Anyone
with a gift, a “plus” man at golf, a Feis Gold Medallist, an expert
gardener--just the distinguishing _cachet_ of excellence won his
admiration. Witness how he lauds the valour of his Dublin Fusiliers,
and yet his courage was no newly acquired virtue. I remember several
years ago he went to a political meeting at Newcastle West. A faction
party took possession of the platform. The intending speakers were for
abandoning the meeting, but Tom declined to give in without at least
a fight, and led the attack on the platform. After a nasty struggle
they captured their objective. Mr. Gwynn, who was one of the speakers,
was so impressed with my husband’s daring that he wrote me his
admiration, saying that he led the attack “with nothing but an umbrella
and a University degree.” His moral courage, too, never failed. When
occasion demanded it, he could always be counted on to say “the dire
full-throated thing.”
For the memory of Parnell he had a deep reverence. This is his vision
of him--
“A flaming coal
Lit at the stars and sent
To burn the sin of patience from her soul,
The Scandal of Content.”
A life, or rather an impressionist study, of “the Chief’s” career was
a work he frequently projected but unfortunately never accomplished.
The plinth at the back of Parnell’s Statue in O’Connell Street should,
he maintained, have been broken to symbolise the wrecking of Parnell’s
career. “Parnell,” he wrote, “died with half his music in him.” Once in
a discussion on the eighties he remarked: “What is the history of the
eighties? It is the history of two Irishmen--Oscar Wilde and Parnell.”
For G. K. Chesterton my husband had a great admiration. In _The Open
Secret of Ireland_, he refers to him as wielding “the wisest pen in
contemporary English letters. There is in his mere sanity a touch of
magic so potent that although incapable of dullness he has achieved
authority, and although convinced that faith is more romantic than
doubt or even sin, he has got himself published and read.” The only
flaw he found in Mr. Chesterton was that he was not a suffragist. My
husband was, of course, an ardent supporter of the Women’s Movement,
and wrote a brilliant pamphlet entitled _Why Bully Women?_ Mr.
Chesterton paid him a noble tribute in the course of an article in the
_Observer_: “The former case, that of the man of letters who becomes
by strength of will a man of war, is better exemplified in a man like
Professor Kettle, whose fall in battle ought to crush the slanderers of
Ireland as the fall of a tower could crush nettles.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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