• A Patriot Manqué
The Great O'Neill. By Sean O'Faolain. (Longmans. 15s.) " His life proves once again that, to be intelligible, history must be taken on a lower key than patriotism," says Mr. O'Faolain, in a preface to his biography of Hugh O'Neill, second Earl of Tyrone. And in the chapter of epilogue he writes:
" Those who, after, the fashion of Archbishop Lombard, made a pious patriot of him, have denied him the intellectual judgement to
which his stature entitled him. For within his limits . . . he saw
that he and they were not merely local pashas fighting for local power but part of a world-conflict. . . . he was the first step that his
people made towards some sort of intellectual self-criticism. . ."
This, in application to an Irish idol, is a brave and welcome thesis, which will offend only those local and sanctimonious myth-mongers who, from generation to generation, come up to, flourish in Ireland, doing its people a most persistent and insidious harnt. The only pity is, we think, as we close this uneasy, untidy-but often brilliant book, that the argument has not been proved. Proved indeed up to the hilt—but perhaps we suspected that already—that Hugh O'Neill was not the simple, glorious patriot of schoolbooks and of market- place oratory ; but the corollary, that he was "a great tragic type," a man possessing " that element of self-perception . . . to the victor a crown, to the defeated a crucifixion . . ." remains, I submit, on page 28o of this biography, simply the generous conception of the preface ; an idea stated and desired, but which not all the involu- • tions of a very troublesome narrative, nor the lures of a vivid, some- times too vivid, prose can bring to acceptance in the reader's mind. For nowhere in all this interesting, confusing pack of facts presented do we find that which Mr. O'Faolani is impassioned to have us find; the intellectual view, or the tragic sense, or the final ruthlessness, or absolute sense of an ego and a purpose—any one of which, strong enough in him, might indeed have enlarged O'Neill's story to European, Renaissance size.
Indeed, the author warns us that we shall not find them. "No intimate details of this great man's character have come down, to us," he says. " We have nothing to go on except his behaviour." That might be enough. And here we have, in disordered but full array, the dossier of Hugh O'Neill. It is a very complicated story, and I am not competent to judge what historians will make of the manner of its setting out—the atmospheric embellishments, the surmises, the picture-making, the tangential reflections. But I do wonder what the average English reader., the man-in-the-street kind, will get from it. Foi Mr. O'Faolain seems to assume in him a background of knowledge that few outside Ireland, and only the educated there, will bring to his book. Not merely in his haste with facts, but implicit in his style and its symbols, is his exaction of familiarity with a thousand years of a way of life and of government entirely divergent from the English way ; he assumes from us not only familiarity with The Four Masters, but with the ancient Gaelic system of tribes and kingship and high-kingship—as well as with the temper and idiom of the Gaelic poet. For many readers all these assumptions will be immensely confusing—as confusing as the realities they had built up were for Elizabeth's determined and implacable colonists, who could never either take or leave Hugh O'Neill—and whom the Earl himself could similarly neither accep nor deny. The whole story—governed from Fli7abeth's side In the tricky device: Divide and Rule, and by the O'Neill; Hugh and the rest of them, by decisions of immediacy, anger and self-interest —meant misery for Ireland. Out of the ashes of desolation an wasteness of this your wretched realm of Ireland vouchsafe, most mighty Empress our dread Sovereign, to receive the voices of a few most unhappy ghosts . . ." wrote Spenser to Elizabeth. And t cry from the invaded, the wronged possessors, is louder, juster a more terrible from every event of those terrible wars, romanticis by the priests and the poets by the illusion of Spanish aid, and fo the English conquistadores by an opening dream of wealth an strange possessions—but in fact• hideous, brutal and unguided b any clear principle even a cynical one, from end to end. . O'Neill, beginning his life as England's pet, and ending it as he defeated enemy, had the chance to hold Ireland together, to bea some applicable design out of the traditions he grew to understa and to make use of—but, judged on his behaviour as presented in this book,, he had not the mental stature. And lacking that, he Mc seems to have lacked the romantic dash and decisiveness of his young ally, Red Hugh O'Donnell. He had great gifts.; he wa soldierly, attractive, shrewd and guileful ; and at the Yellow Ford and Kinsale he made great new sagas for Ireland. But by accident as it were—and without understanding either the ancient land h could have led to triumph then, or the wdlid beyond it, which only needed it as a temporary pawn in the great new game of system being opened up so unscrupulously, .alike by Spain- and England Mr. O'Faolain has done well for Hugh O'Neill in releasing him fro the lamb's clothing of blamelei4.-duty to Church and Fatherland and in showing how much deeper lay his problem than the local
patriots pretend. But he has not been able to show that, failure or success, the second Earl of Tyrone had the measure of his own destiny. He missed it chiefly because he did not see it—and in the extraordinary confusion of his day he would indeed have been all that this biographer claims for him had he managed to do so. This book is brilliant, serious and confusing—and it does not make its point. But for those whom its title speaks to it will prove stimu- lating, and will turn their thoughts usefully, and in a clear, new light, to the tragic, desperate scene of sixteenth-century Ireland.
KATE O'BiuEn.
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