There is a portrait of John Shawe-Taylor
by a celebrated painter in the Dublin Municipal Gallery,
but painted in the midst of a movement of the arts
that exalts characteristics above the more typical
qualities, it does not show us that beautiful and
gracious nature. There is an exaggeration of
the hollows of the cheeks and of the form of the bones
which empties the face of the balance and delicacy
of its lines. He was a very handsome man, as
women who have imagination and tradition understand
those words, and had he not been so, mind and character
had been different. There are certain men, certain
famous commanders of antiquity, for instance, of whose
good looks the historian always speaks, and whose
good looks are the image of their faculty; and these
men copying hawk or leopard have an energy of swift
decision, a power of sudden action, as if their whole
body were their brain.
A few years ago he was returning from
America, and the liner reached Queenstown in a storm
so great that the tender that came out to it for passengers
returned with only one man. It was John Shawe-Taylor,
who had leaped as it was swept away from the ship.
The achievement that has made his
name historic and changed the history of Ireland came
from the same faculty of calculation and daring, from
that instant decision of the hawk, between the movement
of whose wings and the perception of whose eye no
time passes capable of division. A proposal for
a Land Conference had been made, and cleverer men than
he were but talking the life out of it. Every
argument for and against had been debated over and
over, and it was plain that nothing but argument would
come of it. One day we found a letter in the daily
papers, signed with his name, saying that a conference
would be held on a certain date, and that certain
leaders of the landlords and of the tenants were invited.
He had made his swift calculation, probably he could
not have told the reason for it, a decision had arisen
out of his instinct. He was then almost an unknown
man. Had the letter failed, he would have seemed
a crack-brained fool to his life’s end; but the
calculation of his genius was justified. He had,
as men of his type have often, given an expression
to the hidden popular desires; and the expression of
the hidden is the daring of the mind. When he
had spoken, so many others spoke that the thing was
taken out of the mouths of the leaders, it was as
though some power deeper than our daily thought had
spoken, and men recognised that common instinct, that
common sense which is genius. Men like him live
near this power because of something simple and impersonal
within them which is, as I believe, imaged in the fire
of their minds, as in the shape of their bodies and
their faces.
I do not think I have known another
man whose motives were so entirely pure, so entirely
unmixed with any personal calculation, whether of
ambition, of prudence or of vanity. He caught
up into his imagination the public gain as other men
their private gain. For much of his life he had
seemed, though a good soldier and a good shot, and
a good rider to hounds, to care deeply for nothing
but religion, and this religion, so curiously lacking
in denominational limits, concerned itself alone with
the communion of the soul with God. Such men,
before some great decision, will sometimes give to
the analysis of their own motive the energy that other
men give to the examination of the circumstances wherein
they act, and it is often those who attain in this
way to purity of motive who act most wisely at moments
of great crisis. It is as though they sank a
well through the soil where our habits have been built,
and where our hopes take root and are again uprooted,
to the lasting rock and to the living stream.
They are those for whom Tennyson claimed the strength
of ten, and the common and clever wonder at their
simplicity and at a triumph that has always an air
of miracle about it.
Some two years ago Ireland lost a
great aesthetic genius, and it may be it should mourn,
as it must mourn John Synge always, that which is gone
from it in this man’s moral genius. And
yet it may be that, though he died in early manhood,
his work was finished, that the sudden flash of his
mind was of those things that come but seldom in a
lifetime, and that his name is as much a part of history
as though he had lived through many laborious years.
July 1, 1911.