The Phoenix

And there's a score of duchesses, surpassing womankind,

Or who have found a painter to make them so for pay

And smooth out stain and blemish with the elegance of his mind:

I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day.

And who can say but some young belle may walk and talk men wild

Who is my beauty's equal, though that my heart denies. . . .*

Few in Ireland a generation ago would have dared contradict the smitten heart of Poet William Butler Yeats. Like the fabulous bird of Greek myth, the phoenix about whom he wrote in these lines was unique, alone of her species. Born in London, the daughter of an aristocratic Irish officer, tall, stately Maud Gonne (pronounced Gun) was educated in a Paris convent and made her debut in glittering St. Petersburg. She was a daring horsewoman, a thrilling amateur actress, a painter and a gifted linguist. With a Junoesque figure and chestnut hair that fell well below her knees, she was, they said, the loveliest woman in all Ireland.

But Maud Gonne's talents and beauty were not for the drawing rooms of Dublin and the salons of Mayfair. One midwinter night, after a fashionable ball in Ireland's midcountry, Maud had seen an Irish peasant woman and her children flung out of their home by a landlord. Her gay companions shuddered and forgot. But from that time on, Maud Gonne devoted her life to Ireland's independence.

Vainglorious Lout. Up & down the land from a thousand wagons and soapboxes her rich voice called for Home Rule. "Thousands who come to see this new wonder, a beautiful woman who makes speeches," wrote Yeats, "remain to listen with delight. . . . The papers of Russia, France, Germany and even Egypt quote her speeches, and the tale of Irish wrongs has found its way hither and thither "

After the Boer War she married a swashbuckling revolutionary named MacBride, who had fought as a major for Oom Paul Kruger. "This man," wrote Yeats later, "I had deemed a drunken, vainglorious lout." And soon after the birth of their son, Maud and Major MacBride were separated. After the Easter Rising in 1916, the major was executed by the British. In 1921, Maud became the first representative of the Free State in Paris. Soon, however, the Free State began to bear down on her beloved Irish Republican Army. Maud resigned her official post. At 70 she was still mounting carts in Dublin to inveigh against De Valera for his treatment of the Republicans.

The Clann. When the phoenix of the ancients had lived upwards of 500 years, it retired to await death in the high branches of an oak or palm tree. From there a young phoenix would rise to carry the spent body of his parent to the altar of the sun. By last week Maud Gonne MacBride was 81, bedridden in a rambling old-world mansion outside of Dublin. The De Valera government, for which and against which she had fought so bitterly, had grown complacent and tired. For years Dev's party, the Fianna Fail, had known no effective opposition, but last month Ireland's Joan of Arc was helped from her bed to go to the polls and vote in a national by-election.

The Clann na Poblachta (Republican Party), founded only a year ago, had dared to challenge Dev's Fianna Fail. In Dublin, Waterford and Tipperary Counties, Clann candidates cut heavily into the Fianna's 1944 majorities. "The political tide, if it has not yet turned," said the Irish Times, "most assuredly is turning."

And who was the leader of the new party that thus threatened old Dev? He was a tall, dapper, 43-year-old lawyer who had spent his life in the Republican movement, bombing British armored cars while still a boy, commanding a brigade of the Irish Republican Army while still in his teens. A guerrilla, journalist and orator, he had been in jail often, studied law on the side. In 1937, still wanted by the police, he had succeeded in sitting for his law examinations at Dublin's University College and taking a degree with honors before making his getaway. He was Maud Gonne's son, Sean MacBride.

* Copyright 1933 by Macmillan Co. and used with their permission.

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