When an Irish president rises to speak to both Houses of Parliament at Westminster, as Michael D Higgins did in April 2014, the poets, soldiers and politicians he might turn to for an apt quotation are legion. As it happens, Higgins reached twice for the words of the same man, Thomas Kettle: a poet, soldier and politician, all in one.
Kettle was a barrister who became Irish Parliamentary Party MP for East Tyrone in 1906. He was professor of national economics at University College Dublin. His poetry includes the line “Free, we are free to be your friend”, which Higgins quoted before the assembled parliamentarians. In 1914, having witnessed at first hand the sufferings of the Belgians, Kettle volunteered for the Western Front. He was killed at the Battle of the Somme. In the words of the current president, he died as “an Irish patriot, a British soldier and a true European”.
After the war, GK Chesterton came to regard Kettle as “perhaps the greatest example of that greatness of spirit which was so ill-rewarded on both sides of the channel; a wit, a scholar, an orator, a man ambitious in all the arts of peace.” He too thought Kettle a true European. As it happens, 10 years beforehand, Kettle had come to view Chesterton as “the wisest pen in English letters”. Indeed, his summing up of Chesterton is near perfect: “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.”
What is more, Kettle appears to have had Chesterton’s flair for paradox and epigram. He begins his book The Open Secret of Ireland with a comical analysis of the English character, masking a serious intent: “no examination of the Irish Problem is possible without a prior examination of the English mind.”
“The Englishman’s country,” he writes, “is an impregnable island, his house is a castle, his temperament is a suit of armour. The function common to all three is to keep things out, and most admirably has he used them to that end. At first, indeed, he let everybody in; he had a perfect passion for being conquered, and Romans, Teutons, Danes and Normans in succession plucked and ate the apple of England. But with the coming of age of that national consciousness, the bonds of which have never been snapped, the English entered on their lucky and courageous career of keeping things out.”
Soon, Kettle is close to out-Chestertoning Chesterton. His subject has become the English on their travels: “Everybody has laughed at the comedy of it, but no one
has sufficiently applauded its success. The English tourist declined to be at the trouble of speaking any foreign tongue whatsoever; instantly every hotel and restaurant on the Continent was forced to learn English. He refused to read their books; a Leipsic firm at once started to publish his own, and sold him his six-shilling Clapham novels in Lucerne for two francs. He dismissed with indignation the idea of breakfasting on a roll, and bacon and eggs were added unto him. In short, by a straightforward policy of studying nobody else, he compelled everybody else to study him.”
Chesterton also appears to have been held in high esteem by Kettle’s contemporary, Michael Collins, who chose the route of violent revolt over constitutional nationalism. Collins was, apparently, deeply attached to The Napoleon of Notting Hill. And in The Man Who Was Thursday, he read the line “if you don’t seem to be hiding, nobody hunted you out”. Seemingly this coloured his whole approach to the guerrilla campaign he organised while cycling round Dublin in full view. Collins’s hope for the economy of the new Ireland (which he did not live to see) was that it would develop along the Distributist lines championed by Chesterton.
And now the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising is almost upon us. Both Collins and Kettle were in Dublin when it happened. Collins was fighting alongside Pearce and Connolly. Kettle was horrified at the violence of the uprising, which he saw as the last nail in the coffin of Home Rule. And yet he was distraught too on hearing of the executions of the Rising leaders. “I would have died for Thomas MacDonagh,” he cried. MacDonagh lectured on English at University College Dublin.
Four months later, his colleague was killed too, fighting for a different cause. In a beautiful sonnet, “To My Daughter Betty, the Gift of God”, written days beforehand, Tom Kettle, foreseeing his fate, tried to explain what, in the end, he died for. It was “not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor / But for a dream, born in a herdsman’s shed / and for the secret Scripture of the poor.”
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