William O’Brien (1852-1928)

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Bibliographical details
The Irish Revolution and How It Came About (London: George Allen & Unwin [Ruskin House, Museum Street] 1923) bears a title-page epigraph: ‘“Rosebery’s (‘predominant partner’) speech about convincing England in connection with Home Rule was most unfortunate and easily answered by Irishmen who might say (and here he became earnest and very serious) “How are we to convince you? Is it as we did by the Volunteers, by the Tithe War, when Wellington said it was yielding to Civil War, or by the Clerkenwell Explosion, which are the only means that ever have convinced England ?” —Gladstone to Sir Algernon West.’ CONTENTS: Introduction [11]; How the All-for-Ireland League Became a Necessity (1910) [55]; II: “A Desperate Venture” (191 l) [66]; III: A Psychic Analysis [77]; IV: THE Home Rule Liberal Destroyers of Home Rule [95] ; V: How “Ulster” Became the Difficulty [112]; VI: The Two Policies in Action [125]; VII: The Home Rule Bill of 1912 [142]; VIII:.Mismanagement and Deceit (1912) [156] IX. Neither Foresight nor Backbone 1912-13-14 [167]; X: The First Shadow of Partition [182] xi. Lord Loreburn’s Intervention [195]; XII: The Responsibility for the World War [209]; XIII: The Last Strage for Young Ireland [214]; XIV: The Outbreak of the War [228] ; XV: The Easter Week Rebellin (1916) [240]; XVI: “An Irish Provisional Government “ [256]; XVII: The Final Surrender of the Six Counties [281]; XVIII: How the Plot Miscarried [292]; XIX: A Talk with Mr. Bonar Law (1917) [309]; XX: MR. Lloyd George’s “Irish Convention “ (1917) [316]; XXI: To Take Part or Not To? [332]; XXII: The Death of Mr. Redmond [345]; XXIII: A True “National Cabinet” [357]; XXIV: Was it Still Possible to Reconstruct the Parliamentary Movement? [373]; XXV: The General Election and the General Judgement (1918) [385]; XXVI: Peaceful Self-Determination [394] XXVII: A Peace Offer That Was Spurned [408]; XXVIII: The Black and Tans [421]; XXIX: The Truce of the 11the July, 1921 [429]; XXX: And After? [446]; Appendix [459]. See pdf edition [online], or text version [online] - both at Internet Archive.

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Commentary
W. P. Ryan, The Irish Literary Revival, Its History, Pioneers and Possibilities (London: Paternoster Steam Press 1894; facs. 1970), gives a sketch of William O’Brien (pp.86-88), remarking of When We Were Boys that ‘no work that can be compared with as an Irish national novel - not so much for its brilliant and poetical descriptions of Irish scenes, or even its delineation of admirable types of Irish character, but for the crystallisation in the conversations and discourses of the poetry of the national struggle. It is the revelation of the mission and the gospel which the sentiment of nationality has been to our Celtic people’ (p.88).

Benedict Kiely, ‘Ned McKeown’s Two Doors: An Approach to the Novel in Ireland’, A Raid into Dark Corners and Other Essays (Cork UP 1999), remarks of on When we were Boys: ‘it still is of amazing interest. It was written in twelve months or in two periods of six months, each period spent, with some space hetween,in prison uner English beneficence. So that when O’Brein worked in the second portion, he had not the first portion available for consultation. On that occasion Irish art was not the cracked looking-glass of the servant. But in hell or in Ireland, waht was it? (p.6.)

Stephen Gwynn, Irish Literature and Drama in the English Language: A Short History (London: Nelson 1936), p. 113; William O’Brien, When We Were Boys ’... had a great vogue, deserved by fervid energy and a generous enthusiasm. Yet it is singularly devoid of artistic merit ’.

Denis Gwynn, The Life of John Redmond (London: Harrap 1932; rep. 1971): ’William O’Brien, the maverick Home Ruler, suggested that “Ulster” should have a veto in the Irish parliament, a suggesting enthusiastically supported by Redmond.’ (p.238; see Joseph Lee, Ireland 1912-1985, Politics and Society Cambridge UP 1989, p.15.]

Frank O’Connor, An Only Son (1961): ‘Father was devoted to the policy and personality of William O’Brien, who had married the daughter of one of the great Franco-Jewish bankers. It was Sophie Raffalovich who had started the romance by sending to O’Brien when he was in gaol a verse of Racine with an eagle’s feather enclosed, but I am glad that when Sophie O’Brien was old and poor in France during the German occupation, the Irish Government protected her and paid her an allowance.’ (p. 7.)

George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England ([rev. edn.] 1972), remarks that O’Brien condemned the partial Home Rule Bill in Westminster on 25 May, 1914 as ‘one of the grossest frauds ever perpetrated on a too confiding people [...] little short of a cruel political joke at the expense of their intelligence as well as their freedom.’ (p.290.)

Brian Ó Cuív: ‘William O’Brien made a convincing case for the restoration of Irish at Cork National Society, in 1892 [viz., The Influence of the Irish Language on Irish National Literature and Character, Cork, 1892; William Vaughan, ed., A New History of Ireland, Vol. VI: 1870-1921, OUP 1996, p.402, citing Ó Cuív in ‘Irish Literature and Language, 1845-1921’ [q.p.].)

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Quotations
Penal laws: ‘When the framers of the penal laws denied us books, and drew their thick black veil over Irish history, they forgot that the ruins they had themselves made were the most eloquent schoolmasters, the most stupendous memorials of a history and a race that were destined not to die. They might give our flesh to the sword and our fields to the spoiler, but before they could blot out the traces of their crimes, or deface the title deeds of our heritage, they would have had to uproot to their last scrap of cultured filgree the majestic shrines in which the old race worshipped; they would have had to demolish to their last stone the castles whih lay like wounded giants throgh the land to mark where the fight had raged most fiercest; they would have had to level the pillar towers, and to seem up the source of the holy wells. (William O’Brien, ‘The Irish National Idea’, in Irish Ideas, Longmans, Green 1893, p.4; O’Brien’s ‘heightened prose’, cited in Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture, Field Day/Cork UP 1996, p.15.)

Extract from a speech at Bodyke (Sunday, 30 Jan. 1887): ‘I tell you candidly here to-day that though we allow these policemen to withdraw from this meeting, because they were weak - a mercy, which 1 am sorry to say, that they have never reciprocated to the people - I tell you, and I wish the Government reporter was here to listen to it, that if our people had power to meet them, man to man, and rifle to rifle (prolonged cheers) in the open field, I, for one, would cut short my speech-making this very moment, and the next speeches that the destroyers of your homes would hear would be the speeches out of the mouths of your guns. (Loud cheers.) We cannot meet them like that. Unfortunately we have not the power ; but we have a weapon to-day before which all the power and pride of landlordism is going down like the walls of Jericho. (Cheers.) It is tumbling down at the shout of an enfranchised and imconquerable Irish nation. (Loud and prolonged cheers.)" (Freeman's Journal, 31 Jan. 1887; quoted in quoted in The Home Rule Bill: Memoranda on Amendments [Union Defence League], London 1912 - No. 4 [“Reserved Services”] (12 Oct. 1912) - remarks on The Royal Irish Constabulary; available online; accessed 16.08.2014. )

Party funds: ‘The invariable last word to all our consultations was the pathetic one, “Give me a fund and I see my way to doing anything.” And so we had travelled drearily for years in the vicious circle that there could be no creative energy in the Party without funds, and that there could be no possibility for funds for a party thus ingloriously inactive. Although myself removed from Parliament my aid had been constantly invoked by Mr Dillon on the eve of any important meeting of the Party in London, or of the Council of the National Federation in Dublin, for there was not one of them that was not haunted by the anticipation of some surprise from Mr Healy’s fertile ingenuity. There is an unutterable discomfort in the recollections of the invariable course of procedure on these occasions - first, the dozens of beseeching letters to be written to our friends, imploring their attendance at meetings at which, if Mr Healy found us in full strength, all was uneventful and they had an expensive journey for their pains; next, the consultations far into the night preceding every trial of strength; the painful ticking off, man by man, of the friends, foes, and doubtfuls on the Party list, the careful collection of information as to the latest frame of mind of this or that man of the four or five waverers who might turn the scale; the resolution, after endless debates, to take strong action to force the Party to a manful choice at long last between Mr Dillon and his tormentors, and to give somebody or anybody authority enough to effect something; and then almost invariably the next day the discovery that all the labour had been wasted and the strong action resolved upon had been dropped in deference to some drivelling hesitation of some of the four or five doubtfuls who had become de facto the real leaders of the Party.’ (Quoted in D. D. Sheehan, Ireland Since Parnell, London: 1921, Chapter VI: “Towards Light and Leading”; access full text via Sheehan, q.v.)

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Olive Branch in Ireland and Its History (1910): ‘To look over the fence of the famine-stricken village and see the rich green solitudes, which might yield full and plenty, spread out at the very doorsteps of the ragged and hungry peasants, was to fill a stranger with a sacred rage and make it an unshirkable duty to strive towards undoing the unnatural divorce between the people and the land.’ (Quoted in D. D. Sheehan, op. cit., [Chap. VIII:] “The Birth of a Movement and What It Came To” [q.pp.]. Note: An Olive Branch is available at Internet Archive online; accessed 3.11.2010.

Ireland a nation: ‘[It was a] mathematical and absolute certainty that the day was coming when [...] that principle of Ireland a nation would be recognised and welcomed just as warmly by the working millions of Great Britain as it was by that audience [n Ireland], and when the only wonder of Englishmen, Scotchmen, and Welshmen in future would be that it had taken seven centuries to discover the justice, the safety, and the indestructability of the principle of Irish nationality, for which Sarsfield once filled the breach at Limerick, and for whuch Robert Emmet died on the scaffold.’ (quoted in E. Larkin, The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland and the Fall of Parnell 1888-1891, Liverpool 1979, pp.176; cited in D. George Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland, London: Routledge 1982; 1991 Edn., p.221.)

Irish Language: ‘In the matter of languages as in the matter of nationalities there is a marked tendency in our time to cherish those distinguishing characteristics of blood, of language and tradition which constitute the individuality and stimulate the genius of nationalities, and which are to nationwas what domestic life is to individuals (applause) [....] lost were the nation which should forget that the sared passion of nationality, which is the driving force and vital breath of all our struggles [...] has its origin deep in the recesses of the past, among the old associaitions of which the Gaelic language is the very living voice and soul (cheers) [...] it should be necessary to brave the charge of tediousness to claim a kindly thought for that National language which is the oldest of our national possessions, and the inalienable title-deed to the individuality of our race (cheers).’("Mr William IO'Brien on the Irish Language", in Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge/Gaelic Journal, 4:25, July 1892, pp.157-60; quoted in Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century, Cork UP/Field Day 1996, p.23.)

‘“Constitutionalism” in a country whose grievance is that it possess no constitution is an historical humbug. Parnell built up his movement, not by railing at Fenianism in the spirit of a professor of Constitutional history, but by incorporating its tremendous forces in his ranks and acknowledging no criterium [sic] of the rectitude of his political action, be it “constitutional” or “unconstitutional” except whether it was, in the circumstances, the best thing to be done for Ireland.’ The Downfall of Parliamentarianism, 1918; Boyce, op. cit., 1982, p.289.)

Catholic Ireland: ‘Woe’s the day this high-strung Irish race of ours gives up its faith! It is to us what purity is to a woman. Without mystery, without the supernatural, both in religion and in politics, every fruit we ache for turns to ashes upon Irish lips ... Why will Rome goad and force us to rend the Celtic race asunder? Irish youth is the only youth in Christendom that does not want to pick a quarrel with Rome, and Rome will insist on picking a quarrel with us.’ (When We Were Boys, 1890, p.14; quoted in James H. Murphy, Catholic Fiction and Social Reality in Ireland, 1873-1922I, Conn: Greenwood Press 1997, p.68.)

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References
Justin McCarthy, gen. ed., Irish Literature (Washington: University of America 1904), selects ‘A Plea for the study of Irish’ from “The Influence of the Irish Language”, a lecture delivered May 13 1902 to Cork National Society, ‘The story of the belief in, and the clinging to, the Gaelic language is in itself a romance pathetic enough for tears. Age after age, while the native tongue was a badge of contempt, a passport to persecution, even a death warrant - the schools suppressed, the printing press unknown, the relics of the national literature scattered in mouldering manuscripts, secreted as damning evidence of superstition or treason - there were always to be found the poet, the scholar, the ecclesiastic, to foster the sacred fire, the outlawed treasure of the Gael, in his bosom - to suffer, and hunger, and die for its sake./ In the days of Elizabeth it was Duald Mac Firbis, dedicating his great Genealogy to his ruined Celtic prince with the pathetic lament that no Irish prince any longer owned enough territory to afford himself a grave. . . Michael O’Clery [...] Keating [...] O’Flaherty [his Ogygia purchased for 20 guineas; ‘the great Burke responsible for saving the priceless Brehon Law Code after its century of wanderings, neglect, and decay in the cabins of Tipperary’; ‘Drimmin don dilis’ purchased for £3.13s.8d.] [...] Petrie, O’Donovan, O’Curry [...] Approached thus with the loving ardour of a nation’s second youth, the tongue of Tara and Kinkora may realise the fond prophecy that ‘the Gaelic will be in high repute yet among the music-loving hosts of Erinn’ and the men who clung to it when it was persecuted, who believed in it when it was scorned, who in the watches of the night hoped on the reward of knowing that they have preserved unto the happier coming time a language which will be the well-spring of a racier national poetry, national music, national painting, and of that richer spiritual life of simplicity, of equality, of good-fellowship, of striving after the higher and holier ideals, with which the Celtic race alone seems to have the promise of brightening the future of a disenchanted world.’ ALSO selects ‘The Irish in America’ from Irish Ideas.

Stephen Brown, Ireland in Fiction: A Guide to Irish Novels, Tales, Romances and Folklore [Pt. I] (Dublin: Maunsel 1919), lists When We Were Boys [1890]; A Queen of Men [1898], eulogising the first as a very brilliant book, nationalist and Catholic but not blinkered, full of intellect and wit. Justin McCarthy, Irish Lit., gives extract from ‘A Plea for the Study of Irish’; also extract, ‘The Irish in America’, from Irish Ideas.

John Sutherland, The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (Harlow: Longmans 1988); notes When we Were Boys (1890), set in Fenian times, incls. some high society London episodes; Ken Rohan, sentence to life, declares at the end, “Courage, this is not the end!”; records progress of republican American ideas [sic]; his other novels, A Queen of Men (1897), Grace O’Malley had ‘plenty of mustard, little beef’ according to contemporary. English reviewers.

Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2; extracts The Downfall of Parliamentarianism (1918) [346-53], sometimes bitter, sometimes melancholy and generally perceptive retrospect [Seamus Deane, ed.]; 211; even William O’Brien’s UIL of 1898 could not make the party look particularly inspiring in the centenary year [idem.], 213; Parnell (speech at Listowel, 13 Sept. 1891), ‘Boulogne negotiations [...] the only portions of them Mr. O’Brien begged me not to publish, in case during his imprisonment I found it necessary to publish any of them, were the proposals composed by Mr. O’Brien, with the help of Mr. Dillon, in America, before he left, accepted by Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Sexton when he arrived in France, and actually proposed to me as a solution to the question, and which I found so absurd and ridiculous, and so traitorous to the Liberal allies of these men that they were obliged to admit that they were utterly untenable and unsuitable. Mr. O’Brien can publish these proposals if he chooses, and also the counter-proposals I made afterwards ...’, 311; and 311n, O’Brien, journalist and politician, repeatedly imprisoned for his support of tenant causes, became anti-Parnellite at the split, 315-16n; Land War renewed with the Plan of Campaign (1886-91) by O’Brien, Healy, Dillon, and Harrington, 323n; [compared with Healy in his recognition that the Party lost respectability through the divorce scandal, 329; fund-raising in American with McCarthy and Dillon when the news of Gladstone’s ultimatum arrived; reactions an cables, 333; Irish council Bill, 1907, rejected by Sinn Féin and O’Brien’s United Irish League, as well as John Redmond, 740;. BIOG, 370 [vide supra]. NOTE FDA3, 507, Hobson quotes H. R. Nevinson as reporting that William O’Brien told him Pearse said ‘we are going out to be slaughtered’ (Nevinson , Between the Wars, 1936).

British Library holds The Responsibilities of Partition Considered with an Eye to Ireland’s Future (1921) 66pp.; Sinn Fein and its Enemies [Westminster speech, 23 Oct. 1917 [1917], 16pp. See also Sophie O’Brien (his wife; née Raffalovich], Rosette (1907), a novel; Under Croagh Patrick, reminiscences; and Amidst Mayo Bogs.

Belfast Public Library holds When we Were Boys (1880); A Queen of Men (1898); Under Croagh Patrick (1904); Recollections (1905); The Party, who they are and what they have done (1917); Edmund Burke as an Irishman (1924); Evening Memories (1920); Golden Memories (1929); Irish Fireside Stories (1927, 1928); Irish Ideas (1895); An Olive Branch in Ireland (1910); Irish Revolution and How it Came About (1923); The Parnell of Real Life (1926); Around Broom Lane (1931); Also, biog., M[ichael] McDonagh, Life of William O’Brien (1928).

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Notes
Portraits: William O’Brien by William Orpen [NGI; signed]; see Irish Portraits Exhibition, Ulster Mus. 1965; there is portrait group by Charles Paul Renouard showing O’Brien with Tim Healy, Thomas Sexton and Justin McCarthy (presented to National Gallery of Ireland by Theobald Matthew, 1934).

James Joyce: Note that When we Were Boys by William O&3146;Brien is part of the library in Leopold Bloom’s home (see Ulysses, Bodley Head Edn., p.832).

Kith & Kin: Madame O’Brien: Madame William O’Brien, author of Silhouettes d’autrefois ([S.l.]: [s.n.] [n.d.]), (Paris: Librairie Felix Alcan 1926), in French.

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