in Ireland unto this last. And is it here even in this last? Yea, its seeds are here, and behold they are kindling: it is for you and me to fan them into such a flame as shall consume everything that is
The only question that need trouble us now is this: Will the young men of Ireland rise to the opportunity that is given them? They have a year before them: the momentous year of 1914. The fate of the Irish movement in our time will very likely be determined during the coming twelve months, and it will be determined largely by the way in which the Volunteer movement develops. In other words, it will depend upon the young men who have volunteered, for they have the making of the movement in their hands. This is a problem in which the British Government is not a factor; in which the Irish leaders—Parliamentarian, Sinn Féin, Separatist, Gaelic League—are not factors; the young men of the towns and
A former generation of Irishmen got such a year and used it well. An army of 1OO,OOO drilled and equipped men was its glorious fruit. Can we of the twentieth century work to similar purpose and with similar result during the year that has been given to us? I believe we can. There are circumstances which seem to me to make our task easier than theirs.
In the first place, we are poorer than they were. Therefore we shall be more generous. There were many men of money among the Volunteers of 1778-83: it was one of the weaknesses of the movement. Those who have are always inclined to hold; always afraid to risk. No good cause in Ireland appeals for help in vain, provided those to whom it appeals are sufficiently poor. The young men who, I imagine, are volunteering to-day are for the most part poor: being
In the second place, this is a movement of the people, not of the
‘leaders’. The leaders in Ireland have nearly always left the people at
the critical moment; have sometimes sold them. The former Volunteer
movement was abandoned by its leaders; hence its ultimate failure.
Grattan ‘led the van’ of the Volunteers, but he also led the retreat
of the leaders; O'Connell recoiled before the cannon at Clontarf; twice
the hour of the Irish Revolution struck during Young Ireland days, and
twice it struck in vain, for Meagher hesitated in Waterford, Duffy and
McGee hesitated in Dublin. Stephens refused to ‘give the word’ in '65;
he never came in '66 or '67. I do not blame these men: you or I might
have done the same. It is a terrible responsibility to be cast upon a
man, that of bidding the cannon speak and the grapeshot pour. But in
this Volunteer movement, as I understand it, the people are to be
master; and it will be for the people to say when and against whom the
Volunteers shall draw the sword and point the rifle. Now, my reading of
Irish history is that, however the leaders may have failed, the
instinct of the people has
always been unerring. The Volunteers themselves, the people themselves,
must keep control of this movement. Any man or any group of men that
seeks to establish an ascendancy should be dealt with summarily: such
traitors to the Volunteer spirit would deserve to be shot, but it will be
sufficient if they be shot out.
In the third place, the young men of Ireland have been to school to the Gaelic League. Herein it seems to me lies the fact which chiefly distinguishes this generation from the other revolutionary generations of the last century and a half: from the Volunteer generation of 1778, from the United Irish generation of 1798, from the Young Ireland generation of 1848, from the Fenian generation of 1867. We have known the Gaelic League, and
I do not think we shall be as liable to make blunders, to pursue side issues, to mistake shadows for substance, to overlook essentials,
- Lo, a clearness of vision has followed, lo, a purification of sight.