Evening Memories

New Zealand Tablet, Volume L, Issue 27, 12 July 1923, Page 9

Evening Memories

(By William O'Brien.) CHAPTER (Continued.) In every phase of Irish politics ,for the next quarter of a century, I was to feel the effects of the silent, impalpable, unreasoning hostility thus secretly propagated. The public cause was destined to be a more serious sufferer. The three capital mistakes which wrought the destruction of the Parliamentary movement as Parnell understood it, were the personal ferocity with which Parnell was pursued in 1890, the abandonment in 1903 of the policy of Conference, Conciliation and Consent which the country had just endorsed by the mouths of all her representative authorities, and the enslavement to, the English Liberal Party, which was the consequence. None of the three calamities could have occurred without considerable clerical support for the politicians with whom the responsibility lay, and it will be found beyond dispute that in none of the three cases would that support have been so considerable were it not that the opposite and, as time has shown, the right side had the ill chance to be espoused by the author of When We Were Boys. It was a matter of unconscious cerebration, to be sure, but was none the less attended with sorrowful consequence for the nation. And now it all turns out to have been, like the Split of 1890 itself, a stupid misunderstanding. ' While whole libraries of novels have come, and departed from human memory, the truth that was in this book, whatever its faults, proved to be such a.saving salt, that after the thirty years which are counted for a generation of men, Messrs. Maunsell presented me with a requisition for a re-issue of When We Were Boys, and the first edition was snapped up within a couple of weeks by the youth of a better instructed time, and men learned for the first time that the unread book which haunted the slumbers of honest Irish priests without number like a spectre, had all the ti-m-c commanded the almost excessive admiration and attachment of churchmen of the greatness of Cardinal Manning, Archbishop Croke, Bishop Duggan and Canon Sheehan. A more singular phenomenon still. The book was found to be so true to the deepest things in the Irish soul, that it prefigured with an almost uncanny fidelity the self immolation of the young and pure of heart, which in our latest days has redeemed the country from a new Parliamentarian betrayal even more inexcusable than that which sent the hero of When f We Were Boys and his like to their doom. At all events the book itself did but thrive and flourish"for all the babble of idle tongues. For many a year it was a cherished guest in faithful Irish homes as far away as the mining camps and backwoods of America, and the golden sands of Australia.* And now comes the * When We Were Buys had even the distinction of an edition in the French tongue. In the fulness of time I was to learn that my future wife was already wondrously watching from her heaven the labors of the penman in his Galway workshop. Her translation was published by Charpentier under the title A VinyfAns, and its sufficient encomium is that it was prefaced by an Introduction from one of the most eminent statesmen of France, M. Burdeau, whom I had subsequently the privilege of knowing and who possessed in a high degree the character of wedded romance ami genius for affairs which is the glory of the French. Wounded and made captive in the Annie Terrible, he after three gallant attempts made good his escape from his German prison, for all his aching wounds and all the horrors of that cruel winter, and won the most coveted' of all French military distinctions, the red ribbon awarded to him by the votes of his own brother Normaliens. He had by this time reached the high station of President of the Chamber of Deputies, and, but forHhe untimely death by which he paid the penalty for his young hardships was by general consent designated for the Presidency of the Republic. I find the temptation irresistible to tell in' his own words of crystal clearness in the Preface how accurately. the penetrating intellect of one of France's foremost statesmen had then possessed himself of the aims and secrets of the Irish soul. , r . -.'-.- ■ ■, "L'homme a qui nous sommes le plus redevables du present, ouvragc de M. William O'Brien V est peut-etre pas M. O'Brien r lui-meme....Mon honorable ami ne se serait jamais doute, je le erains lien, du talent de romdncier

supreme joy of being summoned back d'outre tombe, so to say, to see the new generations catching up the torch which it can no longer be mine to re-illumine. Canon Sheehan believed a Queen of Men to be my best work.t I have for it myself the partiality of a father for his least favored child. For, notwithstanding the greater writer's tender prediction, up to the present, at all events, A Queen of Men has remained as remote from the world's vision as the figure of Graanya Uaile amongst her ttVestern mists. It was the first attempt, so far as my knowledge extends, to reproduce in real life an epoch of extraordinary dramatic interest combining the first fiendish" incursions of the new religion among the simple homes and monasteries of Comment, the substitution of a rapacious Feudalism for the free-and-easy tenure of the clans, and the last living example of a free native Court in all the glamor of its own racy Gaelic civilisation, and of its close relations with the splendid Court of Spain. But the Monsignor McGrudders of those days were missing, or rather were engrossed in the battle for their own race, with the arms of the spirit and of the flesh alike, against the adventurers and the Married Bishops of England, and for critics already too deeply prejudiced, the absence of any cause of quarrel was, I am afraid, a barely less intolerable grievance than had been found in the pages of When We Were Boys. There are indications, while I write —and not the least of them in a, recent paper on Irish Fiction by a distinguished Jesuit Fatherthat even .1 Queen of Men may still come by her own modest kingdom. But that is not the moral I desire to point here. It is the infatuation of a British statesman of the first rank, who set out with the undertaking to treat his prisoner as

qu'il portait en lui-meme, et la politique Vawait absorb 6 tout entier, si M. Balfour ne lui avait assure, avec le concows de ses jwjcs speciaux, de longs et silencieux ioisirs dans les prisons irlandaises. Bendons grace aM. Balfour. Ce service n'est pas le mains considerable de ceiix qu'il aura rendus sans le vouloir a la cause de Vlrlande ... L'lrlande a fait depuis quinze ans (les pas de gcant vers le succes L'lrlande a fait depuis quinze ans ties pas de (/cant vers le profonde evolution. Quelle transformation, depuis I'cpoque ' d'adolescence heroique oil nous transport e le roman de William O'Brien. Que de maturite aujourd'hui et que- de jeunesse alor&l Tout le parti irlandais semblait 'avoir vingt ans,' et le type du polite qui traverse le line, Voir inspire, les cheveux aw vent, entraine vers le peril et vers la mart par ses chimeres autant que par son courage, etait lien un type national. L'lrlande n' avait jamais appris la politique et il semblait qu'elle (Hit ne I'apprcndre jamais. Elle a trompe Vattente; tons ses amis applaudissent a sa jeune sag esse. ,Et pourtant nous aimons encore, en France du moms a la rcvoir telle qu'elle ctait an temps de ses folks equipees. C'est cette Irlwnde que remct sous nos yeux, dans cadre ou le roman est une forme de la verite, le livre de M. William O'Brien, si poetiquement et naivement traduit par une personme deux fois designee pour cette tdche, etant egalcment familierc avec la pensee intime de I'auteur et avec les secrets de: noire langue francaise. (Vest le vieux genie celtique de Vlrhcnde, e'est sa ga.icte indomptable, son heroisme souriant, son imagination revevse et son cxEur tendre, sources intarissables de denouement et abnegation, de ■pitie active pour les victimes, de pardon pour les oppresseurs, voila cc qui nous seduit, ce qui nous attache a elle par dcs liens a la fois ■ doux et puissants. L'lrlande triomphcra, nous Vesperous, par Us qudlitcs volitiques qu'elle a su emprunter a VAngleterre; mais e'est parce qu'elle est rest Vlrlande, e'est parce qu'elle a una dme a elle et profondement distincte de Vesprit anglo-saxon, que son, triomphe nous est precieux, a nous et a toute Vhumanite." t "Last night I had to close the book at Chapter XXI., \ ■.' The Wreckers,' quite overpowered by the dramatic inL tensity of the description. I am not acquainted with any \ chapter in fiction that equals its dramatic force. . . . I think you have produced a memorable book. It is your greatest . step towards realising the vocation that many have predicted for youthat of being the Walter Scott of Ireland. It is a grand Irish novel and will be taken to the heart of the people."—Letter of Canon Sheehan, April 30, 1898. ■.■;*". .

a pest of society, to be exterminated by the contrivances of the mediaeval dungeon, and ended by being compelled to feed his prisoner with the honey of Hybla in a garden of the Immortals, to crown him with the wreath of wild olive of quite a respectable literary reputation, and to make the saddest day of his sentence that which released him to the grim furies of public life awaiting him outside the gaol gates. (To be continued.)