Evening Memories

New Zealand Tablet, 16 March 1922, Page 7

Evening Memories

(By William O’Brien.)

CHAPTER IV.—(Continued.)

Napoleon was a jealous critic of Moreau for his great victory at Hohenlinden. Jealousy was the last vice that could have jaundiced Parnell's appreciation of his Moreaus. If he for years bore the battle of Obstruction on "his single shield, it was because he had then at his side nobody, except, in a narrower sphere of vision, faithful "Joe" Biggar, to practise the dangerous art, or even to understand its larger purpose. When the Healys and the Sextons began to coruscate around him, rivalling him in skilful handling of the rules of the House, and easily, surpassing him in the flight of epigrams and bright javelins of the brain, which dazzled the House even while tormenting them, Parnell was so far from envying them their battles of Hohenlinden, he was contenteventually too lazily contentto be a smiling spectator of their prowess and to minister to them their laurels with a lavish hand. Fiction was for him a pack of lies, as silly as the story of Jack and the Beanstalk for grown men; the world was so full of more interesting truths and interesting men; yet he divined as surely as the most fervent believer in The Waterside Neighbors that Justin McCarthy was a great man in his books, as well as a most charming companion outside them, and he gloried in him accordingly. And so it was he foregathered with "Dick" Power, discussing his day with the Curraghmore hounds, or John Redmond and William Corbett debating the prospects of the Aughavanagh "shoot," or James O'Kelly listening to the fairy tales of the Whitehead torpedo, or James Gilhooly, to whom he would expound a favorite project for turning the Castletownbere harbor to vast Admiralty uses (a project which the Admiralty have since had the good luck to realise in terms of cement forts and great guns).

Between him and one of his first and most useful confidants there arose a divorce, as to which there were grievous faultsor, rather, in truth, misunderstandings on both sides. How little a part personal uncharity played in this misadventure an incident which occurred after the misunderstandings had begun to darken, but before they solidified into their settled shape, will perhaps sufficiently attest. When United Ireland had only been twelve weeks started, having . no conceivable use for money beyond the classic oaten ration and its modest washing down, I dropped

the half of my covenanted salary as Editor and Manager. The .effect was to establish my Protean helper, Mr. Healy, my two sub-editors, and myself upon a footing of democratic equality in the matter of pay. Parnell somehow heard of the folly. He did not attempt to reason with myself, but hearing what Mr. Healy's honorarium was, he insisted almost with indignation how monstrously inadequate a pittance it was in the ease of a man of Healy's superb gifts. It was his first, and up to the time of "the Split," his last interference in the management of United Ireland, and he did not interfere in vain. Another and a still more practised journalist Parnell excluded ruthlessly from his esoteric circle, although' in all matters other than Party secrets he readily sunned himself in his genial company. "I tell —— as much as is good for him," he once said in reply to a remonstrance of mine. "A newspaper man would rather sell his immortal soul than keep a secret worth blabbing." When I gently reminded him that this was a rather sweeping censure of newspaper men, he laughed it off with the pretty bit of nonsense: "My dear O'Brien, you are not a newspaper man. You are Don Quixote."

Once in a way Parnell was capable of dropping sayings of a slightly acid taste in what he considered to be safe company. How many of the public men of. England could survive, if on any one night the members' smoke-room of the House of Commons were, like the proverbial Palace of Truth, forced to yield up its secrets? The sharpest thing I ever heard of a colleague was his too well published " is as vain as a peacock." The addendum "and has as little brain" was not in the least in his taste and was never spoken. The description of the same gentleman, so often attributed to him, "a melancholy humbug,' 5 was an editorial gibe in The Freeman's Journal, and was not at all of Parnell's manufacture. ;It may be taken as a decisive proof that no political leader was ever less uncharitable to his friends in his most intimate or his most exaspertaed moments, that a book in which his most secret thoughts .and writings were pitilessly laid bare, and which would assuredly not have surpressed the bitterest allusions to the members of his Party, does at least this justice to his memory, that it does not contain more than two or three ill-natured sentences concerning any of his colleagues, and even these not of a heinousness to be reproached to anybody except the angels. It was a more severe test than the average garden politician of any party could stand.

With Michael Davitt he was sometimes vexed, but always, as the American girl would put it, "sweet." Davitt used to relate with glee his story of the question to Parnell: "Suppose you had your Irish Parliament how would you begin?" and the smiling reply: "Well, Davitt, I think I should begin by locking you up." Nobody knew better than Davitt that, if locked up he were to be, it would be in an earthly Paradise compared with which even the Ballybrack cottage of his married life would be a place of punishment. To a similar question of my own as to what he would first do if an Irish Parliament were assembling, Parnell answered in his peculiar vein of merry irony: "Don't you think, O'Brien, that would be a capital opportunity to retire from Irish politics?" Quite otherwise I have heard him many a time broach his own bold programme of national Reconstruction for the first twenty years of an Irish Parliament, and he would add: "I daresay the boys would think me a dreadfully prosy person. By all means, the youngsters must have their try at the Millennium, but I should as soon propose to separate men's souls from their bodies as to feed the country upon a diet of poetry unmixed."

The blackest of accusation in later years was Parnell's insolent ambition to fill Irish seats with his own creatures. The charge was never made when the Party was at its noonday height, for the good reason that the constituencies Mere then more indebted to the sort of men who consented to serve them than the members were to the constituencies who asked them to walk as on hot ploughshares for Ireland. The mean suggestion only came long after with Treasury salaries and the messes of Treasury patronage which made a seat in Parliament a prize that sordid village ambition might intrigue for. The Party of the Parliament of 1882-5, and indeed, for some years after, was one for which Parnell had rather to beg for recruits than to force them on the constituencies. The despairing telegram from Kerry: "We'll elect a broomstick if you'll

give it a name," gave the true key to the situation. There never was a leader who spread his nets wider or had fewer minions. Once when, at a Tipperary Convention, Mr. John O'Connor, who was recommended by Mr! Healy, as the spokesman of the Party, was rejected in the fury of a local war-dance, Parnell summoned a second Convention to reconsider the decision, but regarded the emergency with so much detachment that, for all the telegrams from Harrington and myself, urging him to preside, we searched the Kingstown and the North Wall boats in vain for any trace of his arrival. When we ran him down at last at Morrison's Hotel late on the night before the Convention, he inquired for the hours of the trains to Thurles the next morning, and, when he learned there were two, opted for the later one. When I remonstrated and urged that the local commotion was so intense I should have very much preferred he was already in Thurles when we were speaking, the man's life was written in the smiling answer : "Good gracious, O'Brien, yor are an extreme man!" He had little difficulty in getting the local hotheads to see that Mr. O'Connor would be the wiser nomination; but, so far as any personal preference of his own was concerned, Mr. John O'Connor "a yellow primrose was to him and nothing more." Some years later, upon a vacancy for Mid-Tipperary, a Convention for the choice of a candidate was summoned, but up to the eve of the Convention no candidate was to be found. I chanced upon Parnell in the Lobby of the House of Commons and pressed him to take action. , He said he had written to the Archbishop of Cashel, who had no candidate to suggest, and he knew of no suitable man himself. What did I suggest? By a happy accident, Henry Harrison, a. University stripling who had just been bearing a gallant part in the eviction struggles in Donegal and in the resulting prosecutions, caught my eye at the moment, as he was chatting over his experiences in a distant corner of the Lobby. Why not that fine young fellow, if no local man was offering? "Ah!" was Parnell's ready response: "Would you ,mind introducing me?" And before a week was over young Harrison was the member for Mid-Tipperary, and a very high-hearted one at that. Such was the passion of this autocrat for garrisoning the Party with his own nominees. "The Party" he regarded wholly from the point of view of its efficiency for the country's service, and by a rough and ready process of natural selection the fittest men somehow gravitated to its ranks. It was not until politics became a means of livelihood that the political boss and the "local man with a long-tailed family" found it worth while to capture the machinery of election and to bring Parnell's incomparable engine of Parliamentary achievement to ruin.

(To be continued.)