Mr. De Valera
De Valera. By Denis Gwynn. (Jarrolds. 12s. 6d.) MR. GWYNN. has written in this book the first able and concise as well as comprehensive biography of an unusually enigmatic man. His treatment of Mr. De Valera's American mission and the Truce negotiations is admirably done, the more so since these phases of his subject's career were not promising material ; very properly he has avoided the spectacular side of Mr. De Valera's career—it has always been overdone—and concentrated on the course and divaga. tions of his mental development from the time when "his nationalistic education, so to speak, was not yet completed" to the point where, to-day, he seems to be in possession of a comprehensive and, at any _rate so he believes, practical programme of nationalism. Unfortunately, as it seems to this reviewer, Mr. Gwynn is too much concerned with the divagations and inconsistencies in Mr. De Valera's career, and insufficiently in the unifying idea of his premises. So the discussion of his policy is of the most meagre.
For Mr. De Valera is a pioneer or he is nothing. lie is was, and probably always will be, as he was called during the civil war, an Irregular. He has stood all his life, and stands now, at the head of a revolutionary movement. And a revoir tionary, a pioneer, and an _irregular, simply cannot afford to be consistent. Consider his career. He was in gaol when he was first nominated for a parliament he refused to attend. He was " wanted " when he had the consummate nen'e to go to America in the hope of persuading the Republicans or the Democrats to adopt a plank recognizing a non-existent Trish Republic. Yet, after he -had spoken for months of
the principle of Self-Determination, and the Republican party leaders agreed to adopt a plank recognizing that principle for Ireland, he refused to accept it. He was in gaol
• when he was elected in 1922 to a Dail he refused to recognize. Yet in 1927 he was inside that Dail, having subscribed to an oath that he had always refused to take (declaring incidentally, later on, that he never took the oath on the grounds that he had merely signed his name to it). For five years he contributed to the working of a Treaty that he had bitterly opposed and to wreck which numbers of his young followers had been executed a few years before. In 1932 he was President of the Executive Council of the Free State, and had persuaded his followers throughout the country that he had won an amazing victory for their cause—a victory they could have had for the asking without the loss of a single life years before. Obviously, judged by ordinary standards, any man who could take up, with the most ingenuous declarations of the rightness of each step, so many different and even divergent positions would be considered in any other country little better than a cynical politician, and would probably have been hounded from public life within a few years. But Mr. De Valera has suffered neither that defeat nor that judgement, and few people—even in Ireland—would say that he deserves either. The circumstances are everything • in such a case, and it is the weakness of Mr. Gwynn's book that he refuses to consider the circumstances or admit the premises from which his subject starts. As a result his judgements are coloured throughout by an a priori assumption of an unlimited capacity for self-deception in his subject, where it would have been at least as much to the point to assume an endless elasticity in an iron man.
Admittedly the biographer of Mr. De Valera must err on the side of charity. Admittedly he is a most exasperating person in many respects. Admittedly "it is impossible to tie him down to the plain implications of ordinary language and • conduct," and his "metaphysical ingenuity is inexhaustible." It has been all very tiresome, no doubt, especially to such straightforward politicians as Mr. Lloyd George. But that the guerilla cannot march in a straight line and does not fight according to the rules does not make him a bandit. No! You cannot argue unless you agree on the premises. Either one must reject Mr. De Valera as an impossible person who refuses to accept the code of ordinary human behaviour, or one must sway all one's will-power and sympathy towards an under- standing of his background. He knows that himself—he clings to history, his first principles, like a barnacle, knowing that if he is isolated from what has produced him he will appear an empty, hard, barren shell.
SEAN O'FaoLinv.
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