BOOKS.
TILE O'CONNELL CORRESPONDENCE.* To the present generation O'Connell has become a name— but a great name, inseparably intertwined with that of Ireland —and the two thick volumes of letters, collected with so much toil and edited so fairly by Mr. W. J. Fitzpatrick, may help the readers of our day to form some idea of the immense per- sonality whose words and deeds roused the passions or excited the sympathies, and occupied the daily thoughts of their fathers and grandfathers. We say help, for how large a por-
• Correspondence of Daniel O'Connell, de Liberator. Edited, with Notices ( f his Life and Times, by W. J. Fitzpatrick. 2 vols. London ; John Murray.
tion of the man is absent from these pages, how much that moved to jovial laughter as well as fiery wrath, what breadths of humour and varied eloquence, how huge a part of the body of the stupendous agitator finds, and necessarily finds, no place. For O'Connell was by nature a speaker, not a writer; he composed letters, except those on business, against the grain ; and neither wit, nor humour, nor drollery, has even a niche in his collected correspondence. There is, however, one thing which comes out pleasantly, his conjugal and family affection, as fervid as it was natural; and the volumes were worth publishing if only for the love-letters to his wife. He was not only a fond, he was an adoring husband from first to last ; and he not only took a pride in his children, he passionately loved them all. The brightest parts of the collection are those family letters, and they alone show that, despite his boundless virulence in speech and writing, he was a genuinely kind-hearted man. There are two letters to a daughter which breathe an exquisite tenderness, revealing the very core of his nature, and no one can read them without feeling something deeper than admiration for the writer. His conduct to the widow and daughter of D'Esterre, the man whom he shot in a duel, also tells in his favour,—he went out of his way to win a lawsuit for the first, and he pensioned the second. His hatred of Negro slavery, bloodshed, and all violence, except that which took the form of written or spoken words when used by himself, comes out early in his career and burns on to the end. The letters illustrate alike his virtues and failings in these respects, and, on the whole, enhance one's estimate of the good side of his character, which appeared most effectively in his private life.
Respecting opinion on his public career, no change is at all likely to be made by Mr. Fitzpatrick's prolonged and trying labour, although a large number of the letters see the light for the first time. O'Connell was at his best during the period when he was not a paid agitator.. The bright idea of standing for Clare, it seems, did not originate with but was adopted by him, and he never recovered from the intoxication of success; indeed, his first visit to London, in 1825, to fight the Bill for Suppressing the Catholic Association, was to him so delightful a triumph that it laid the foundation of his subsequent reliance upon politics as a profession. He was charmed with his reception by all classes, and the records of it, in his letters to his wife, brim over with his exu- berant joy. "We are certainly working on the English mind," he writes ; "I calculate on opening an agitation shop.
Believe me, darling, I would soon carry the question if I did " In fact, to that visit and the result of the Clare election, we may trace his adoption of politics pure and simple as a paying trade. At the same time, it is clear that he was not actuated by any sort of greed. He was not mean or corrupt —he made a love-match, believing he would be disinherited— but he found that he could not earn a living by his profession and carry on great public agitations ; so, preferring the latter occupation, he slid down from the Bar to the platform, and took his pay from the " Tribute " or the "Rent." He did not take it without working for it, having, as he wrote in 1795, "an enthusiastic ambition which converts every toil into a pleasure, and every study into an amusement." The child was the father of the man, and the passion of ambition was amply gratified. It is interesting to note that he was keenly sensible of one of his great defects. Writing to his wife from London in 1825, he says, "Maurice did make a good speech, but he should not imitate his father's faults by being so personal ;" and again, a few days after : "I am proud of my Maurice. Let him, however, check his tendency to personality, which in him is the more dangerous because it has an hereditary source." Mr. Fitz- patrick traces it to O'Connell's grandmother, " Maira-ni-Dubh, daughter of O'Donoughue of the Lakes," who was famous for her "caustic sarcasm and "strong denunciation" of all who sought to thwart her will. We are told that when paying servitors their wages, she always exclaimed in Irish : "May God prosper or melt away your wages according as you have earned them !" O'Connell's power would have been greater had he been less imbued with the bitter and wrathful spirit of the "dear grandmother" to whom, in 1793, he sends his "duty." Probably she meant what she said ; but her grand- son seems to have measured out his praise and abuse to suit the purpose of the hour, or exhale his anger. When he wrote of Wellington, "That villain has neither heart nor head," he was no more in earnest., except for the moment, than he was when, coming to the death of little Nell, he flung down The Old Curiosity Shop, and declared he "would never again read a line that 'Boz' wrote." He could not have believed what he said of the "vile Duke," and of course he continued to read Dickens.
One point which is strongly brought out in these volumes is that, from the first, all the measures demanded by O'Connell were not ends, but means to an end,—" the Repeal," as he calls it, that is, the establishment of an Irish Government and an Irish Parliament. "How mistaken men are who suppose that the history of the world will be over," he wrote from London in March, 1829," as soon as we are emancipated ! Oh! that will be the time to commence the struggle for popular rights." In November of the next year, he declared that there never was a period "in which an extensive demand for the Repeal would have a better effect," a singular misjudgment. On the accession of the Queen, it is true, he wrote :—" Ireland is now ready to amalgamate with the entire Empire. We are prepared for full and perpetual conciliation "—but on her own terms, what he called "perfect equality of rights, laws, and liberties a real effectual Union, or no Union, such is the alternative." That was in June, 1837. A year later he was despondent, partly because there had been a "shameful disregard" of his "efforts for the grocers" who sold spirits. "Thus the world goes." he exclaims, "and these things would soon drive me from politics, but that every day convinces me we must repeal The enmity to the Union was my first effort, and it will be my last ; and idle as it may seem, I do hope for success." It was at this time that he declined a judicial post ; "he would not desert Ireland." His real thoughts were, apparently, always: expressed to Archbishop iticHale ; and there we may look for them. We find the belief that if the Church could be dis- established, and "real corporate reform" obtained in Ireland, "we should have ninety-nine out of every hundred of the Irish of every persuasion friendly to a domestic Parliament," which throws a light on the meaning of the "real Union," demanded in 1837. The " tribute," at this time, did not flow in sufficient volume, nor in the next year, and he feared, or said he feared, that the country was deserting him, and that he had "ex- hausted the bounty of the Irish people." That partly accounts for a depression of spirits, which did not last long. We soon find him rejoicing at the prospect of distress, deficient revenue, and war as allies, and crowing over the expected death of Wellington, who was ill. He got up steam enough to found the Repeal Association in 1840, when he saw that the Whigs were failing. Mr. Fitzpatrick relates an in- structive anecdote at this point. "On the night that Catholic Emancipation passed," he writes, "when both stood witnesses of the incident, Carew O'Dwyer slapped him on the shoulder, exclaiming, Othello's occupation's gone!' ' Gone !' criedthe Liberator with an arch smile ; isn't there a Repeal of the Union ?' " He soon set it at work, with what results all know ; for although the decision of the Peers released him front Bridewell, Repeal slept for a generation, to rise again as Home- rule, or the first step to Separation. O'Connell never saw that this lurking shadow of Repeal was always, as it is now, the greatest enemy to reasonable measures on behalf of Ireland. When it was plain that he and his adherents were only work- ing up to that end, and sought the different objects they put forward, chiefly, if not solely, as the means to secure in- dependence, then resistance was inevitably increased. A frank acceptance of the Union would have made remedial plans less difficult to carry; but that cordial acceptance was never forthcoming. On the contrary, "justice to Ireland" was only sought as a preliminary to a dissolution of the Union; and as that could not be granted without breaking up the Kingdom and establishing a potential foe opposite Liverpool and Glasgow, so the avowed stages towards it were blocked. The great grievance of Ireland is that she is not England, which is a quarrel not with a people, but Nature herself. After his defeat by the Peel Administration, he coquetted with "the Federalists," in the hope of obtaining their support; and in 1846, at the very time when he was spouting for a policy of conciliation, he wrote :—" There is no sub- stantial remedy for Ireland except in the restoration of her domestic Parliament." Whether he used it as an argument in terrorera, or to call forth contributions, or whether he meant it, must remain uncertain ; but if we take his words, he did mean it, and also mean that all reforms would be stages to that end. It must be said, however, to his honour, that from these pages nothing can be gleaned which gives the least warrant for the policy pursued by the Parnellites since 1879. With all his defects, he was a better man than any who have succeeded him in the paid agitation business which he established so successfully in Ireland.
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