“I enclose copies of two letters which he wrote this morning [September 20, 1803]. One of the acts of kindness to which he particularly refers, in his letter to Mr. Wickham, was his being removed from the cell at Newgate, in which he had been placed after the sentence, to his former apartment at Kilmainham, as had been originally intended. He had alluded to this in his conversation with the clergymen, and admitted that the general conduct of those who administered the Government was likely to conciliate the people, though he did not approve the form of the Government and the British connection, both of which he had been desirous to overthrow.”
In regard to this forwarded letter, the Home Secretary utters his congratulatory mind, and gives his opinion of our hero:—
“At the same time that one cannot but deplore the wicked malignity and wonder at the enthusiastic wildness which appears to have actuated the conduct of this miserable man, one cannot but admire the judgment, the temper, and delicacy which appear to have been manifested in the conduct of your Excellency’s Government towards this person, and all concerned or in any manner connected with him. I cannot but take advantage of this occasion to express the satisfaction I feel in observing that the justice, moderation, and mildness of your Excellency’s Government have extorted even from a condemned traitor the same sentiments of respect and reverence which we have been accustomed to hear from the loyal part of the community.”
It does not seem to have been revealed to the Hon. Charles Yorke, that what “extorted” Emmet’s assurances was his own extreme, almost fantastic, chivalry; and that those assurances set off deeply by contrast, as he vehemently meant they should do, his abhorrence of the underlying system of which Lord Hardwicke’s conduct was merely the agreeable accident. Lord Hardwicke, at least, had understood.
Even one intelligent modern has fallen foul of Emmet’s unusually scrupulous care in such matters, and of his attitude of regal courtesy, like that of the battling foes on Crécy field: such a care and such an attitude indicate, it is thought, “weakness of character!” What it really indicates is a diplomacy so high that if generally practised it might render human intercourse very difficult. We cannot all be as Apollo Musagetes, daring to employ nothing but the amenities, the major force, in a universe inured to cheap thunderbolts. As Thoreau shrewdly says: “The gods can never afford to have a man in the world who is privy to any of their secrets. They cannot have a spy here: they will at once send him packing!”
A postulate of true magnanimity is modesty. Emmet’s was unique. It is the testimony of John Patten, who was well aware of his kinsman’s immense self-reliance, that “Robert had not one particle of vanity in his composition. He was the most free from conceit of any man I ever knew. You might live with him for years . . . and never discover that he thought about himself at all. He was vain neither of his person nor of his mind.” La Comtesse d’Haussonville cannot refrain, in her graceful memoir, from contrasting him with another excellent youth of genius, André Chénier, who very properly expressed his pang of self-pity in face of the guillotine. “Et pourtant,” he cried, striking his forehead with that gesture of Gallic candour which is so odd to us and so winning: “et pourtant il y avait quelque chose ici!” Il y avait quelque chose ici in Emmet too, although it was not great lyric poetry. He had almost every other capacity. The Rev. Archibald Douglas, in his old age, when Robert Emmet had been nearly forty years in his grave, summed up his conviction about him to Dr. R. R. Madden: “So gifted a creature does not appear once in a thousand years.”
We have no portrait of Emmet which antedates his trial. Three artists in good repute sketched him, that day, on bits of waste paper or else on the backs of envelopes, and did it surreptitiously for dread of prohibition: these were Comerford, Brocas, and James Petrie. The two first, viewing Emmet in profile, gained better results than the third; yet Petrie’s drawing serves as the basis of the only well-known engraved pictures. It was Petrie, moreover, who was allowed to take the death-mask of Robert Emmet. The good material accumulated was put to no very memorable use. The Petrie Emmet is somewhat heavy and glowering, and distinctly wry-necked. It is meant, in fact, to be impressive; and the note of artificiality disqualifies it as a true representation of its subject, a man of shynesses and simplicities. Comerford, on the other hand, and Brocas, as effectively, have given us a face to look at which one instinctively believes in. It is stamped with concentration and resolve, but has in it something serene and gentle and sweet, and it harmonises with all we can learn of Emmet’s physical appearance from the printed page. He was about five feet seven inches in height, wiry, slender, erect, healthy, full of endurance, quick of movement. His dark eyes were small and rather deep-set, and sparkling with expression; his nose was straight and thin, his mouth delicately chiselled. He had the powerful chin and jaw-bone never absent from the bodily semblance of a strong-willed personality. The fine pendulous hair bespoke the enthusiast, but it was not worn long save over the forehead, which was noticeably broad and high. What gave a faun-like idiosyncrasy to the whole countenance was the slight upward curve of the perfect eyebrows at the inner edge. If we are to accept Brocas as our best authority (though his hand at work has somehow captured a momentary scorn not seen by Comerford), this idiosyncrasy had in it no touch of frowning severity such as was foreign, according to all report, to Emmet, but added rather a final whimsical attraction to a sad young face which a child or a dog would readily love. As Anne Devlin said once of “Miss Sarah’s,” it was “not handsome, but more than handsome.” The one face it resembles is the Giotto Dante.
Some critics on the spindle side will find it easier to forgive an unsuccessful patriot than an uninventive and unauthoritative lover. Emmet in hiding near the Priory, between the no-rising and the arrest, had his almost certain chances of escape; but he could not persuade the girl, born, like Hamlet, to a tragic inaction, to strike hands with him and make the dash for liberty. Habit sat too heavily on her defrauded spirit, and insufficient faith in herself kept her where she was. The secrecy of their relations seems to have hurt and weakened her. She could no more stand up then against her father’s displeasure than she could part long after with dejection and a sort of remorse, when the face of her outer world had beautifully, almost miraculously, changed. And Emmet loved her as she was, a day-lily on a drooping stem. To quarrel with them because no fleet-footed horse, as in a novel, pranced by night to Rathfarnham to bear them away together, is to quarrel with a perfected sequence. To mark the look of this Robert, hungry for the heroic, the look of this Sarah, mystical as twilight, is but to forecast casualties. Perhaps as every soul has a right to its own kind of welfare and happiness, so it has a right to its own kind of sorrow. The second alternative suits the innocent, although it shocks the moral sense of most persons far more than would the choice of error instead of truth. To be an Emmet at all meant to get into trouble for advanced ideals. To be a Curran meant to have a keen intelligence always besieged hard, and eventually overcome, by melancholia, as John Philpot Curran’s was at the end, as Richard Curran’s was in his prime. Emmet and the young creature of his adoration were hardly used; but Fate chose not ill for them. A révolution manquée with an elopement; expatriation with a marriage certificate; a change of political front with the parental blessing—all look somehow equally incongruous and out of key with those sensitive faces elected, let us say, to better things. Their story, with all deductions which can be made, has already done something to deepen the sense of human love in the world, and to broaden the dream of human liberty. Perhaps either of those games may be considered as always worth the candle.
Rashness, and the immediate ruin consequent upon it, two things which men can taste, smell, handle, hear, and see, are not redeemed, in their opinion, by anything so unsubstantial as motive. History, a tissue of externals, cannot afford to take account of that. Hence it falls out that certain spirits are finally given over, with their illegitimate deeds in arm, to folk-lore and balladry. Of these are Charlotte Corday, and John Brown of Ossawatomie, and Robert Emmet. There is no need of exculpating them in the forum of the people, where they were never held to be at fault; and exculpation is a waste of words to the rest of us. We understand too well what social havoc these pure-eyed hot-hearted angels bring in their wake, when they condescend to interfere with our fixed affairs. They call into being in their own despite our most self-protective measures: measures, in short, which amount to an international coalition against the undesirable immigrant. Relentless inhospitality to such innovators, in every generation and in every clime, is the habit of this planet. Such as our affairs are, we do not seem to wish them made over into duplicates of those of the Kingdom of Heaven. The executed meddlers, however, often take on an unaccountable posthumous grace, and may even be approached upon anniversaries in a mood none other than that of affectionate congratulation. The anomaly of our own situation has passed with their death: though they never change, we grow up in time to be Posterity, and to see with them the ultimate correlations of things, in a region of intellectual space where nothing goes by its old name. To be unbiassed and Irish is to love Robert Emmet; to be generously English is to love him; to be American is to love him anyhow.
“Aristogeiton! here is for thy sword