" Colonel ” Arthur Lynch.

Gisborne Times, Volume VII, Issue 307, 7 January 1902, Page 1

" Colonel ” Arthur Lynch.

JOURNALIST, CONSPIRATOR, AND

RENEGADE

A journalist writes as follows in the London Express : —Arthur Lynch has come curiously before the public during the past few days. Hitherto he was not known to the multitude.

He is a dreamer, a poet, a champion of lost causea, and half-forgotten beliefs. Those who know him, who,, appreciate his fine qualities, his ardour, his sheer impossibleness, will never confound him with the scum of degenerate Irishmen who contrive to fill the advertising poster.

To begin with, I hardly regard Lynch as an Irishman. He was, I believe, born in Australia—most certainly bred there. His people occupied a good position, and, at an early age (ho is now about thirtyfour), he was sent to Vienna to study medicine. He learnt something of the hoaling art, but he took more interest in Socialism and poetry than in anatomy. To him every sort of sham was hateful, so he boldly told his relatives that he had pitched physic to the dogs, and taken literature via Bohemia. Result —parental remonstrances and a threat of being cut off with a parental shilling. As if a shilling, or a million shillings, could wean him from the muse. See, then,

this youthful visionary, tall, lanky, a typical Cornstalk in appearance, with a keen, hatchet-like face, high forehead, and large, closely-sot oyes, fiercely resentful of pressure that would keep him to the beaten path, setting out for Paris, the Mecca of genius. Thero he undoubtedly encountered the agents of tho Fenian organisation. What a splendid recruit he was ! A thinker, a writer, perhaps an orator, an enthusiast who preferred a crust and hi 3 ideal to wealth and compromise. Clearly such a man would be an acquisition to the Irish Parliamentary party. So he went to Galway, but his fine-tempered blade was quickly blunted against the shield of Parnellism. Lynch could not stomach the servitude demanded by the autocrat, and the result was seen in a fiercely-contested election, in which the young free-lance was beaten by some fifty votes. I first met Lynch in 1893 It was my duty to examine and pronounce on literary contributions to the Sun when that journal burst upon modern London. One day he walked in and offered an article on some topic. It was excellent. After a very brief novitiate he practically became a member of the staff, as my colleague, the news editor of those days, shared my belief in Lynch’s capabilities. Once he was sent to interview Mascagni. Ho found that distinguished personage in bed. The resultant conversation, written in broken English, French, German, and Italian, was one of the best things I ever read.

Lynch, too, dabbled in poetry, and published two volumes of verse, clever, wolfishly satirical of society, inspired in lines, and throughout well written. One of these volumes, if I remember aright, described certain phases of modern life so unblushingly that the publisher stopped its circulation.

Early in 1894 Lynch came to me and asked for a month’s holiday. He had urgent business in the United States. Ho must go, even if compelled to resign his position. I argued with him, even tempted him with a bait of more and highly-paid work, but ho was obdurate. I guessed that his journey wa3 connected with the silly propaganda of physical force employed by the O’Donovan Rossa type of humbug, and I parted from him with regret, for Lynch was a very lovable fellow.

In three weeks he returned —so the business did not take long and my chaffing comments on his secret mission surprised him into earnestness. His eyes lit up, his thin face glowed with passion as he described to me bombs of such potency that they would wreck London Bridge, yet five of them could bo carried in a cigar-case. Poor Lynch 1 The pity of it that this splendid literary career should bo destroyed by such bombs ! No one could have tried harder .than I did to pull him back from the abyss. We saw much of each other, discussed mutual projects in novels and plays, but on that one topic of revolution, of hatred to England, of an insane desire to wrest the Irish race from the grip of the detestable: Saxon, he would not listen, to me, yet I was a Saxon, and certainly a dose friend ot'his, and we jointly made a few pounds in a West Australian mining deal 1 Then we drifted apart, wholly by accident. I heard of him as one marked “ dangerous ” by the special department of Scotland Yard which doals with dynamitards, as correspondent for a London daily paper, as author of more poems, and, finally, as “ colonel ” in the Boer army. He has been down there in the Transvaal, herding with men against, whom his very soul must revolt, fighting against men whose every sympathy, save one, is in harmony with him.