Louise Imogen Guiney

“ Still less did others suspect the now plighted attachment, the innocent love hungry for joy, and yet hurried on to dark ends through devious and hidden ways. Mr. Curran’s strenuous opposition, on all grounds, was necessarily taken for granted, until some prodigious success should befall Emmet, and as if by a spell free the daughter who so feared her father. Sarah knew detail by detail of the conspiracy as it arose, and was fain with all her soul to encourage its progress. ”

“ He who had staked so much on the purity of his public motive, he who cared only, and cared fiercely, for the clearing of his name from the misconceptions of posterity, he who was one of the elect souls loving his love so much because he loved honour more—he, Robert Emmet, was willing to forfeit every chance of his own vindication for the sake of the sad girl brought into abhorrent publicity by his rashness. ”

“ This Englishman, whatever his eminence of courage and skill might be, had been the husband of Emmet’s sweetheart; and Emmet was an Irish rebel and felon. The young soldier had probably weighed well what he was inheriting, before his marriage, and found all that endurable enough, until he died. In a world where earthly accidents wither away at a breath, and men of like temper see each other as they are, Henry Sturgeon must have smiled from the blood-wet Spanish grass straight into Robert Emmet’s eyes. ”

“ What gave a faun-like idiosyncrasy to the whole countenance was the slight upward curve of the perfect eyebrows at the inner edge. If we are to accept Brocas as our best authority (though his hand at work has somehow captured a momentary scorn not seen by Comerford) , this idiosyncrasy had in it no touch of frowning severity such as was foreign, according to all report, to Emmet, but added rather a final whimsical attraction to a sad young face which a child or a dog would readily love. As Anne Devlin said once of “Miss Sarah’s,” it was “not handsome, but more than handsome.” ”

“ The Temple influence in eighteenth-century Ireland was, obliquely, the American influence: a new and heady draught at that time, a “draught of intellectual day.” If we seek for those unseen agencies which are so much more operative than mere descent, we cover a good deal of ground in remembering that Robert Emmet the patriot came of the same blood as Sidney’s friend, Cromwell’s chaplain, and Dorothy Osborne’s leal and philosophic husband. And he shared not only the Temple idiosyncrasy, but, unlike his remarkable brothers, the thin, dark, aquiline Temple face. ”

“ Now to be magnanimous is not to possess a definite [90] grace or virtue: magnanimity, like a sense of humour, is a spirit, a solvent merely; to exercise it in any one emergency is to show greatness equal to all. Robert Emmet said that he had received, immediately on his return from France, official invitations from conspirators in high quarters at home: the “first men in the land” were those who “invited him over.” Of his truthfulness there was but one opinion. Said Curran, who loved him little: “I would have believed the word of Emmet as soon as the oath of any other man I ever knew.” ”

“ Naked logic was Emmet’s element, and the expedient his negligible quantity. Every agitation sincerely founded [47] on a popular need breeds, in time, its extremists. They are the glory and the difficulty of all reform. It might have been said of Emmet, as at the outset of the Oxford Movement it was said of Hurrell Froude, that “the gentleman was not afraid of inferences.” Curran’s thoughts dwelt in no such simplified worlds. Like all the best Irishmen of his blazingly brilliant day, he was for Parliamentary Reform and Catholic Emancipation, and against the Union. ”

“ So romantic a fancy, implying so much belief in human generosity, was only too natural to Robert Emmet. Many thinking heads, even under coronets, had been hot for reform in that unfavourable hour; there were many who desired the removal of religious disabilities, popular representation in Parliament, death to the vile system of local laws under which one witness, and only one witness, was sufficient to convict a man of high treason. ”

“ About nine o’clock, Emmet being in such a state of speechless agitation as may be conceived, one Quigley rushed in with the false report that the Government soldiery were upon them. There was nothing to do but sally forth in the hope of augmented numbers, once the move was made. The poor “General,” in his [26] green-and-white-and-gold uniform, at the head of some eighty insubordinates, took in the bitter situation at a glance: he foresaw how his holy insurrection would dwindle to a three-hours’ riot, how his dream, with all its costly architecture, was ending like snow in the gutter. ”

“ The anomaly of our own situation has passed with their death: though they never change, we grow up in time to be Posterity, and to see with them the ultimate correlations of things, in a region of intellectual space where nothing goes by its old name. [103] To be unbiassed and Irish is to love Robert Emmet; to be generously English is to love him; to be American is to love him anyhow. ”

“ Sarah herself was entirely open with him: one would expect no less of her nobly sweet nature. “She pleaded his own cause for him by proving how little he deserved a divided affection;” but “the constancy and tenderness of her attachment to Emmet seem only to have rendered her the more interesting.” Two difficult years and more went by for Henry Sturgeon. He never wavered in his purpose: much as society sought after him, there was but one woman in the world to that patient and dedicated lover. ”

“ Her voice seems to have been singularly beautiful: there was a general development of musical genius in her father’s family. The incident was reported at firsthand to Irving, as to Moore. To those who knew her story, the little forgetful act was poignant enough: for she was singing to the dead. In her sorrow, her deprivations, her entire withdrawal from the world, Miss Curran was blest with tender friends and champions. The poet just named, who was one of Robert Emmet’s early comrades, knew how admiration followed her like her shadow. ”

“ Emmet’s [96] assurances was his own extreme, almost fantastic, chivalry; and that those assurances set off deeply by contrast, as he vehemently meant they should do, his abhorrence of the underlying system of which Lord Hardwicke’s conduct was merely the agreeable accident. Lord Hardwicke, at least, had understood.
Even one intelligent modern has fallen foul of Emmet’s unusually scrupulous care in such matters, and of his attitude of regal courtesy, like that of the battling foes on Crécy field: such a care and such an attitude indicate, it is thought, “weakness of character!” ”

“ Perhaps as every soul has a right to its own kind of welfare and happiness, so it has a right to its own kind of sorrow. The second alternative suits the innocent, although it shocks the moral sense of most persons far more than would the choice of error instead of truth. To be an Emmet at all meant to get into trouble for advanced ideals. To be a Curran meant to have a keen intelligence [101] always besieged hard, and eventually overcome, by melancholia, as John Philpot Curran’s was at the end, as Richard Curran’s was in his prime. ”

“ At the end of a hundred years, the feelings which may temperately be described as sympathy and forbearance do survive, ranged on the side of this political offender; but is it to be thought for a moment that five-and-twenty years of life, intellectuality, social standing, above all the capacity for being fooled (adorable as that may sometimes be) , are alone able to commend any man to the remembrance of posterity? No: to dominate a moral distance there must be moral height. Emmet was magnanimous. ”

“ What it really indicates is a diplomacy so high that if generally practised it might render human intercourse very difficult. We cannot all be as Apollo Musagetes, daring to employ nothing but the amenities, the major force, in a universe inured to cheap thunderbolts. As Thoreau shrewdly says: “The gods can never afford to have a man in the world who is privy to any of their secrets. They cannot have a spy here: they will at once send him packing!”
A postulate of true magnanimity is modesty. Emmet’s was unique. ”

“ On the day set for his execution Robert Emmet wrote to his old friend Richard Curran:—
“My dearest Richard: I find I have but a few hours to live; but if it was the last moment, and the power of utterance was leaving me, I would thank you from the bottom of my heart for your generous expressions of affection and forgiveness to me. If there was any one in the world in whose breast my death might be supposed not to stifle every spark of resentment, it might be you. I have deeply injured you ”

“ Rashness, and the immediate ruin consequent upon it, two things which men can taste, smell, handle, hear, and see, are not redeemed, in their opinion, by anything so unsubstantial as motive. History, a tissue of externals, cannot afford to take account of that. Hence it falls out that certain spirits are finally given over, with their illegitimate deeds in arm, to folk-lore and balladry. Of these are Charlotte Corday, and John Brown of Ossawatomie, [102] and Robert Emmet. There is no need of exculpating them in the forum of the people, where they were never held to be at fault ”

“ The captor was Major Sirr, the unloved fowler of that other young eagle of insurrection but just mentioned, Lord Edward Fitzgerald. He was able to recognise Emmet by the retrospective description obligingly furnished by Dr. Elrington, Provost of Trinity, of an undergraduate whom he had not loved. The captive was bound and led away, bleeding from a pistol wound in the shoulder. He had tried to get off, and some rough treatment followed, for which apologies were tendered. “All is fair in war,” said the prince of courtesy. ”

“ And again: “Miss Sarah [32] was not tall, her figure was very slight, her complexion dark, her eyes large and black, and her look was the mildest, the softest, and the sweetest look you ever saw!” All this is beautifully borne out by the Romney portrait, save that the pensive face which Romney must have begun to paint before the time of her betrothal (for after 1799 he painted hardly at all) is not olive-skinned and not black-eyed. The eyes are, in truth, very dark, but of Irish violet-grey. Every Anne Devlin in the world would have called them “black.” ”

“ Moreover, an Irish father is as likely as not to cherish spacious ideas of his own governing prerogative, and refuse to be tied in the matter to “anything so temporal,” as Lowell says in another application, “as a responsibility.” Mr. Curran could have bespoken for his children other destinies if they had ever known freedom of the heart at home.
Again, his attitude towards Emmet may have seemed to him no exaggerated hatred, but the mere tribute of virtuous scorn. ”

“ When enclosed in his cell, Emmet became the object of apparent concern and affection on the part of two acquaintances: the accomplished advocate and litterateur, Mr. Leonard M’Nally, and Dr. Trevor, Superintendent of Prisons. If these persons had stepped out of an ancient epic or some fancied tragedy to show what human genius could do by way of creating hypocrites, no plaudit ever yet given could be worthy of the play. ”

“ It is a terribly costly thing to be, as we say, equal to an emergency, before the emergency is quite ready to be equalled. And that was Emmet’s plight. A French fleet had been promised to begin military operations towards the end of August, but an unforeseen explosion in one of Emmet’s Dublin magazines led him to declare his toy war against the English Crown prematurely. ”

“ I know not whether success would have blotted out the recollection of what I have done; but I [do] know that a man with the coldness of death on him need not to be made to feel any other coldness, and that he may be spared any addition to the misery he feels, not for himself, but for those to whom he has left nothing but sorrow.”
It is apparent from this page that the great Mr. Curran had not withheld from one under misfortune some crumbs of that verbal opulence for which he was famous. Emmet’s disclaimer of any eagerness on Sarah’s part in reciprocating his devotion is a knightly one. ”

“ Robert Emmet’s situation, unless he repented of his politics, had any chance of being considered otherwise than unsound in his religion. Individualism, looked upon as the exact science it undoubtedly is, was not quite at its best in the self-righteous era of George the Third, and under the Establishment which was regulated by a now almost obsolete basilolatry. ”

“ May they be more fortunate than their uncle, but may they preserve as pure and ardent an attachment to their country as he has done. Give the watch to little Robert; he [62] will not prize it the less for having been in the possession of two Roberts before him. I have one dying request to make to you. I was attached to Sarah Curran, the youngest daughter of your friend. I did hope to have had her my companion for life; I did hope that she would not only have constituted my happiness, but that her heart and understanding would have made her one of Jane’s dearest friends. ”

“ Curran himself received a letter from Robert Emmet. It was neither signed nor dated, and opened abruptly, waiving all formalities, not from any hidden defiance, but from entire absorption in the mournful retrospect it called up. As we know from Lord Hardwicke’s communication, Emmet had retained Mr. Curran for his counsel, and it was thought fitting that the latter should decline the brief for the defence. Of course Mr. Curran threw it up; no man could have done otherwise. ”

“ Curran, for whom he had an affection as genuine as he was capable of feeling. It was like “Janus” Wainewright’s affection for Charles Lamb, and as exempt from the poison-cup otherwise dealt impartially to divers and sundry. It is possible, therefore, that Mr. M’Nally chose to acquaint his much-deceived client with the true state of Sarah’s health: a life-in-death which also was surely “better so.” But this is mere conjecture, as Emmet would never have inquired; rather than name his “nut-brown maid,” the truly “banished man” would still have endured all the inner turmoil of lonely love ”