From the somewhat picturesque assemblage of Irish political agitators emerges the figure of one in many ways the most picturesque, and, in most, the greatest of them. The period (1775–1847) of O’Connell’s activities discloses him as one of the generation that came in with Scott and Wordsworth—children of the overlapping centuries, whom shortly the French Revolution was to stir to many things strange to the world of 1775.

The facts of O’Connell’s life arrange themselves concisely from his birth, August 6, 1775, from a good family of County Kerry; his French education at S. Omer and Douay; and his legal sojourn at the customary Lincoln’s Inn; to his call to the Irish Bar (May 19, 1798), and the beginning of his identification with the Irish cause. From his speech in 1813 in defence of Magee,—the basis of this selection,—this identification became ever more complete. It was in 1823 that he founded the “Catholic Association.” In 1828 he was elected to Parliament from County Clare, but was not allowed to take his seat. He stood again, was again elected; and, in 1830, just at the acme of his popularity, at last entered Parliament unchallenged. Now followed within and without the Commons the struggle for Irish liberties that is almost synonymous with the name O’Connell. The year 1843 marks the high tide of his system of agitation by mass-meetings—the “Monster-Meetings,” so-called. This device of popular propaganda was O’Connell’s own; and probably none have ever swayed more temperately than he the mighty forces of a Celtic audience, obedient to the incitations of impassioned oratory. For the most part in the open air and in the countryside O’Connell would draw from a radius of many miles a serious, sympathetic, and—strange to say—sober host of peasantry, in whom his voice woke infallibly the sense of race and religion as things to be fought for, not with the obvious musket, but with orderly combination, moderate measures, and all that a tempered and single-minded zeal could do. The Irish people had long hailed him as their “Liberator”; he was the leader to whom they looked for Catholic Emancipation and the repeal of the forced union with Great Britain; and yet it is not the least tribute to O’Connell’s powers that he was able to restrain a people laboring under acknowledged wrongs, and racially prone to insurrection, from any serious appeal to arms. The Government of that day was not moved by such considerations. The sequence of the “Monster-Meetings” was that O’Connell was arrested and tried on what must now appear a trivial charge of treason. He was even convicted; but the sentence failed to receive the approval of the House of Lords. Although clear of his difficulties, the man was broken, his superb powers gone; and like a true Catholic he had the wish to die at Rome. Before he left England he appeared again in Parliament and tried to speak—his fine voice sunk to a husky whisper. The report in “Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates” of the day’s proceedings, in reference to this episode, is laconically significant; it runs—“Mr. O’Connell was understood to say * * *” On his journey, the “Liberator” died May 5, 1847, at Genoa, whence his body was returned. But in response to a rhetorical instinct that was medieval, Celtic, and yet, one feels, in this case not unjustifiable, his friends caused his heart to be embalmed and sent to Rome, where it rests in the eternal sanctuary of Saint Agatha.

The character of O’Connell challenges the biographer. In everything, perhaps, save his love for moderation, the man was Celtic; and every one does not care for the Celt. Surely he had the defects of the race: improvidence, unbounded invective, a speech too prodigal of epithet and ornament, the ultrasanguine temperament, and, more or less, the histrionic pose. Oppose to these that, as a Catholic, under great provocations, he was tolerant; as an agitator, moderate in his programme; as a man, generous, high-spirited, and, after a convivial youth, notably temperate. Manifestly it is a character that lends itself to the old-style biography of balance. The easiest estimate of it is to say outright that O’Connell was pure demagogue; but if so, he was one of the greatest. He lived in a time when the conduct of political discussion knew no amenities. It was the day of slander, innuendo, high words for high words, and then—the duel. For the high words, see O’Connell’s reported speeches almost anywhere; as for the duelling, he had killed his man at the outset of his prominence, and lived a life of repentance for it. No man, it appears as we read the diatribes of the day, has been more soundly abused in English: his replies seem almost to strain the language of abuse. Thus it is that to the modern taste his style so often strikes a false note, and seems a crude mixture of passion and prejudice unworthy of a fame so great. Therefore O’Connell can least of all men be judged merely by his own words: the critic has always to remember the place and the moment,—the crowded, sympathetic court-room, the biased judge and hostile jury; or the myriad; upturned faces on a green hillside, mobile to each turning of the rhetorical screw. At such hours O’Connell must have yielded to his own art; the orator was subordinated to oratory, and often said ridiculous things.

It was all of a character with O’Connell’s temperamental intensity. In the usual sense of the word, then, he cannot be called a demagogue—a mere puppet of the popular will. When the people and O’Connell had two minds about a question, it was not the “Liberator” who changed. Thus, for his opposition to Trades Unions, he was mobbed and hooted in the very streets of Dublin. Nor did he take the demonstration seriously; he knew his people too well for that. In a word, his appeal and influence were racial rather than parochial; he must be counted not as a great politician, or even statesman, but as one of the “shepherds of the people,”—in Mr. Gladstone’s phrase, an ethnagogue.

His genius found its play in a complete and overwhelming attack of any project: the maxim, ?d?? ??a?, was never its game. As a young man, he forged early to the front of his profession; as he gained freely, so he was always in debt; and when, as one of the leading advocates of Ireland, the ambition of O’Connell looked farther and saw, as one must fancy, a higher art in agitation, he abandoned the certain prosperities of a legal career and left at his death barely £1000. He was a man of emotions, then, subject to moods and aberrations; best at ex tempore effort; poorly read—singular to state—even in Irish history; and if a great orator, surely an orator with something of the actor there. His name will be cherished among his people as one in whom their wrongs found an eloquent and imperative voice; the world will be disposed to regard him as a fine example of the partly ineffectual, partly admirable type Reformer, whose particular programme, as yet but half realized, was, in Mr. Lecky’s words,A “to open in Ireland a new era, with a separate and independent Parliament and perfect religious equality.”