BOOKS.

EVENING MEMORIES.*

Mn. WILLIAM O'BRIEN in his retirement seems to have lost none of his enthusiasm for Irish politics. His new volume of reminiscences, covering the period from 1883 to 1890 with a supplement on recent events, is as whimsical and grandiloquent as ever. It reminds the writer of the first time when he heard the celebrated orator on his native heath. The scene was a dingy little parlour in a country inn, where twelve or fifteen men had assembled on a wet afternoon to listen to an election speech

from Mr. O'Brien. The audience and the surroundings were tame and depressed. But Mr. O'Brien, with superb self-assur- ance, started with " Men of Wicklow ! " and proceeded to harangue his handful of followers for an hour as if the whole population of the county were hanging on his words. The episode illustrated the Irishman's delight in make-believe and the Irishman's lack of humour which are shown in this enter- taining book. Mr. O'Brien, although a journalist by.Rrofesaion, contrived to persuade himself that Ireland within the Union was suffering like Belgium under the Germans or Armenia under

the Turk, and that all the judges and officials, though Irish almost to a man, were sinister fellows like the familiars of the Inquisition. He knew very well that it was all make-believe,

but he cast himself for a heroic part and played it with great gusto for eight or ten years. In this book the veteran actor recalls his old performances and works himself up into a fine frenzy as he relates his conduct of the " Plan of Campaign,"

his hairbreadth escapes from the police, his flight in disguise to England, his visit to Canada with the object of stirring up an

Irish agitation against Lord Lansdowne, and his ludicrous experiences in gaol. He tells us how great a strain the part in.posed on him:-

`' The author who will make one weep—it was, I think, Horace who made the observation—must first weep himself. The pain in my own case was there in more than sufficient quantity. The mere physical distress of public speaking after my manner was extreme. The total lack of elocutionary training I was too old or too careless ever to remedy. Unlike the true orator,

• Evening Memories. By William O'Brien. Dublin; Maunsel. [10s. net.] who commands his powers with the easy elegance with which he might manipulate the stops of an organ, I spoke not merely with the voice, but with every limb and nerve and muscle of body and mind, with such an excess of strain that hair, collar and inner garments were usually bathed with sweat before I sat down, while my surprisingly effective attempts to make my words travel to the furthest ranks of a multitude, involved a positive danger of which I was painfully conscious without adopting any means of mitigating it."

But never once does Mr. O'Brien lay aside the tragic mask. Parnell, he says, told him that he was Don Quixote, and he is

no more capable of seeing the comic side of his activities than was the Knight of La Mancha. He writes with the greatest solemnity of " England's dealings with her tortured prisoner in the Irish seas," of " the fiendish spectre of Orangeism," of " the grisly Captain Plunkett " and the sinister features " of Sir Edward (then Mr.) Carson, who acted as Crown Prosecutor when Mr. O'Brien was tried at Mitchelstown in 1887. Sir Edward Carson, being an unsympathetic Irishman, made but one comment on Mr. O'Brien's defence—" The usual blather ! "

But the author declines to see the joke, and, after recording it, proceeds to chide the Crown Prosecutor for making his cause odious, " since a battle unto blood it was to be."

Apart from its unconscious humour and its literary skill, the book is worth reading as a revelation of national characters.

A Southern Irishman lives in the past or in the future. He strives by choice for the unattainable. He cannot be contented with the present. He always wants what is forbidden for the sole reason that it is denied him. Mr. O'Brien tells an illumin- ating anecdote of Dr. Duggan, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Clonfert, receiving the Papal Rescript in which boycotting and the " plan of campaign " were condemned. The agitators whom he was entertaining asked somewhat anxiously whether they should leave the palace, whereupon the Bishop, addressing his man-servant, said : " Mike, kill another pig." Mr. O'Brien thinks that this " was one of the great answers of history," presumably because it implied disobedience to the Pope. He is reminded of a parish pri6st who dared not defy the Papal Rescript against the " plan of campaign," but who contrived to reconcile his politics and his religion by asking Mr. O'Brien to speak only about " the plan." To people who, like this priest, arc casuists by temperament, murder and theft and breach of contract may easily be made to appear venial offences, or even meritorious acts, on the ground that they are proscribed by law and that the law, being " English," is necessarily wrong. But Mr. O'Brien's narrative shows that it is not only the " Englishness " of the law

which offends his younger countrymen. They find a romantic pleasure in law-breaking and in secret conspiracies. The author describes at length a visit to an Irish-American Conven- tion in 1886 where he had to persuade three or four secret societies, which hated one another, that fresh dynamite outrages would alienate Mr. Gladstone and the Liberal Home Rulers. The Irish-Americans, debarred from such pursuits in their own

country, were moved by a racial instinct to plot murder in England. A year before, says Mr. O'Brien, the American Fenians had arranged with a Russian envoy to supply transports for a raid upon Ireland if Mr. Gladstone had drifted into war with Russia over the Afghan frontier dispute at Penjdeh. Mr. O'Brien saw the envoy in London, apparently on behalf of Parnell, whc was too shrewd to play a direct part in the negotiations. The Russian and Irish-American alliance has been revived to more purpose, now that the Bolsheviks control Russia and are potent in Ireland. But the quarrels between the different Irish factions, in America as well as in Ireland, still continue. Mr. O'Brien says many hard things about Great Britain, but he reserves his bitterest words for his countrymen and for his old associates like Mr. Dillon. He himself seems to have been on the verge of a, quarrel with Parnell over the " plan of campaign," which Parnell evidently disliked and distrusted. But Mr. O'Brien was under the spell of that strange personality, who was not, he says, a " mystery man," but whose mode of life, as described in these pages, was scarcely consistent with sanity.

We are interested to learn from Mr. O'Brien that his novel, When We Were Boys, was the cause of the hostility shown towards him by the Roman Catholic Church in his later years. A Protestant reader would suppose, both from the novel and from this new book, that Mr. O'Brien was a, most docile admirer of the Romish hierarchy. But it seems that the novel which he wrote

in Galway Prison was reviewed at length in the Freeman's Journal. by a critic who quoted passages reflecting on the lack

of patriotism of an imaginary prelate. " The average plain- going rural priest, little addicted to the -reading of romances,

wanted to know no more," and set down Mr. O'Brien as an anti- clerical. The Church threw its influence on the side of Mr. Dillon, when open war broke out between him and Mr. O'Brien, and the author was rapidly extinguished as a political force. Thus Mr. O'Brien, who sought, he says, to show that it was a mistake to suppose that Home Rule would mean "Rome Rule," unconsciously and inadvertently proved the opposite. A Church which failed to understand the harmless novel and which persecuted its Roman Catholic author must obviously be most intolerant, as the Irish Protestants have always said that it is. Mr. O'Brien bears no malice and eulogizes all the prelates whom he has occasion to mention. But he seems to be puzzled by the treatment that he has received.