“I do not doubt that his prison life had been hard enough, but he would not complain, having been in ‘the hands of his enemies’; and he would often tell one of that life, but not of its hardships. A famous popular leader of that time, who made a great noise because he was in prison as a common felon for a political offence, made him very angry. I said ‘It is well known that he has done this, not because he shrinks from hardship but because there is a danger in a popular movement that the obscure men who can alone carry it to success, may say, “our leaders are treated differently.”’ He answered, ‘There are things a man must not do, even to save a nation.’ And when I asked ‘What things?’ he said, ‘He must not weep in public.’ He knew that a doctrine expediency cries out on would have but few to follow, and he would say, ‘Michael Davitt wants his converts by the thousand. I shall be satisfied with half a dozen.’ Most complained of his impracticability, and there was a saying that an angel could not find a course of action he would not discover a moral flaw in, and it is probable that his long imprisonment and exile, while heightening his sense of ideal law, had deprived him of initiative by taking away its opportunities. He would often complain that the young men would not follow him, and I once said, ‘Your power is that they do not. We can do nothing till we have converted you; you are our conscience.’ Yet he lived long enough to see the young men grow to middle life and assume like their fathers before them that a good Irishman is he who agreed with the people. Yet we, when we withstand the people, owe it to him that we can feel we have behind us an Irish tradition. ‘My religion,’ he would say, ‘is the old Persian one, “To pull the bow and speak the truth.”’
“I do not know whether he would have liked our unpopular plays, but I cannot imagine him growing excited because he thought them slanders upon Ireland. O’Connell had called the Irish peasantry the finest peasantry upon earth, and his heirs found it impossible to separate patriotism and flattery. Again and again John O’Leary would return to this, and I have heard him say, ‘I think it probable that the English national character is finer than ours, but that does not make me want to be an Englishman.’ I have often heard him defend Ireland against one charge or another, and he was full of knowledge, but the patriotism he had sacrificed so much for marred neither his justice nor his scholarship.
“He disapproved of much of Parnell’s policy, but Parnell was the only man in Irish public life of his day who had his sympathy, and I remember hearing some one say in those days before the split that are growing vague to me, that Parnell never came to Dublin without seeing him. They were perhaps alike in some hidden root of character though the one had lived a life of power and excitement, while the other had been driven into contemplation by circumstance and as I think by nature. Certainly they were both proud men.”
He was, when I knew him, living in a little room, books all around him and books in heaps upon the floor. I would send him sometimes snipe or golden plover from Kiltartan bog or woodcock from the hazel woods at Coole, hoping to tempt him with something that might better nourish the worn body than the little custard pudding that was used to serve him for his two days’ dinner, because of that “horrible dyspepsia” that often makes those who have been long in prison live starving after their release, mocked with the sight of food.
It was through reading Davis’s poems he had become a Nationalist, and his own influence had helped to shape this other poet in the same fashion, for from the time of Yeats’s boyhood there had been a close friendship between them, the old man admiring the young man’s genius, and taking his side in the quarrels that arose about patriotism in poetry and the like. I remember their both dining with me one evening in London and coming on to see a very poor play, very badly acted by some Irish society. At its end Yeats was asked to say some words of gratitude for the performance, during which we had all felt impatient and vexed. He did speak at some length, and held his audience, and without telling any untruth left them feeling that all had gone well. John O’Leary turned to me and said fervently, “I don’t think there is anything on God’s earth that Willie Yeats could not make a speech about!”
There is a bust of John O’Leary in the Municipal Gallery. The grand lines of the massive head, the eyes full of smouldering fire, might be those of some ancient prophet understanding his people’s doom.
There is nothing of storm or unrest about that other Dublin monument, that bronze figure sitting tranquilly within the gates of Trinity College and within its quadrangle. Lecky was the reasoner, the philosopher, the looker-on, writing his histories, even of Ireland, through the uproar of the Land War with the same detachment as did the Four Masters, writing their older history amongst the wars and burnings of the seventeenth century that were so terrible in Ireland.
He had been a debater while an undergraduate of Trinity, and it was fitting that he should have represented it in Parliament during his last years.
Trinity, where Wolfe Tone had been an undergraduate a hundred years earlier had changed in that hundred years. I was in Paris in 1900 and went to see an old acquaintance, that most imaginative archæologist, Salomon Reinach. He told me he had been lately to Ireland and he had been astonished by two things, the ignorance of the Irish language—it was not known even by the head of the Dublin Museum or the head of its archæological side—and by the hostility of Trinity College to all things Irish. “It is an English fort, nothing else.” “Its garrison,” the students, had gone out and broken the windows of a newspaper office while he was there, and he had spent an evening with Doctor Mahaffy, who was “much astonished that I was no longer taken up with Greek things, and that I found Irish antiquity so much more interesting.”