We have said that though Mr. Ferguson could hardly be called a Young Irelander in politics, all the elective affinities of his genius tended toward that school of thought. But Lady Wilde, then known if she wrote prose as Mr. John Fanshawe Ellis, and if she wrote verse as Speranza, had an extraordinary influence on all the intellectual and political activities of Young Ireland. It was a favorite phantasy of that time, when Lamartine's book was intoxicating all Young Europe with the idea of a grand coming revolutionary epopoeia, and the atrocities of socialism in France and Mazzinianism in Italy had not yet horrified all Christendom, to find the model men for a modern Plutarch in the ranks of the Girondists. Notably Meagher was supposed to be gifted with all the qualities of Vergniaud, and Speranza to have more than the genius of Madame Roland. But when we come to real comparisons of character, the parallel easily gives way. If Smith O'Brien was like any Frenchman of the first revolution, it was Lafayette. Mitchel had in certain respects a suspicious resemblance to the earlier and milder phases of Robespierre's peculiar intellectual idiosyncrasy. The base of Carnot's character was that faculty for organization which was the mainspring of Gavan Duffy's various and powerful genius. The parallel was, even so far as it went, intrinsically unjust. Lamartine's glowing imagination gave to the Girondists a grandeur largely ideal. It is fair to say that Meagher's oratory was on the whole of a higher order than Vergniaud's; and certainly Madame Roland, great as may have been the influence of her character and her conversation, has left us no example of her talent that will bear comparison with Lady Wilde's poems or prose.
These poems, however, if full justice is to be done to them, ought to be read from first to last with a running commentary in the memory from the history of those few tragic years whose episodes they in a manner mark. One poem is a mournfully passionate appeal to O'Connell against the alliance with the Whigs, which was charged as one of the causes of the secession. Another is a ballad of the famine, with lights as ghastly as ever glowed in the imagination of Euripides or Dante, and founded on horrors such as Greek or Italian never witnessed. There is then a picture of "the young patriot leader"— which an artist would characterize as a decidedly idealized portrait of Meagher—that American general who has since proved his title to be called "of the sword." Again, a gloomy series of images recalls to us the awful state of the country—the corpses that were buried without coffins, and the men and women that walked the roads more like corpses than living creatures, spectres and skeletons at once; the little children out of whose sunken eyes the very tears were dried, and over whose bare little bones the hideous fur of famine had begun to grow; the cholera cart, with its load of helpless huddled humanity, on its way to the hospital; the emigrant ship sending back its woeful wail of farewell from swarming poop to stern in the offing; and, far as the eye could search the land, the blackened potato-fields, filling all the air with the fetid odors of decay. Again and again such pictures are contrasted with passionate lyrics full of rebellious fire, urging the people to die, if die they must, by the sword rather than by hunger—and sometimes, too, with an angry, unreasonable, readily-forgiven reproach to the priesthood, who bore with such noble fortitude and self-immolating charity the very cross of all the crosses of that terrible time.
It is a curious fact, and reminds one of the myth of Achilles' heel, that O'Connell, who marched among his myriad foes like one clad in panoply of mail from head to foot, with a sort of inexpugnable vigor and endurance, not to be wounded, not to be stunned, with his buckler ready for every [{475}] thrust, and a blow for every blow that rained on his casque, was weak as a child under the influence of verse. Any one who may count over the number of times his favorite quotations, such as the lines beginning "Hereditary bondsmen" from "Childe Harold" for example, crop up in the course of his speeches, will be inclined to say that his fondness for poetry was almost preposterous. It was always tempting him, indeed, into dangerous ways—for while his prose preached "the ethereal principles of moral force," and the tenet that "no political amelioration is worth the shedding of a single drop of human blood," his favorite quotations were strictly in favor of fighting. The "hereditary bondsmen" were to "strike the blow;" and the Irish are a nation only too well disposed to interpret such a precept literally. Moore's melodies were always at the tip of his tongue; and Moore's "Slave so lowly" is indignantly urged not to pine in his chains, but to raise the green flag forthwith, and do or die. Some verses of O'Connell's own, of which he was at least equally fond, began:
Oh Erin! shall it e'er be mine
To see thy sons in battle line?
It was not altogether politic, especially when Young Ireland was gaining the ascendant, to use such quotations habitually; but the temptation seems to have been irresistible. So, on the other hand, may be conceived his excessive sensitiveness to anything sounding like a reproach that reached him through the vehicle of verse. When Brougham or Stanley or Peel struck their hardest, they got in return rather more than they gave—when the whole House of Commons tried to stifle his voice, over all the din Mr. Speaker heard himself with horror called upon to stop this "beastly bellowing." But when Moore wrote those lines—so cruelly touching, so terribly caustic—"The dream of those days," which appeared in the last number of the Melodies, the Liberator was, it is said, so deeply affected that he shed tears. So again, these lines of Speranza, which appeared in the Nation at the time of the secession, stung him to the very heart:
Gone from us—dead to us—he whom we worshipped so!
Low lies the altar we raised to his name;
Madly his own hand hath shattered and laid it low—
Madly his own breath hath blasted his fame.
He whose proud bosom once raged with humanity.
He whose broad forehead was circled with might;
Sunk to a time-serving, driveling inanity—
God! why not spare our loved country the sight?
Was it the gold of the stranger that tempted him?
Ah! we'd have pledged to him body and soul—
Toiled for him—fought for him—starved for him—died for him—
Smiled though our graves were the steps to hi s goal.
Breathed he one word in his deep, earnest whispering?
Wealth, crown, and kingdom were laid at his feet;
Raised he his right hand, the millions would round him cling—
Hush! 'tis the Sassenach ally you greet.
It is a curious and, indeed, a very touching trait in O'Connell's character that an imputation conveyed in this form had a power to wound him which all the articles of the morning papers and all the speeches of the evening debates had not. This redoubtable master of every weapon of invective, whose weighty words sometimes fell on his adversary like one of Ossian's Titans hurling boulders, or again burst into a motley cascade of quip, and crank, and chaff, and wild, rampant ridicule, that (sometimes rather coarse and personal) was at its best, to other rhetoric, as the music of an Irish jig is to all other music, nevertheless had his Achilles' tendon. The man who loved to call himself "the best abused man in the universe" was as weak before the enemy who attacked him according to the rules of prosody as if he lived in the age when every Celt in Kerry piously believed that a man, if the metre were only made sufficiently acrid, might be rhymed to death, in the same manner [{476}] as an ancestor of Lord Derby was, according to the Four Masters. [Footnote 98]
[Footnote 98: "John Stanley came to Ireland as the king of England's viceroy—a man who gave neither toleration nor sanctuary to ecclesiastics, laymen, or literary men; but all with whom he came in contact he subjected to cold, hardship, and famine; and he it was who plundered Niall, the son of Hugh O'Higgin, at Uisneach of Meath; but Henry D'Alton plundered James Tuite and the king's people, and gave to the O'Higgins a cow in lieu of each cow of which they had been plundered, and afterward escorted them into Connaught. The O'Higgins, on account of Niall, then satirized John Stanley, who only lived live weeks after the satirizing, having died from the venom of their satires. This was the second instance of the poetical influence of Niall O'Higgin's satires, the first having been the Clan Conway turning gray the night they plundered Niall at Clodoin, and the second the death of John Stanley."—Annals of the Four Masters. A.D. 1414.]
Lady Wilde's verse has not at all the same distinctively Celtic character as Mr. Ferguson's. He aspires to be
Kindly Irish of the Irish,
Neither Saxon nor Italian;