<SPAN name="XXIII"></SPAN>
<h2>XXIII</h2>
<h2><b>THE WORK OF T.M. KETTLE</b></h2>
<br/>
<p>To have written books and to have died in battle has been a common
enough fate in the last few years. But not many of the young men who
have fallen in the war have left us with such a sense of perished
genius
as Lieutenant T.M. Kettle, who was killed at Ginchy. He was one of
those
men who have almost too many gifts to succeed. He had the gift of
letters and the gift of politics; he was a mathematician, an economist,
a barrister, and a philosopher; he was a Bohemian as well as a scholar;
as one listened to him, one suspected at times that he must be one of
the most brilliant conversationalists of the age. He lived in a blaze
of
adoration as a student, and, though this adoration was tempered by the
abuse of opponents in his later years, he still had a way of going
about
as a conqueror with his charm. Had he only had a little ordinariness in
his composition to harden him, he would almost certainly have ended as
the leading Irish statesman of his day. He was undoubtedly ambitious of
success in the grand style. But with his ambition went the mood of
Ecclesiastes, which reminded him of the vanity of ambition. In his
youth
he adhered to Herbert Spencer's much-quoted saying: "What I need to
realize is how infinitesimal is the importance of anything I can do,
and
how infinitely important it is that I should do it." But, while with
Spencer this was a call to action, with Kettle it was rather a call to
meditation, to discussion. He was the Hamlet of modern Ireland. And it
is interesting to remember that in one of his early essays he defended
Hamlet against the common charge of "inability to act," and protested
that he was the victim, not of a vacillating will, but of the fates. He
contended that, so great were the issues and so dubious the evidence,
Hamlet had every right to hesitate. "The commercial blandness," he
wrote, "with which people talk of Hamlet's 'plain duty' makes one
wonder
if they recognize such a thing as plain morality. The 'removal' of an
uncle without due process of law and on the unsupported evidence of an
unsubpoenable ghost; the widowing of a mother and her casting-off as
unspeakably vile, are treated as enterprises about which a man has no
right to hesitate or even to feel unhappy." This is not
mere speciousness. There is the commonsense of pessimism in it too.</p>
<p>The normal Irish man of letters begins as something of a Utopian.
Kettle
was always too much of a pessimist—he himself would have said a
realist—to yield easily to romance. As a very young man he edited in
Dublin a paper called <i>The Nationist</i>, for which he claimed,
above all
things, that it stood for "realism" in politics. Some men are driven
into revolution by despair: it was as though Kettle had been driven
into
reform by despair. He admired the Utopians, but he could not share
their
faith. "If one never got tired," he wrote in a sketch of the
International Socialist Congress at Stuttgart in 1907, "one would
always
be with the revolutionaries, the re-makers, with Fourier and Kropotkin.
But the soul's energy is strictly limited; and with weariness there
comes the need for compromise, for 'machines,' for reputation, for
routine. Fatigue is the beginning of political wisdom." One finds the
same strain of melancholy transmuting itself into gaiety with an
epigram
in much of his work. His appreciation of Anatole France is the
appreciation of a kindred spirit. In an essay called <i>The Fatigue of
Anatole France</i> in <i>The Day's Burden</i> he defended his author's
pessimistic attitude as he might have defended his own:</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>A pessimism, stabbed and gashed with the radiance of epigrams, as a
thundercloud is stabbed by lightning, is a type of spiritual life far
from contemptible. A reasonable sadness, chastened by the music of
consummate prose, is an attitude and an achievement that will help many
men to bear with more resignation the burden of our century.</p>
</div>
<p>How wonderfully, again, he portrays the Hamlet doubts of Anatole
France,
when, speaking of his bust, he says: "It is the face of a soldier ready
to die for a flag in which he does not entirely believe." And he goes
on:</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>He looks out at you like a veteran of the lost cause of intellect,
to whose soul the trumpet of defeat strikes with as mournful and
vehement a music as to that of Pascal himself, but who thinks that a
wise man may be permitted to hearten himself up in evil days with an
anecdote after the manner of his master Rabelais.</p>
</div>
<p>Kettle himself practised just such a gloom shot with gaiety. He did
not,
however, share Anatole France's gaiety of unbelief. In some ways he was
more nearly akin to Villiers de l'Isle Adam, with his religion and his
love of the fine gesture. Had he been a Frenchman of an earlier
generation, he would have been famous for his talk, like Villiers, in
the cafés. Most people who knew him contend that he talked even
better
than he wrote; but one gets a good enough example of his ruling mood
and
attitude in the fine essay called <i>On Saying Good-bye.</i>
Meditating on
life as "a sustained good-bye," he writes:</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>Life is a cheap <i>table d'hôte</i> in a rather dirty
restaurant, with Time changing the plates before you have had enough of
anything.</p>
<p> We were bewildered at school to be told that walking was a
perpetual falling. But life is, in a far more significant way, a
perpetual dying. Death is not an eccentricity, but a settled habit of
the universe. The drums of to-day call to us, as they call to young
Fortinbras in the fifth act of <i>Hamlet</i>, over corpses piled up in
such abundance as to be almost ridiculous. We praise the pioneer, but
we praise him on wrong grounds. His strength lies not in his leaning
out to new things—that may be mere curiosity—but in his power to
abandon old things. All his courage is a courage of adieus.</p>
</div>
<p>This meditativeness on the passing nature of things is one of the
old
moods of mankind. Kettle, however, was one of the men of our time in
whom it has achieved imaginative expression. I remember his once
saying,
in regard to some hostile criticisms that had been passed on his own
"power to abandon old things": "The whole world is nothing but the
story
of a renegade. The bud is renegade to the tree, and the flower to the
bud, and the fruit to the flower." Though he rejoiced in change as a
politician, however, he bewaited the necessity of change as a
philosopher. His praise of death in the essay I have just quoted from
is
the praise of something that will put an end to changes and goodbyes</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>There is only one journey, as it seems to me ... in which we attain
our ideal of going away and going home at the same time. Death,
normally encountered, has all the attractions of suicide without any of
its horrors. The old woman—</p>
</div>
<p>an old woman previously mentioned who complained that "the only
bothersome thing about walking was that the miles began at the wrong
end"—</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>the old woman when she comes to that road will find the miles
beginning at the right end. We shall all bid our first real adieu to
those brother-jesters of ours, Time; and Space; and though the
handkerchiefs flutter, no lack of courage will have power to cheat or
defeat us. "However amusing the comedy may have been," wrote Pascal,
"there is always blood in the fifth act. They scatter a little dust in
your face; and then all is over for ever." Blood there may be, but
blood does not necessarily mean tragedy. The wisdom of humility bids us
pray that in that fifth act we may have good lines and a timely exit;
but, fine or feeble, there is comfort in breaking the parting word into
its two significant halves, a Dieu. Since life has been a constant
slipping from one good-bye to another, why should we fear that sole
good-bye which promises to cancel all its forerunners?</p>
</div>
<p>There you have a passage which, in the light of events, seems
strangely
prophetic. Kettle certainly got his "good lines" at Ginchy. He gave his
life greatly for his ideal of a free Ireland in a free Europe.</p>
<p>This suggests that underlying his Hamlet there was a man of action
as
surely as there was a jester. He was a man with a genius for rising to
the occasion—for saying the fine word and doing the fine thing. He
compromised often, in accordance with his "realistic" view of things;
but he never compromised in his belief in the necessity of large and
European ideals in Ireland. He stood by all good causes, not as an
extremist, but as a helper somewhat disillusioned. But his
disillusionment never made him feeble in the middle of the fight. He
was
the sworn foe of the belittlers of Ireland. One will get an idea of the
passion with which he fought for the traditional Ireland, as well as
for
the Ireland of coming days, if one turns to his rhymed reply to a
living
English poet who had urged the Irish to forget their history and gently
cease to be a nation. The last lines of this poem—<i>Reason in Rhyme</i>,
as
he called it—are his testament to England no less than his call to
Europeanism is his testament to Ireland:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza"><span>Bond, from the toil of hate we may not cease:<br/>
</span><span>Free, we are free to be your friend.<br/>
</span><span>And when you make your banquet, and we come.<br/>
</span><span>Soldier with equal soldier must we sit,<br/>
</span><span>Closing a battle, not forgetting it.<br/>
</span><span>With not a name to hide,<br/>
</span><span>This mate and mother of valiant "rebels" dead<br/>
</span><span>Must come with all her history on her head.<br/>
</span><span>We keep the past for pride:<br/>
</span><span>No deepest peace shall strike our poets dumb:<br/>
</span><span>No rawest squad of all Death's volunteers,<br/>
</span><span>No rudest men who died<br/>
</span><span>To tear your flag down in the bitter years.<br/>
</span><span>But shall have praise, and three times thrice again,<br/>
</span><span>When at the table men shall drink with men.<br/>
</span></div>
</div>
<p>That was Kettle's mood to the last. This was the mood that made him
regard with such horror the execution of Pearse and Connolly, and the
other leaders of the Dublin insurrection. He regarded these men as
having all but destroyed his dream of an Ireland enjoying the freedom
of Europe. But he did not believe that any English Government possessed
the right to be merciless in Ireland. The murder of Sheehy-Skeffington,
who was his brother-in-law, cast another shadow over his imagination
from which he never recovered. Only a week before he died he wrote to
me
from France: "The Skeffington case oppresses me with horror." When I
saw
him in the previous July, he talked like a man whose heart Easter Week
and its terrible retributions had broken. But there must have been
exaltation in those days just before his death, as one gathers from the
last, or all but the last, of his letters home:</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>We are moving up to-night into the battle of the Somme. The
bombardment, destruction, and bloodshed are beyond all imagination, nor
did I ever think that the valour of simple men could be quite as
beautiful as that of my Dublin Fusiliers. I have had two chances of
leaving them—one on sick leave and one to take a staff job. I have
chosen to stay with my comrades.</p>
</div>
<p>There at the end you have the grand gesture. There you have the
"good
lines" that Kettle had always desired.</p>
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