meanwhile the insurrection, like all its historical forerunners, has been quelled in blood. it sounds rhetorical to say so, but it was not quelled in peasoup or tisane. while it lasted the fighting was very determined, and it is easily, i think, the most considerable of irish rebellions.
the country was not with it, for be it remembered that a whole army of irishmen, possibly three hundred thousand of our race, are fighting with england instead of against her. in dublin alone there is scarcely a poor home in which a father, a brother, or a son is not serving in one of the many fronts which england is defending. had the country risen, and fought as stubbornly as the volunteers did, no troops could have beaten them—well that is a wild statement, the heavy guns could always beat them—but from whatever angle irish people consider this affair it must appear to them tragic and lamentable beyond expression, but not mean and not unheroic.
it was hard enough that our men in the english armies should be slain for causes which no amount of explanation will ever render less foreign to us, or even intelligible; but that our men who were left should be killed in ireland fighting against the same england that their brothers are fighting for ties the question into such knots of contradiction as we may give up trying to unravel. we can only think—this has happened—and let it unhappen itself as best it may.
we say that the time always finds the man, and by it we mean: that when a responsibility is toward there will be found some shoulder to bend for the yoke which all others shrink from. it is not always nor often the great ones of the earth who undertake these burdens—it is usually the good folk, that gentle hierarchy who swear allegiance to mournfulness and the under dog, as others dedicate themselves to mutton chops and the easy nymph. it is not my intention to idealise any of the men who were concerned in this rebellion. their country will, some few years hence, do that as adequately as she has done it for those who went before them.
those of the leaders whom i knew were not great men, nor brilliant—that is they were more scholars than thinkers, and more thinkers than men of action; and i believe that in no capacity could they have attained to what is called eminence, nor do i consider they coveted any such public distinction as is noted in that word.
but in my definition they were good men—men, that is, who willed no evil, and whose movements of body or brain were unselfish and healthy. no person living is the worse off for having known thomas macdonagh, and i, at least, have never heard macdonagh speak unkindly or even harshly of anything that lived. it has been said of him that his lyrics were epical; in a measure it is true, and it is true in the same measure that his death was epical. he was the first of the leaders who was tried and shot. it was not easy for him to die leaving behind two young children and a young wife, and the thought that his last moment must have been tormented by their memory is very painful. we are all fatalists when we strike against power, and i hope he put care from him as the soldiers marched him out.
the o'rahilly also i knew, but not intimately, and i can only speak of a good humour, a courtesy, and an energy that never failed. he was a man of unceasing ideas and unceasing speech, and laughter accompanied every sound made by his lips.
plunkett and pearse i knew also, but not intimately. young plunkett, as he was always called, would never strike one as a militant person. he, like pearse and macdonagh, wrote verse, and it was no better nor worse than their's were. he had an appetite for quaint and difficult knowledge. he studied egyptian and sanscrit, and distant curious matter of that sort, and was interested in inventions and the theatre. he was tried and sentenced and shot.
as to pearse, i do not know how to place him, nor what to say of him. if there was an idealist among the men concerned in this insurrection it was he, and if there was any person in the world less fitted to head an insurrection it was he also. i never could "touch" or sense in him the qualities which other men spoke of, and which made him military commandant of the rising. none of these men were magnetic in the sense that mr. larkin is magnetic, and i would have said that pearse was less magnetic than any of the others. yet it was to him and around him they clung.
men must find some centre either of power or action or intellect about which they may group themselves, and i think that pearse became the leader because his temperament was more profoundly emotional than any of the others. he was emotional not in a flighty, but in a serious way, and one felt more that he suffered than that he enjoyed.
he had a power; men who came into intimate contact with him began to act differently to their own desires and interests. his schoolmasters did not always receive their salaries with regularity. the reason that he did not pay them was the simple one that he had no money. given by another man this explanation would be uneconomic, but from him it was so logical that even a child could comprehend it. these masters did not always leave him. they remained, marvelling perhaps, and accepting, even with stupefaction, the theory that children must be taught, but that no such urgency is due towards the payment of wages. one of his boys said there was no fun in telling lies to mr. pearse, for, however outrageous the lie, he always believed it. he built and renovated and improved his school because the results were good for his scholars, and somehow he found builders to undertake these forlorn hopes.
it was not, i think, that he "put his trust in god," but that when something had to be done he did it, and entirely disregarded logic or economics or force. he said—such a thing has to be done and so far as one man can do it i will do it, and he bowed straightaway to the task.
it is mournful to think of men like these having to take charge of bloody and desolate work, and one can imagine them say, "oh! cursed spite," as they accepted responsibility.
