He had wandered and painted in Germany and in the west of Ireland, in Connemara and in his own county of Clare, till his work at the National Gallery forced him to give up his art. But in his last days he would often speak of his early days in the West, and of country people he remembered, a girl near Maam who was a great singer, and a piper, Paddy Conneely, who was the best judge of sheep and cattle in the whole country.
He was during the Land War when I first knew him, a very strong Unionist, for his sensitive nature shrank from its harsh and violent methods, and for a while he felt that he had no longer a country to take pride in. In 1899 he wrote: “ ... I look forward with some uneasiness to the advent of Patriots from beyond sea, now American citizens under the Stars and Stripes. With this outlook before it, the Government is reducing the Irish Constabulary, a most extraordinary proceeding and a quite unaccountable one except indeed on the theory that every administration is doomed to fatuity where Irish affairs have to be dealt with. For the police are the appointed guardians of civil order, and however abused or resisted, are recognised as such. But if the military have to be called out, what a handle is given to vapourers on both sides of the Irish sea! And what about the dismissed Constables? Will they not be thrown into the ranks of the Patriots?”
And in 1895 he had written, refusing an invitation to dine with me—I cannot remember who I said was coming, but he expressed this regret: “Especially as I enjoy meeting Sir A. and Lady Clay, and should have liked to see a bird so rare as an honest Nationalist.” Yet he kept a spirit of independence that was akin to rebellion, even through those years of official position and pleasant London dinners, and friendships, and the Athenæum Club.
During the years after the death in 1892 of my husband, who had been a trustee of the National Gallery, and Sir Frederic’s death in 1900, our friendship became a close one. Our talk turned very often from pictures and Italy to Ireland. In 1897 I published Mr. Gregory’s Letter-box, a political history of the years between 1812 and 1830, taken from letters to and by my husband’s grandfather, then Under-Secretary for Ireland. Sir Frederic was much pleased with the book. He came to see me when he had read it and said: “I am glad you have come down on the real culprit, George III.,” and quoted one or two people who had said his obstinacy was the cause of so many of Ireland’s troubles. But after a little he said very gravely: “I see a tendency to Home Rule on your own part.” I said, “I defy any one to study Irish History without getting a dislike and distrust of England.” He was silent for a time and then said, “That is my feeling,” and told me how patriotic he had been as a boy though disliking “O’Connell and his gang.” Later he accused me of having become “A red hot Nationalist,” and said I had no Irish blood, but I convinced him I had, both Irish and French.
He was as angry at the time of the Boer War as any Mayo ballad-singer or Connacht Ranger’s wife. “According to the doctor I am better, but really this war is killing me. It is the worst affair I recollect. It is utterly inglorious.... I grieve particularly for our brave Irishmen whose lives have been squandered to no purpose.” He was to the end a Unionist, so far as his political doctrine went, but I think his rooted passion for Ireland increased, and made, as such strong passions are used to do, all politics seem but accidental, transitory, a business that is outside the heart of life.
The language movement, of which I was able to bring him news, began to excite him. One day I found him “excited and incredulous at Atkinson’s evidence against the Irish language, in which he says all Irish books are filthy and all folk-lore is at bottom abominable.” And then he got, “on your recommendation and Doctor Hyde’s reputation as a scholar” the History of Irish Literature and wrote: “I am reading Dr. Hyde’s Literary History with the greatest interest. It is a high pleasure to find the matter he deals with treated by a true scholar and in a reasonable and philosophic spirit. But indeed the advance in this respect since my earlier days is marvellous. At that time the comparative method was hardly, if at all, thought of. Rabid Irishmen, who often didn’t know their own language but at second hand, and knew no other tongue at all, spouted the rankest absurdities. Now true light has been let in and Irish history, archæology, literature, and poetry are the gainers. Let us not grudge to the Germans their meed of honour in having led the way.” And again: “I should be exceedingly sorry if the Irish language died out of men’s mouths altogether. I look upon the loss of a language or even a dialect as equivalent to the extirpation of a species in natural history....” Then, in 1899: “Those addresses of Dr. Hyde and Mr. Yeats are very interesting and, I would fain hope, may find a response in the hearts of the people who heard them. The subject is one full of sadness. Self-respect, a decaying language, a dying music, how shall they be resuscitated! I could weep when I recollect how full Munster, Connacht, and even Ulster were in my earlier days of exquisite native music—when in fact among the peasantry and the Irish of the towns you heard no other; when the man at the plough-tail had his peculiar ‘whistle,’ strange, wild, and full of melody and rhythm. All this must now have passed away irrevocably. May the language have a better chance! I cannot tell you how much Doctor Hyde’s book has moved me. Principally it is a manful effort.”
When I was again in London, he showed me the Literary History close at hand and asked me a little nervously what was Douglas Hyde’s age. My answer, or surmise, pleased him, and he said: “Then he will be able to work for a long time.” Once or twice, when we went on to talk of other things, he came back to this and said, “I am so glad he is a young man.”
He was jealous for the honour of Ireland even in lesser things. He was very much interested in the beginning of our theatre. In 1899 he writes: “I am happy to sign the guarantee form for the coming year, and enclose it. You are a dreamy lot in Erin. As you say, I think the quality comes from the atmosphere. Here there is more of the opposite than suits me, but I dream still, as I have done all my lifetime. I trust there will be no shindy at the performance of Countess Cathleen. But if not, our compatriots will have been for once untrue to themselves!” And later: “I am sincerely glad the experiment was on the whole successful and that those who intended mischief after all made but a poor effort to inflict it.... Altogether it appears as if the old palmy days of Dublin independent appreciation of the drama were about to be revived in our altered times. I congratulate Mr. Yeats on the success of the drama as an acting piece, and in everything except —— ——’s beautiful Irish hyperbole. I recollect an account of a concert given at Clonmel several years ago, in which the eloquent local journalist said of one of the amateur lady singers, after the loftiest eulogy, ‘but it was in her last song that Miss —— —— gave the coup de grace to her performance.’”
He cared very much for Mr. Yeats’s work, but I could never persuade him to come and meet him. He always made some excuse. At last he made a promise for one afternoon, but, in place of coming, he wrote, saying he was half ashamed to confess to so much enthusiasm, but he was so much under the spell of the poems that he was afraid that, in meeting the writer, the spell might be broken. He told me when next I saw him that of the poets he had known the only ones that did not disappoint him were William Morris and Rossetti. “Swinburne was excitable; Tennyson was grumpy and posing; Browning was charming as a friend, but not fulfilling my idea of what a poet should be.” But I did bring them together in the end, and he thanked me later and confessed my faith had been justified.
In 1900, during his last illness, I was often with him. I had been away in Dublin for our plays and I find a note written after my return to London: “Went to see Sir F. He is in bed, and I fear, or indeed must hope, the end is very near.... I went up to see him. He was clear but drowsy, at first a little inarticulate, but when I got up to go, he held my hand a long time, speaking with great kindness ... asked for Robert, and how the plays had gone. I told him of them, and of the Times notice of Maeve, saying its idealism had been so well received by an Irish audience, and of the notice on the same page telling that Tess in London had been jeered at by an audience who found it too serious. He said: ‘That is just what one would expect.’ He asked if Robert had been abroad yet, and I said no, he was so fond of Ireland he had not cared to go until now, and that I myself found every year an increased delight and happiness in Ireland. He said, ‘It is so with me. My best joys have been connected with Ireland.’ Then he spoke of Celtic influence in English literature and said, ‘There will some day be a great Pan-Celtic Empire.’ And so we parted.”