BOOKS.

THE LIFE OF PARNELL.* [FIRST NOTICE.]

Mn. BARRY O'BRIEN has produced a very interesting book on a remarkably interesting subject, though it is open to a few obvious criticisms. As might be expected, he is a strong partisan, and on all matters relating to Irish land an extreme partisan. It is one of his difficulties that his hero scarcely ever put pen to paper without reluctance, and that the few confidential communications he ever made were almost exclu- sively verbal, and his biographer has therefore very little documentary material of real value. A great proportion of this book rests mainly upon reported conversations. Mr. O'Brien is evidently a practised interviewer. He fills many pages with long dialogues with important politicians, includ- ing, among others, Gladstone, Bright, Chamberlain, and Cecil Rhodes. Some of these conversations deal with ques- tions of great importance and delicacy in which the utmost accuracy is required, but we have no intimation that they were ever submitted to the approval of the speakers. It is no dis- paragement either to the good memory or good faith of Mr. O'Brien to say that evidence of this kind must always be regarded with suspicion. Most of Mr. O'Brien's interlocutors are now in their graves, and the smallest experience of life is sufficient to show how dangerous it is to rely too closely on one-sided versions of long conversations, however skilfully they may be reported. Mr. O'Brien appears, however, to have had an intimate knowledge of Parnell and of a large number of persons with whom he co-operated, and especially with the Fenian leaders, about whose relations to the whole Parnellite movement he has much that is valuable to tell.

Of all the men who have played a prominent part in Irish politics, Parnell was probably the least like an Irishman. One great element of the success of O'Connell was that he was an admirable representative of the Celtic nature both in its lights and its shades. Henry Grattan represented with hardly less fidelity the better qualities of the Anglo-Irish gentry,—a class from whom nearly all the most eminent Irishmen of the last two centuries have sprung, and who, as Matthew Arnold was accustomed to say, have developed a type of character of their own, clearly different from that of the pure Celt and from that of the pure Englishman. Parnell, however, was quite unlike them. As Lord Cowper said, "He was very English. He had neither the virtues nor the vices of an Irishman. His very passion was English, his coolness was English, his reserve was _English." " There is not a bit of a Celt in him," was the astonished and somewhat indignant exclamation of one of his faithful followers. He once consulted Sir Henry Thompson about his health, suppressing his name, and the great surgeon has given a clear account of his impression of him. What surprised him most was that his patient was an Irishman :—" He had none of the characteristics of an Irishman. He was cold, reserved, uncommunicative; a very silent man, who answered every question fully and clearly, but never volunteered information." He was a Protestant by religion, and for a short time a member of the Synod of the Disestablished Church, though he never appears to have shown any real religious belief. He was, however, extremely superstitions, refusing to lodge in a room which was numbered thirteen, or to support a Bill with thirteen clauses, or to allow three lights

• The Life of Cha,lee Siet Parnell. By B. Barry O'Brien. 2 vols. London :

Smith, Elder, and [214.1

to burn on his table, or even to cross another person on 1 staircase. He dreaded October as a fatal month, he wel filled with alarm when a glass was broken in his presence and, what must have been very embarrassing to an Mat leader, he considered green an unlucky colour.

His education, such as it was, was mainly English. g( was at two schools in England and afterwards at Cambridge but his early days were entirely without promise. As schoolboy he was idle and insubordinate, and he appears te have been generally disliked by his fellow-boys. He was fond of fighting, ill-tempered, arrogant, exacting, and very ready to take offence. Cambridge was utterly uncongenial to him, and he was sent down, without taking a degree, on account of a disturbance in which he was concerned. He wee conscious of his unpopularity, and appears to have ascribed it partly to his Irish birth. "These English," he would say, "despise us because we are Irish, but we will stand up to them. That's the way to treat the English." On his return from Cambridge he employed himself for some years chiefly in cricket and field sports, bat he seems to have made no friends outside his family. One of his relations said that Youatt on the Horse was the only book he at this time ever saw him read. He knew nothing and cared nothing about Irish history; and when in after years Gladstone, who was then welling over with the subject, poured out to him his indignant comments on the historic wrongs of Ireland, he was surprised to find that the Irish leader's mind was a com- plete blank on the subject.

He grew up, however, in an intensely anti-English atm> sphere. His mother was an American—the daughter of an Admiral who had fought against England in the war of 1812 —and a rooted and almost frantic hatred of England, which she never concealed or restrained, was her strongest passion When the Fenian movement broke out, the Parnell household was deeply stirred. One of his sisters had a remarkable turn for verse, and she became a constant contributor to the Fenian newspaper. She was a girl with considerable gifts, but excitable to the verge of madness, and her sudden death in 1882 was probably largely due to this cause. "It was at the time of the Egyptian War," writes one of her friends, "and there was a rumour of an English defeat. I remember- well seeing Fanny burst into the drawing-room waving the newspaper over her head and saying, Oh, mother, there is an Egyptian victory ! Arabi has whipped the Btitishers. It is grand.' Next day she died quite suddenly." Daring the Fenian trials of 1865 the sympathies of Mrs. Parnell were so notorious that she was placed under police surveillance, and her house, to the great indignation of her son, was searched for incrimi- nating documents. The execution of the three Fenians who were hung in 1867 for having shot a policeman at the rescue of Fenian prisoners at Manchester appears to have been the event which, more than any other, impelled Parnell to take a part in Irish politics. He afterwards spent a year in America, where his brother was settled. He watched with much sym- pathy the growth of Fenianism, and be was evidently deeply impressed by the speeches in which Gladstone declared that it was the growth of Fenianism which had called English attention to Irish affairs, and that but for the Clerkenwel] explosion and the shooting of the policeman at Manchester, the disestablishment of the Church could not have been carried. More imprudent words were never spoken by an English statesman, and again and again in his speeches Parnell recurred to them as indicating the true path of Irish politics.

It was in 1874 that he made his entry into politics by standing for Parliament for the county of Dublin. He found no difficulty in obtaining Home-rule support, for he belonged to a class whose adhesion to that cause was very rare. He was

a Protestant landlord of considerable means and position, .a member of a family which had been very distinguished in Irish history, and which had furnished one of the ablest opponents of the Union. It has been truly said that when Irishmen wish to throw themselves into democratic revoln- bon their first instinct is to look for some one of good family to lead them, and the fact that Parnell belonged to a different social level from most of his followers was never forgotten either by himself or by them, or by the great masses who supported him. It was one element, though certainly not the only one, of the absolute despotism which he acquired. He was, however, in 1874 entirely inexperienced. He broke down in his first speech, and appeared to those about him absolutely without political knowledge. "His whole stock of informa- tion about Ireland was limited to the history of the Man- chester martyrs. He could talk of them, but he could not talk of anything else." When the election had terminated he was at the bottom of the poll ; but his coolness and his fierce hatred of England were already apparent, and in the following year, on the death of John Mitchel, he was re- turned, chiefly by Fenian support, for the county of Meath.

It has always been known to good observers, but this book shows beyond all possible dispute, that it was essentially through Fenian influence that Parnell entered Parliament, and that it was through Fenian influence that he soon after- wards displaced Butt as leader. The Fenians were divided on the subject of Parliamentary agitation; all of them despised and distrusted the constitutional movement of Butt, but Biggar had started a new form of Parliamentary action with which they had more sympathy. He believed that it was possible by persistent obstruction and by a systematic disregard of all the rules and conventionalities of the House of Commons at once to paralyse and to degrade it, and thus, without incurring any danger, to inflict a serious injury upon England. As Mr. O'Brien says, "The Irishman who carries out a fighting policy against England in any shape or form is bound to command the sympathy of the rank and file of the Fenian organisation." This was the policy which Parnell adopted and carried out with extra- ordinary skill. "There was one thing about Parnell," a Fenian leader said, "on which the Fenians believed they could rely, his hatred of England. They felt that that would last for ever."

His relations to the Fenian body were very clearly defined. He never, like Biggar, consented to join them, but he never concealed his full sympathy with their ultimate object and with their intense hatred of the British Empire. "A true revolutionary movement in Ireland," he once said, "should, in my opinion, partake both of a constitutional and an illegal character. It should be both an open and a secret organisa- tion, using the Constitution for its own liarposee, but also taking advantage of its secret combination." When a Fenian agent was deputed to ask him to join the body, he firmly refused. "I can do good," he said, "with the Parliamentary machine. I mean to try at all events. Purely physical-force movements have always failed in Ireland." "I do not want to break up your movement ; on the contrary, I wish it to go on. Collect arms, do everything that you are doing, but let the open movement have a chance too. We can both help each other, but I am sure I can be of more use in the open movement." "We cannot," he said in one of his speeches, "under the British Constitution ask for more than the resti- tution of Grattan's Parliament. But no man has a right to fix the boundary of the march of a nation. We have never attempted to fix the rie plus ultra to the progress of Ireland's nationhood and we never shall." During his whole career, as Mr. O'Brien truly says, he stood on the verge of treason. felony without ever actually incurring its penalties.

His adhesion to the combative section of the Heme-rule party soon gave it an ascendency, and after a short experience of Parliament his extraordinary gifts were fully developed. He was never an orator, and there was no touch of imagina- tion or emotion in his speeches, but his self-command, his tenacity, his absolute contempt for the opinion of the House, his rare skill in seizing opportunities, and meeting difficulties, and saying the right thing at the right moment, could not be surpassed, and he possessed that indefinable gift of command by which some men can bend the wills of others to their own, to a degree that none of his contemporaries equalled. In the words of Sir Charles Dllke, his success was largely due "to his aloofness. He hated England, English ways, English modes of thought. He would have nothing to do with us. He acted like a foreigner Dealing with him was like dealing with a foreign Power. This gave him immense advantage, and, coupled with his iron will, explains his ascendency."

The conflict for the leadership between him and Butt was short and decisive. When Parnell entered Parliament the Home-rulers numbered fifty-nine, and probably the great majority of them desired, like Butt, that the movement should be purely constitutional. Butt always deprecated a policy of exasperation, and denounced obstruction as a criminal folly which could have no other effect than to alienate English friends. "No man," he said, "can damage the authority of the House of Commons without damaging the cause of representative government and of freedom all over the world." Parnell utterly repudiated such views. "I care nothing," he said, "for this English Parliament and its outcries. I care nothing for its existence." He openly declared that all attempt to conciliate English opinion was folly, that nothing was to be won from English statesmen except by injuring and annoying them, and that he wished nothing more than to paralyse and humiliate the House of Commons. "By such a policy," he said, "we can punish the English," and he predicted that the English "would soon be afraid of the punishment."

If the struggle had been confined to Ireland it is quite possible that the policy of Butt might have prevailed, but the Fenians who organised the movement in America and sup- plied the bulk of its funds determined that if Parliamentary action was to be supported at all, it should only be upon the lines of Parnell. A Home-rule Confederation of Great Britain had been started for the purpose of directing the votes of the Irish in England and Scotland exclusively to Irish ends; it passed completely under Fenian influence, and in 1877 it displaced Butt and elected Parnell as its president. In the same year a great meeting in Dublin, which "was practically got up by the Fenians," adopted the same policy.

Parnell speedily made his leadership of the party indis- putable, and he ruled it with a rod of iron. He commanded the funds by which it was chiefly subsidised. He crushed by his strong personality every attempt at revolt, and in all the arts of party management he showed himself supremely able. Gladstone described to Mr. O'Brien in glowing terms the suc- cess which was achieved :—" His ascendency over his party was extraordinary ; there has never been anything like it, in my

experience, in the House of Commons The absolute obedience, the strict discipline, the military discipline in which he held them, was unlike anything I have ever seen.

He was the most remarkable man I ever met. I do not say the ablest man ; I say the most remarkable and the most interesting. He was an intellectual phenomenon. He was unlike any one I had ever met. He did things and he said things unlike other men." Without ever losing his own composure, or even hie own dignity, he led the House through scenes of obstruction and passion such as it had never before known, compelled it to alter fundamentally its procedure, and maintained in the midst of English parties an independent, isolated, and perfectly disciplined body so powerful that both sides of the House soon found it necessary to consult its wishes. In positive legislation it accomplished little or nothing, except perhaps when it supported the Radicals in the abolition of flogging in the Army ; but it had not long been in existence when leading men of both parties made overtures to Parnell. The history of these overtures forms a valuable though a humiliating portion of this book, but it is too long to be dealt with in a review like the present. Those who came in contact with Parnell in the ordinary arrange- ments of the House found him reasonable, and often moderate, in conversation ; an excellent man of business; and, when it suited his purpose, quite capable of making and keeping a bargain. But more than once, for political purposes, he revealed conversations which were strictly confidential ; and more than once he did so in such a manner as to call down the most categorical contradictions from men of indisputable honour. His complete absence of moral scruple extended to truthfulness as to other things, and in one of the conversa- tions which Mr. Tollemache has published, Gladstone went so far as to describe him as "a consummate liar."

The lowering of the suffrage by the Liberals in 1884 raised his following to eighty-five, but he had no belief in exclusively Parliamentary action unless it was supported by chronic rebellion and outrage. "O'Connell," he said, "gained Catholic

Emancipation outside the House of Commons No amount of eloquence could achieve what the fear of an im- pending insurrection, what the Clerkenwell explosion, and the shot into the police-van had achieved." It was in this spirit that he threw himself into the Land Movement, which was directed, in the words of the report of the special Com- missioners, "against the payment of agricultural rents, for the purpose of impoverishing and expelling from the country

the Irish landlords who were styled the English garrison." He was not the originator of this policy. Lalor, one of the ablest of the rebel writers of 1848, had long before main- tained that a revolutionary movement in Ireland would never enlist the genuine support of the farming classes unless it was turned into a movement against landlordism; unless the confiscation of rent was held out as a prize that might be won; unless the expulsion of the English Government from Ireland was coupled with the expulsion of all loyal owners from the soil. John Mitchel had strenuously adopted the same policy, and had urged that the mass of the Irish people would never be roused by any measure short of "destruction of all land- lordism and denial of all tenure and title derived from English sovereign."

It was on these lines and with this object that the Land League was started in 1879, chiefly by John Devoy, a promi- nent member of the Fenian and Clan-na-gael Societies in America, and by Michael Davitt. A period of acute agricul- tural depression, which made many existing rents really burdensome, greatly assisted them, and after a short hesita- tion Parnell joined the League and became its president. As Mr. O'Brien observes, out of its seven first chosen officers four were Fenians or ex.Fenians, and all were in sympathy with Fenianism. The Report of the Special Commission and the sworn evidence which it collected will furnish to all future historians an imperishable record of the Reign of Terror which this body established, and of the manner in which for many years, and over a great part of Ireland it superseded or paralysed the law.