Читать книгу The Enigma of Arthur Griffith - Colum Kenny - Страница 10

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1871–1901: Hard-Working Men

‘It is tiresome being a boy. To relieve the ennui of my youth I had taken to having convictions. My first conviction was that the English were a detestable race, my last that my compatriots were an exceedingly foolish but highly admirable people.’ So wrote Arthur Griffith.1 Educated by the Christian Brothers, he was said by a fellow pupil to be ‘dilatory and unresponsive to the master’s strap’.2 Griffith believed that only the school system of the Christian Brothers properly recognised Ireland. In schools controlled by government nominees, he wrote: ‘The pupil was not taught as he is in every system elsewhere, to look out upon the world from his own country.’3

By the age of fourteen at the latest, Griffith left school to become apprenticed to a Protestant printer. About that time, his family later said, he wrote a piece that an English magazine (Old and Young) published.4 He also joined the Young Ireland Society. In 1885 its president John O’Leary, the Fenian veteran, presented him with books at the annual prize-giving of this ‘neo-Fenian’ organisation. Another member of the society was W.B. Yeats, with whom O’Leary shared his personal library.5 O’Leary, who was something of a mentor to Griffith and Yeats, once stated that no account of his own life as an ardent nationalist and journalist could be complete without mentioning his devotion to books.6

The Leinster

By the age of eighteen Griffith was also one of the most enthusiastic members of a group that styled itself variously as the Leinster Debating Club/Society or the Leinster Literary Club/Society. Its members met in a room at 87 Marlborough Street, where they kept a small lending library.7 Significantly, the bitter split in Irish politics occasioned by the downfall of Parnell led to the demise of the Leinster in 1892, and Griffith was to be the instrument of its destruction.

Meetings of the Leinster started by reading and discussing papers written by its members, and ended in poetry and sing-songs that included both ‘classical and patriotic’ ballads. Those ‘beautiful little concerts made the evenings enjoyable’, wrote one member.8 At St Patrick’s Day and Christmas there were special celebrations. All this happened in the centre of a city that was dirty and decaying. At Griffith’s suggestion in 1889, members organised long, healthy walks together in the country on Sundays, and reported back on sites of interest visited by them.9 In 1891 James Moran joined the club. He later fondly recalled these young men out together in the Dublin hills. Another acquaintance wrote of Griffith that ‘he was a splendid man to be with on tramps’, for ‘he could go on for hours with a deliberate gait, talking in a rather low voice about people and places. He knew everything about the local history of Dublin and the places adjoining’.10 Even when in London for treaty negotiations in 1921, Griffith led members of his delegation’s staff on rambles through that city.

Some of the young men also cycled together on Saturdays during the 1890s. Griffith got himself an old second-hand bike and named it ‘the humming-bird’, on account of the noise it made before it even came into sight.11 Later, he and some friends peddled 140 kilometers to a Gaelic League festival in Wexford.12 Such outings benefited him in 1916 when he had to ride his bicycle on a long circuitous route by the outskirts of Dublin for a secret meeting across town with Eoin MacNeill.

Minutes of the Leinster society survive for the years 1888–92,13 as does a bound volume of some contributions to the first seven issues of its occasional handwritten journal Eblana. ‘Eblana’ was a name that the Greek geographer Ptolemy once gave to an Irish settlement on or near the site of Dublin.14 Each issue of this journal that survives appears from the minutes to have been read aloud and discussed at meetings. The surviving volume, from 1889, includes an emphatic preface addressed by Eblana’s first editor, Robert Flood, to anyone whose property it might become in the future:

Our society was composed of hard-working young men of humble circumstances who formed a society for their mutual improvement … Therefore, Oh stranger, toss not your head in scorn when you peruse their maiden efforts in literature. Sneer not if colons, semi-colons, and full periods, are less numerous than they would be if our society boasted of M. [A.] and B.A … [It was] written by youths, to fortune and fame unknown.15

As if to underline this point, Flood had to be replaced as editor later in 1889 when he emigrated. He had been its main contributor, with Griffith the other main writer.16 In the fashion of the time contributors adopted pen names, with Griffith already using ‘Shanganagh’, with which he would become closely associated through the pages of the United Irishman. All pen names are identified at the start of the Eblana volume. Out of forty-nine contributions listed for the period of the extant volume, ten were by Flood and nine by Griffith. Shortly before Flood left, he contributed an essay on the ‘Social Condition of the Working Classes’ in which he praised a principle that became Griffith’s political philosophy, writing about ‘that all important factor … the principle of Self Reliance [underlined on the manuscript]’. He reported that his paper had given rise to ‘a most interesting debate’.17 Flood was followed as editor, successively, by Edward Whelan, John Doyle and William Rooney. No issue that any of these three edited appears to have survived.

Griffith spent a night alone in Glasnevin Cemetery, writing for the Eblana about doing so.18 His friend Ed Whelan wrote on ‘Strikes: Their Remedy’. The minutes show that ‘Whelan advocated a system of state socialism or the owning of all sources of trade and industry by the state’, and that his paper was favourably received by Griffith and other members.19

There appear to have been about twenty active members of the club, writing about and discussing a range of literary and other matters from Longfellow and Tennyson, through socialism and religion and on to Irish poetesses. All its members were male, although an explicit late effort by John R. Whelan to have the exclusion of women written into the club’s rules as a requirement, was defeated on the casting vote of the meeting’s chairman, Arthur Griffith.20 Griffith was president of the club from 3 October 1890 until 11 December 1891.

Papers read by Griffith to members included ‘The Irish Writers of the Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’ (‘loudly applauded’), ‘The Elizabethan Poets’, and ‘Thomas Parnell and His Contemporaries’. The latter ‘exhaustive paper’ was unfortunately interrupted from time to time by ‘the uproariousness of a dance club in the room beneath us’.21 During the delivery of his paper on Elizabethans on 5 February 1892, Griffith ‘contended that Marlowe and Massinger have not been accorded the position among the poets of their time which their words entitled them to, and that the abilities of Ben Jonson were much over-rated’. This he delivered to a club of hard-working men like himself who had left school early and who were trying to make a living by day.

There were also formal debates. Griffith argued in the affirmative on a question ‘Is the Church opposed to civilization’, and ‘also spoke in favour of republicanism’ on a heavily defeated motion ‘That monarchial is a better form of government’.22 In a paper on ‘Grattan and Flood’, who were leading lights of the pre-1800 independently minded Protestant Irish parliament, Griffith said of Grattan ‘Had he not played the generous fool prating of Ireland’s trust in English generosity the misery of the last ninety years would have been impossible … Had Henry Flood’s advice been taken by his rival, Ireland, in all human probability would to-day be a free and prosperous nation.’ This paper was read on the evening that his younger friend William Rooney joined the club in 1891.23 Griffith’s contributions to Eblana also included essays on Irish street ballads, James Clarence Mangan, the Gracchi and Sir Richard Steele. The editor commended Griffith for his essay on Irish street ballads, including ‘the simplicity of language and humourous descriptions’, and said of the eighteen-year-old who was already using what became his best-known pen name ‘We expect much from “Shanganagh”.’ In the spirit of the club he also criticised some of Griffith’s other work.24

Griffith’s humourous contributions to Eblana included some lyrical lines devoted to ‘Ye Maide Without a Name’. These resemble in tone verses that he would later dedicate to ‘Mollie’ (Mary/Maud Sheehan) in the 1890s. In this way he responded to the editor’s appeal for a lighter approach than that which he and other earnest young men had taken on ‘very heavy subjects’ when first invited to write for Eblana.25 Griffith also showed his sense of humour in a piece about printers, such as he and his father were. He wrote for Eblana of ‘the unfortunate being’ who misreading the line ‘I kissed her under the kitchen stairs’ rendered it as ‘I kicked her under the kitchen stairs’.26 As MP for the Coombe in a moot parliament held by the club he wittily opposed a bill proposing Home Rule for Ringsend on the paradoxical grounds that he was ‘following the dictates of his own conscience and the instructions of his constituents’, only to abstain on the vote.27

Griffith and others ‘succeeded in contributing much to make the evening a very bright and happy one’ when members organised a ‘smoking-concert’ one dismal November day. On another occasion a meeting ‘resolved itself into a bohemian choral society’. Apparently members sometimes drank ‘gooseberry wine champagne’, as at their St Patrick’s Annual Banquet, held in the room where they usually met. At Christmas 1891, Griffith recited ‘The Courtship of Tarlagh Mulligan’, while his friend William Rooney sang ‘A Nation Once Again’ and ‘Carolan’s Cup’.28

Tensions and Charles Stewart Parnell

Contributions to the Eblana were sternly criticised at meetings, and also in writing by its editor. This was believed to encourage success in the tradition of Young Ireland.29 Its range and tone prefigured the ethos of Griffith’s United Irishman. The club’s minutes also show that, as might be expected of any group of young Irishmen debating politics and society, there were occasional tensions and disagreements. However, reading its minutes, one is unprepared for the eruption that destroyed the club in 1892 and that saw Griffith and his friend Rooney express different opinions. It was an example of the damaging divisiveness caused by ‘the Parnell split’ in Irish politics, a split that Griffith would long seek to avoid replicating by his single-minded demand for national independence and his determination that all other considerations, whether personal, cultural or social, be subsidiary to that.

Griffith at this point even tried his hand at Parnellite verse, more successfully than James Joyce’s alter ego would in the latter’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where Stephen Dedalus ‘saw himself sitting at his table in Bray the morning after the discussion at the Christmas dinner table, trying to write a poem about Parnell on the back of one of his father’s second moiety notices. But his brain had then refused to grapple with the theme’. On 8 March 1889, Griffith included in his contributions to the first run of Eblana some verses entitled ‘The Crimes of The Times’.30 It was just two weeks since the Pigott forgeries published in the London Times had been exposed, having been used to implicate Parnell falsely in the Phoenix Park murders. It was nine months before Katharine O’Shea’s husband filed for divorce. Griffith’s lines included these:

Our great and glorious Parnell’s victorious

The forgers scattered far and near

And the wicked crimes of the blaguard Times

Will soon be punished I have no fear.

However, by the following winter events finally overtook the Irish leader. On 25 November 1890 Prime Minister William Gladstone’s letter urging Parnell’s resignation was published. Later that week Griffith proposed a very strong and detailed motion of support for Parnell, and persuaded members of the Leinster ‘comprising all shades of public opinion’ to agree with it unanimously: ‘Mr Griffith spoke as one who never was a supporter of Mr Parnell but was an independent nationalist.’ The club agreed to inform Parnell that ‘To us it matter not whether ecclesiastical domination on the one side, or Dublin Castle influence on the other prevail, our duty is imperative. The path of independence is before us.’31 Griffith and a friend are said to have tried but failed to persuade Timothy Harrington, a Parnellite MP, to give up his seat in Dublin so that Parnell might be elected there instead.32 The Leinster also canvassed the voters of North Kilkenny in a vital by-election, with Griffith as club president using then on its notices his pen name J.P. Ruhart (an anagram of ‘Arthur’).33

In 1891 Griffith went to support Parnell at Broadstone Station in Dublin when Parnell left for Creggs, Co. Galway, to address what was his last election meeting. Parnell told those present that he was going to the west ‘contrary to his doctor’s orders, as he was suffering from a severe cold’.34 It was a dismal time, recalled in Griffith’s paper twenty years later:

On a September night, gloomy and cold, Parnell came to the Broadstone on an outside car to journey to his last meeting, accompanied by one faithful friend. Around the station the present writer and fifty or sixty others waited to give him a parting blessing – to cheer him up with the message that the rank-and-file of his followers in Dublin would stand by him to the last, although every man who wore the letters ‘M.P.’ after his name disappeared from his side. When Mr Parnell arrived at the station, it needed no physician to see that he was ill, and wretchedly ill. His face was livid and haggard, one of his arms bandaged, and the hand I shook had no longer the firm grip I had felt previously … As he descended from the car a woman beside me stretched out her hand to him saying ‘God bless you, Mr Parnell – don’t go tonight.’ He turned towards her, smiled and shook his head. That was the last we saw of Parnell alive.35

Joyce’s fictional Leopold Bloom had a moment with Parnell too: ‘He saw him once on the auspicious occasion when they broke up the type in the Insuppressible or was it United Ireland, a privilege he keenly appreciated, and, in point of fact, handed him his silk hat when it was knocked off and he [Parnell] said Thank you’. When Parnell died, Griffith and Rooney and other members of the Leinster marched as a group in the funeral procession on Sunday, 11 October 1891.36

Parnell’s downfall poisoned and dulled Irish politics for more than a decade, its venom evident at a meeting of the Leinster Debating Club, when one of that society’s occasional visitors, James McCluskey, scoffed at members and claimed that they would be anti-Parnellites if they lived down in Mallow, Co. Cork. Nevertheless, Rooney and others in the club proposed McCloskey for membership a fortnight later. Griffith spoke strongly against McCloskey’s admission but was defeated. He and some others immediately resigned.37 During a lively discussion one week afterwards, Rooney explained that he had supported McCloskey on the assumption that the man had spoken originally in the heat of the moment and would pull back. But the damage was done, and on 9 December 1892, the remaining members of the Leinster Debating Club wound up their society.

Girls and Gas

Girls did not participate in the usual meetings of the Leinster. But Griffith could enjoy female company at the house of his more affluent Whelan cousins, where there were frequent Sunday teas, with a piano and girls singing favourite songs.38 A printer’s apprentice told Padraic Colum that when a group including Griffith paired off with girls, ‘“Dan” [i.e. Griffith] would begin to spout lines such as “To be or not to be,” or “The quality of mercy is not strained” [both by Shakespeare].’ Padraic Colum suspected that this display of erudition was as much to cover Griffith’s shyness as to make an impression, and one fears that some of the girls were not impressed.39

However, if he was not always fascinating, at least Griffith was by no means out of place in the emerging social order for which James Joyce in Ulysses outlined alternative qualifications:

You must have a certain fascination: Parnell. Arthur Griffith is a squareheaded fellow but he has no go in him for the mob. Or gas about our lovely land. Gammon and spinach. Dublin Bread Company’s [DBC] tearoom. Debating societies. That republicanism is the best form of government. That the language question should take precedence of the economic question. Have your daughters inveigling them to your house.

Griffith and Rooney could certainly, and did ‘gas about our lovely land’. Why would they not when others trumpeted the glories of empire? Griffith frequented lively debating clubs, when a growing number of small literary societies generated a head of steam about a national revival. Pubs and tearooms such as the DBC provided further venues for discussion with his friends. And at the Leinster he argued that republicanism was the best form of government. Whether or not he was ‘inveigled’ by Peter Sheehan’s daughters into their home on Cook Street is unknown, but he certainly visited them there, and perhaps later called to the new home that, at the turn of the century, the family acquired on a fashionable street. Griffith might not be convinced that the Irish language question ‘should take precedence of the economic question’, regretting as he did that there were ‘muddled persons who confound language and nationality’ and disdaining ‘camp-followers of the language movement, shouting raucously their shibboleth “An Gaedheal Thu?”’. But he studied Irish, believing that ‘all of us surely can inspire those destined to carve our epitaphs to re-learn it’.40 Seán T. O’Kelly, when later president of Ireland, wrote that from 1899 ‘Griffith and Rooney, in the pages of the United Irishman gave the Gaelic League all the support that they could’. O’Kelly added:

Griffith himself practised what he preached, and was a regular attendant at Irish classes which were held every week in the rooms of the Celtic Literary Society. Though I know that he worked hard to learn Irish, and long years after these days I speak of now, I can say Griffith attended regular classes in Irish in Reading Prison, I am afraid his efforts to get a knowledge of the language were never very successful, but he gave the example which was the effective thing at the time.41

The turn of the century saw many young men attempting to learn Irish, with James Joyce among those taking lessons.

South Africa

When the Leinster was dissolved, Rooney soon became the founding stalwart of a new Celtic Literary Society. Griffith seems not to have been actively involved at meetings of this new group before going to South Africa in January 1898, although before leaving he attended its Christmas festivities with the woman whom he would one day marry.42 He had recently lost his job in Dublin, perhaps by quitting in resentment at the response to a practical joke played on him, and this presumably put him under financial pressure. Printing jobs were not easy to find at the time.43 He was not alone or first among his friends in leaving Ireland. John R. Whelan, ‘a capable and energetic secretary’ of the Celtic Literary Society and ‘a disciple of John Mitchel’ had no sooner had his considered appeal to ‘the thinking Irishman’ on literature and nationalism printed in the advanced nationalist Shan Van Vocht in 1897 than he went to South Africa before Griffith. In his case, Dublin Castle suspected that it was for political rather than economic reasons. Griffith was fond of Whelan, and Griffith’s humorous poem ‘The Thirteenth Lock’ was recited at Whelan’s farewell drinks.44 Griffith’s son Nevin later said that Whelan wrote from Africa urging his father to go out. Rumours that Whelan was killed there were false, and he later returned to Ireland before emigrating long-term to Scotland.45

When Griffith announced that he was leaving Ireland, his friends held a farewell session for him too. At it Rooney paid Griffith a glowing tribute, speaking as someone who knew ‘how much the existence of many National organisations have owed to your support, who have watched how well the gospel of Young Ireland has been put into practice by you, who have recognised the reality of your enthusiasm and patriotism by your very modesty and reserve.’46 Before Griffith went he contributed for the society’s journal under his pen name ‘J.P. Ruhart’ a ‘very amusing skit’ about the adventures of an Irish philosopher.47

Griffith may have emigrated simply in search of better-paid employment. But there is also a hint of threatened tuberculosis, a disease that was common in Dublin. It has even been suggested that he deliberately went to South Africa to ‘make friends for Ireland’.48 Perhaps he went as part of a general strategy on the part of the IRB, when it was hoped that the Boers might beat the British in an imminent war. He was certainly politically active there, along with John MacBride.

So much did Griffith’s friends admire his skills that months after he left they took the unusual step of devoting a special session of the Celtic Literary Society to his writings. These consisted ‘in a great measure of local stories, sketches, and songs, dealing with life in the Liberties and other ancient parts of our city’. It was recorded that ‘The character drawing, treatment of dialogue, and general surroundings of the story were recognised and heartily enjoyed by the audience as absolutely true to their models.’49 Members regretted that Griffith’s writings were not better known, ‘and trusted that some effort would be made to bring them into greater popularity’. In this way a seed was planted that would grow into Rooney’s decision to propose for the position of editor of the planned United Irishman his friend Arthur Griffith, who returned to Dublin from South Africa in the autumn of 1898.

Griffith then sometimes made his way to Sandycove, in south Dublin, to swim at the Forty Foot and relax on the sheltered roof of a nearby Martello tower that Oliver St John Gogarty occasionally leased from its owner (Plate 6). Gogarty, like Griffith, was a strong swimmer and the two men ventured far out into Dublin Bay.50 James Joyce was to set in this tower the opening scene of Ulysses, perhaps the most famous novel of the twentieth century. As that century dawned, Arthur Griffith was approaching his thirtieth birthday.

Sackville/O’Connell Street, 1903–8. The Dublin of Griffith and of Joyce’s Ulysses (National Library of Ireland [L_CAB_06672]).