I am glad that he who had been even a little moved by that stir in the mind, that rush of revolutionary energy that moved the poets and patriots and rebels of ’48, should after half a hundred years have been stirred by the intellectual energy that came with a new generation, as its imagination turned for a while from the Parliament where all was to have been set right, after the break in the Irish party and after Parnell’s death.
“I enclose you a guarantee paper filled up for such a sum as I can afford (or perhaps more) to lose, but I hope there will be no loss for anybody in the matter, while there will certainly be some gain to Ireland! I’d have answered sooner but that I am suffering from a horrible form of dyspepsia, with exceptional langour.” It is no wonder if the old man who sent with this his promise for twenty shillings was somewhat broken in health. He was the last of the Fenian triumvirate,—Kickham, Luby, O’Leary,—and he had come back to Dublin after fifteen years of banishment and five of penal servitude at Portland. John O’Leary had been turning over books on the stalls by the Seine in Paris, when one day somebody had come to him and asked him to come back to Ireland where a rising was being planned, and he had come.
A part of the romance of my early days had been the whispered rumours of servants, and the overheard talk of my elders, of the threatened rising of the Fenians:
“An army of Papists grim
With a green flag o’er them.
Red coats and black police
Flying before them.”
The house of Roxborough, my old home, had once been attacked by Whiteboys. My father had defended it, firing from the windows, and it was not hard to believe that another attack might be made. It seemed a good occasion for being allowed to learn to shoot with my brothers, but that was in those days not thought fitting, even in self-defence, for a girl, and my gun was never loaded with anything more weighty than a coppercap. So when this new business of the theatre brought me to meet, amongst many others till then unknown, John O’Leary, I remembered those old days and the excitement of a Fenian’s escape—might he not be in hiding in our own woods or hay-lofts? And I wondered to find that not only Nationalists admired and respected so wild and dangerous a rebel. So I asked Mr. Yeats to tell me the reason, for he had known him well and had even shared a lodging with him for a while; so that his friends would say: “You have the advantage over us. O’Leary takes so long to convert to any new thing, and you can begin with him at breakfast.” And he wrote to me: “When John O’Leary returned from exile, he found himself in the midst of a movement which inherited the methods of O’Connell and a measure of his success. Journalists and politicians were alike in his eyes untruthful men, thinking that any means that brought the end were justified, and for that reason certain, as he thought, to miss the end desired. The root of all was, though I doubt if he put the thought into words, that journalists and politicians looked for their judges among their inferiors, and assumed those opinions and passions that moved the largest number of men. Their school is still dominant, and John O’Leary had seen through half his life, as we have seen, men coarsening their thought and their manners, and exaggerating their emotions in a daily and weekly press that was like the reverie of an hysterical woman. He was not of O’Connell’s household. His master had been Davis, and he was quick to discover and condemn the man who sought for judgment not among his equals or in himself. He saw, as no one else in modern Ireland has seen, that men who make this choice are long unpopular, all through their lives it may be, but grow in sense and courage with their years, and have the most gazers even in the end.
“Yet he was not unjust to those who went the other way. He imputed to them no bad motives, for I have heard him say of a man that he distrusted, ‘He would not sacrifice himself but he would risk himself,’ and of a man who seemed to him to appeal always to low motives, the chief mischief-maker of his kind, ‘He would sacrifice himself.’ Yet, what he himself commended with his favourite word ‘morale’ was the opposite of that sudden emotional self-sacrifice, the spurious heroism of popular movements, being life-long hardness and serenity, a choice made every day anew. He thought but little of opinions, even those he had sacrificed so much for, and I have heard him say, ‘There was never cause so bad that it has not been defended by good men for good reasons.’ And of Samuel Ferguson, poet and antiquarian, who was not of his party or any Nationalist party, ‘He has been a better patriot than I.’ He knew that in the end, whatever else had temporary use, it was simple things that mattered, the things a child can understand, a man’s courage and his generosity.