Evening Memories

New Zealand Tablet, Volume L, Issue 42, 25 October 1923, Page 7

Evening Memories

. (By William O’Brien.) ! i CHAPTER XXVll.(Continued.) : Was there, at least, the fierce joy of a good hater whenever we were looking into the eyes of the foe in the English Parliament, and giving blow for blow ? My sensations were more complex than that. In the sense of beholding in that arena the figure and substance of the cruel powei that for all the long ages since the Crusades tortured, debased and calumniated a race at least their equals in all moral and physical gifts, and only inferior to them in their supply of guns and gunpowder, I detested the name ol ..England with all the white heat of the John Mitchel ol the Letters to Clarendon. To crush her rule in Ireland was a sacred life-mission to be pursued, come weal come woe, with a will-power that would stand any strain, and could be abated by no terror and by no bribe. During more than the average span of life, the fortunes of Ireland never left my thoughts for a single day and not very often for a single waking hour. And there did not enter into these thoughts any possibility of regret or faltering. At the same time the England of my hate was an abstraction, and an abstraction that, once her grip was loosed of Ireland, might be transfigured into something very different in the light of a broader democratic day. It was not forty millions of fellow-men born unto sorrow like ourselves with whom my quarrel lay—it was not even the six hundred eupeptic, self-sufficing Saxons on the benches on front of me. But as fate would have it they were the enemy drawn up before us in order- of , battle with shotted guns, doubtless numbering many fine fellows to be cordially fraternised with as soon as the wars were over, but as to whom, in the meantnrfe, the consigns on pain of death for the Irish Cause was to sit tight and to shoot straight. Until we had shot our way to victory, fraternisation would be treason. More than that, by an instinct not too difficult to understand by the light of subsequent events when Parnell’s resolutes, unconquerable at Cannae, yielded to - the softnesses of Capua—when from an Irish Party they became as clay in the hands of the potters of an English Party- my antipathy to the House of Commons and my dissociation from all its inner ways and friendships grew only the more marked, notwithstanding that more than half its members were Home Rulers, and it seemed almost moroseness to refuse to be made friends to and even petted in a House where once we had been howled down with catcalls and proscribed in every form of outlawry. Ever after, 1885, profuse friendship' was to. be had either from the Liberals or from the Tories, but only on the condition that you must not be friends of both of them, and the Irishman who indentured himself either to the one English Party or to the other was so far lost to Ireland. To be “a good party man” in the English sense was to be a bad Irishman. Be our national failing over-suspiciousness or (as I think) over-softness, at all events, it is not to be concealed that I quitted the House of Commons by the members entrance for the last time with as whole-hearted a detestation fif the place and of the life as on the , day I first entered there five-and-thirty years before, and with a stronger conviction than ever that the House of Commons had not advanced an inch towards understating Ireland in the interval.* And the conclusion may not be, the less worth attention because it is arrived at by one who spent more than half of these five-and-thirty years in risking all the amenities of life in order to help in a reconciliation of the two nations. . /

* Funnily enough, my most cherished recollections of the proud Commons of England are of the doorkeepers, attendants, and policemen. Also what could be quainter than the simple'English body’s unfathomable ignorance of Ireland Testify my delightful little English landlady in Pimlico who used to sit under a silver-tongued Irish clergyman in a neighboring church, and who in the earlier days, when the poor lady at the back of her head probably suspected my business in London was not altogether without a whiff of dynamite, used to plead: “You may have anything else you like, you know, but do please leave us our dear Established Church!” Having struck my bargain for the safety of her dear Established Church, she was my firm friend for life. , •-

:" What was it, then, which made the life just described a supportable one? Firstly, the consolation of Galileo, that, whatever "law and order'/ might say to the contrary, the world was in motion in the right direction for all that. Self-government and the extinction of landlordism were the fundamental conditions of a wholesome Irish State; the defeat of Coercion was the indispensable preliminary *o either the one or the other; and-Coercion was already smashed and would be pulverised at the General Election. And my supply of energy towards these ends came in any quantity as readily as a torrent from the mountains. Then there was the purest of all pleasures—the pleasure of giving pleasure. In a state of things in which danger hung over large masses of one's countrymen and even the stoutest hearts sometimes beat low, it was a delicious surprise to discover that there was that in the ring of one's voice and the touch of one's hand which gave hope to sinking hearts, of a mysterious potency which it is not possible to explain until the subtle psychic current that passes between a man and masses of men in such conjunctures is better understood. Unfortunately that consolation, too, carried its penalties in an exquisite realisation for oneself of the dangers one was conjuring away for others,. and in the despair that at certain moments smote one's own heart while one's listeners' cheeks were smiling and their souls afire. I cannot better give some inkling of my meaning than by a reverent quotation from a letter of one of the dozen best women who ever lived to another of that dozenfrom Sainte Chantal to Mere Angelique of Port Royal: "God shows me how to give help and comfort, but I myself remain destitute. I talk of God, I give encouragement to others, I write as if I felt all I say, but I do it all with shrinking and revolt." These mystic words from a heavenlier plane have such a tragic message for more earthly consolers!

But at least I was able in the darkest hours to keep so cheerful a face while practising these incomprehensible therapeutics of the soul that a time came when genial cynics, not too sorry it may be for an excuse for watching the fun themselves from their own snug firesides, quite seriously took it into their heads that the chance of "saying* a few words" or inhaling the music of a brass band gave me the happiest moments of my life, failing the supreme joy of being in the thick of a bayonet charge or of being dragged from gaol to gaol.* Nothing could exceed the surprise, and, one may hope, relief of these good people when they discovered that my complete withdrawal from public life brought me the only period of health and peace of mind in a perfect home that ever fell to my lot. It is none the less true that, although mine was a sufficiently sombre philosophy to make me, many a time,, in the zenith of my popularity, j-eflect at what short notice the mad plaudits that came up to me on the platform might turn to hootings, the affection of my countrymen had quand meme something of the sacredness of communion with the soul of a nation. Having begun life with an infinite faith in human nature, I am ending it with .an infinite pity for its inborn foibles, and an infinite admiration for the high purposes, the insuppressible hopes, and the myriad courageous activities which sustain men in a world v only tolerable for the generality of human kind by reason of its transitoriness. '■'•••

* An amusing instance in point was a resolution of a brass band in Cork with whom it was my misfortune to differ in my view of the Split of 1890. The resolution was a scathing denunciation of'-my ingratitude in presuming to differ with “a band that so often played you up to the Gaol Gate.” What was to, happen inside the Gate after the musicians had marched off to supper, the poor fellows happily forgot to take into the reckoning. : ■'* (To be continued.) x- • - ;-lv —— -u- ; v'-V-Self-control, self-confidence, courtesy, a mind eager to know and understand, and a resolute but well-disciplined will play an important part in' the building of a strong personality. - ‘ .

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