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CHAPTER THREE

The Review Editor

Arthur Griffith’s relationship with the journalistic profession might be typified as lifelong: his own father had a thirty-year association with the newspaper business. As a teenager, Griffith both satirised and celebrated the profession by writing fictional tales of a journalist ‘smoking a cigar with the easy grace of a man about town’. He wins top jobs ‘with the help of the muses and a glass of whiskey’ due to his uncanny ability to convince newspaper editors that he was ‘the grandest liar that the Lord ever breathed into’ and so was unquestionably the right man for the job.1 Many of Griffith’s contemporaries pondered the significance of the trade. This was because the enfranchisement of sections of the working class during the mid-1880s coincided with the rise of the journalist to a position of political significance for the first time. Furthermore, as was demonstrated by T.P. O’Connor’s burgeoning literary world in Britain, young writers such as George Bernard Shaw and other self-consciously ‘modern’ figures were not ashamed to have begun as ‘lowly’ journalists, even if it would take a couple of decades before O’Connor’s journals were widely accepted.2 In his teens, Griffith drew a contrast between revered past pamphleteers, such as Jonathan Swift, and contemporary writers for newspapers in order to defend the credibility of the latter. As an adult he would draw a different analogy; namely, between the journalistic profession and that of the barrister, claiming that this was the root of a prospective problem.

Griffith emphasised that ‘most people in this country live under the impression that those who write the leading articles in the daily papers believe in what they write’. This, of course, was ‘generally untrue’. It was the proprietor of a newspaper who sets and upholds ‘a policy’ for his own private business interests. Journalists were expected to be merely a pen for hire. Although, as Griffith noted, many journalists privately maintain that ‘their position … is similar to that of the lawyer who indifferently accepts a brief’, the fact remained that to most of his readers ‘he is not … speaking from a brief, but a tribune speaking from conviction’ as if he were a passionate advocate upon their behalf. Unlike the impartial barrister, therefore, the journalist was potentially ‘a man of superior knowledge or education who uses his superiority to mislead’.3

Griffith preferred to consider himself as a man who could never be guilty of playing such a dirty trick. He likened himself to his literary idol John Mitchel, a barrister turned journalist whose United Irishman publication was the model for Griffith’s own. To Griffith, Mitchel’s capacity to be an independent thinker came from his indifference to intellectual fashions: ‘he was a sane Nietzsche in his view of man, but his sanity was a century out of date back and forward.’ This was the reason why ‘he never wrote a paragraph which there is not an intellectual pleasure in reading’ and why, even in his ‘fiercest polemics’, he was capable of being a remarkably perceptive writer on the relationship between the narrow world of politics and the broader question of human nature. To Griffith, however, Mitchel was ‘a man of superior knowledge or education’ whom the Irish public failed to appreciate not because he had failed society but because society had failed him: ‘Ireland failed Mitchel because it failed in manhood.’4 This literary justification of extreme individualism, if a little perverse, was essentially a reflection of each man’s shared temperamental incapacity of being a common party-political animal that subscribed to popular shibboleths. Republican in philosophy, they actually thought more like monarchs from behind their editorial chairs in defence of their conception of citizenship. This was why Griffith was better suited to being a review editor rather than an actual journalist. He insisted on being his own boss.

Griffith was fortunate that review editors still enjoyed an exalted reputation during his lifetime. This was because of a lingering prejudice within British and Irish society against the journalistic world of commercial newspapers, which was frequently typified as ‘more a disease than a profession’.5 Griffith sought to capitalise upon this cultural phenomenon in a disingenuous manner. He perpetually pointed an accusing finger at all contemporary Irish newspapers for operating equally out of London and Dublin commercial offices and accommodating themselves to business and political norms as if this was proof not only of their lowly and anti-intellectual opportunism but also their conscious betrayal of Irish interests. This stance essentially fooled nobody as Griffith could only operate his review publications under a protective immunity from the commercial pressures that governed regular newspapers. Indeed, it was no secret to most contemporaries that Griffith was using his status as a review editor as a cover for issuing what was often considered to be a suspect political journalism of his own. Be that as it may, although Griffith’s journal was never printed in more than a thousand copies, had an even smaller readership and rarely broke even, the very fact that it was a weekly review rather than a newspaper meant that its capacity to influence bookish opinion in the country was significant.

The cessation of the Anglo-Boer War might have led to the permanent cessation of the United Irishman were it not for the ongoing political conflict over the financing of Irish education. In particular, the challenge that the Jesuits’ university, University College Dublin (UCD), was posing to the state’s universities, principally Trinity College Dublin (TCD), had become a very pivotal one because the Tory government had promised to establish a completely new ‘national university of Ireland’. This stimulated a significant market for creating and perpetuating review publications, perhaps most notably UCD’s New Ireland Review. Griffith would tackle the politics of the university question on a fairly regular basis but his readership was not generally an academic one.

The United Irishman’s popular front-page feature ‘All Ireland’ covered new publications and cultural events to make it a useful calendar for all who were interested in Irish literary life. This feature was compiled by William Rooney, up until he fell terminally ill in March 1901, and subsequently by Máire Butler, a Catholic fiction writer who was closely related to the propertied Galway family of Edward Martyn, the chief patron of Catholic sacred music in Ireland and a playwright.6 This literary side to the review was enhanced by its weekly ‘Ireland in London’ feature, which was designed to keep writers in Ireland and London informed of each other’s activities. Henry Egan Kenny (‘Sean Ghall’), Griffith’s closest friend, compiled this feature. Kenny now worked in London for the customs and excise office and also wrote (alongside Tomas Cuffe, a historian of Dublin) most of the Irish historical articles in the United Irishman (later, he was commissioned by historian Alice Stopford Green to do research for her publications).7 The veteran journalist Michael Cusack, who turned Griffith into a particularly enthusiastic fan of ‘the fine art’ of GAA hurling, was the author of all of its sporting columns.8

Later, a myth developed that Griffith wrote virtually everything that appeared in his publications. This occurred because during a pivotal period of Irish political debate (the early 1910s) Griffith was forced to do so for a time and, all things considered, he shouldered this burden extraordinarily well. This was the exception rather than the norm, however. Particularly during the early years, aside from writing occasional book reviews under pseudonyms, Griffith’s only personal contribution was to make political commentaries in brief editorials and to choose what Celtic Literary Society lectures to republish (the United Irishman was effectively the organ of this society). The latter practice ceased during 1902, as the Celtic began to crumble after Rooney, its founder, passed away. Ultimately, Griffith came to view his earliest days as a participant in debating societies as a youthful irrelevance; a viewpoint that reflected his sense that he had now moved on to more rewarding activities.

The formative stages of the United Irishman were commemorated by the publication of Rooney’s historical ballads and essays as books. This initiative of Griffith’s was supported by Seamus MacManus, a Donegal-born writer and frequent United Irishman contributor (he later became associated with Notre Dame University in Ohio), who also published in book format the poems of his recently deceased wife Anna Johnston (‘Ethna Carbery’ and daughter of Robert), the former co-editor of the Belfast Shan Van Vocht.9 Griffith paid tribute to Rooney’s memory by attributing to him an iconic image comparable to that which surrounded Thomas Davis, who had been Rooney’s literary role model.10 The United Irishman, however, had not been notable for containing original literature. Indeed, its declared intention to promote the ideals of long-deceased figures such as Davis and Wolfe Tone reflected a tendency to rely upon a simple historicism. Other writers, who were no less sincere than Griffith in their admiration of Rooney, lamented that he literally ‘burnt himself out’ through his futile attempt to repeat the example of Thomas Davis (a man who died equally young) as a historian who attempted to be an all-embracing essayist on Irish cultural matters.11

A focus upon Irish history had sometimes created religiously tinged disputes in the United Irishman columns. This was in keeping with contemporary trends. Catholic religious publications, being a lesser priority of the British firms who monopolised the market, were the chief product of Irish publishers.12 In addition, clergymen often supervised Irish newspapers’ literary supplements, which invariably included unremarkable melodramatic fiction with a religiously motivated punch line.13 This trend, which became particularly noticeable during the 1880s,14 was reflected in the United Irishman by Máire Butler’s celebration of the didactic novels of Canon Sheehan, whose work she portrayed as the pinnacle of contemporary Irish literature due to the theologically-inspired intellectualism that underpinned all his work. While Butler viewed this as evidence of his realism, old republicans, by contrast, ridiculed his novels in the United Irishman as typically anti-republican and anti-individualist Catholic writings that were entirely unrealistic depictions of Irish society: ‘a realist, by all the Gods! Let any Irish novelist try to do so and every Father Sheehan in Ireland will denounce him’.15

Religiosity certainly shaped many contemporaries’ reaction to W.B. Yeats’ launching of the Irish Literary Theatre, the forerunner of Edward Martyn’s Abbey Theatre. This was perhaps inevitable because an Eastern-mysticism derived pantheism was the essential inspiration behind Yeats’ art,16 while his most talented playwright John Millington Synge, a depressed Darwinist, decided to focus on a perceived nature-worshipping tradition among peasants in the west of Ireland. Orthodox Christians, if not many artists and some intellectuals, equated Yeats and Synge’s pantheism with retrogressive, or unhealthy, social tendencies. Griffith’s reaction to this controversy reflected his own individual sensibilities. Unlike Rooney,17 Griffith greatly admired Yeats’ ability as a poet, crediting him with being ‘the greatest of Irish poets’ due to his facility in simultaneously ‘interpreting the Celt to the world and to the Celt himself’. He reviewed a collected edition of Yeats’ poems by suggesting that every Irishman should acquire a copy of the book even if he had to steal it.18 Meanwhile, Yeats’ greatest defender in these debates, the equally pantheistic painter and poet George Russell (AE), was described by Griffith as ‘one of the few men whose good opinion I sincerely value’.19 Nevertheless, Griffith was unconvinced of the value of the plays that Yeats patronised or produced. He ignored the religious criticisms of the plays. Declaring himself to be totally indifferent to ‘the moral character of an artist’, he noted that ‘I should still love Byron’s poetry were he ten times the libertine he has been painted’ and he denied absolutely that religious figures had a right to censure artistic creations.20 Instead, the United Irishman focused on the absence of a recent tradition of Irish theatre outside the staging of popular melodramas and described Yeats’ attempts to draw inspiration from the classics (‘the severe simplicity of Greek drama appeals to very scant audiences now’)21 as a novel but misjudged initiative.22

Griffith’s prior criticisms of the South African writer Olive Schreiner had reflected his belief that modern literature needed to be grounded in realism, or experiences with which contemporaries could identify. In a survey of modern Irish novelists, he lamented the proliferation of writers with underdeveloped talents. He believed that this had occurred due to the persistence of the romantic, or introspective, tradition of the exploration of purely personal themes while ignoring the challenge of capturing the nature of Irish society itself.23 As an urbane Dubliner hoping to witness the creation of a more realistic Irish literature, he had much reason to be disappointed with writers’ choice of themes. Ireland was certainly not producing any Emile Zolas, while Griffith was not at all convinced that the obsession of Yeats’ theatre circle with rural folklore was genuine, as their preoccupation was clearly with mythologies rather than the nature of contemporary rural Irish society. T.W. Rolleston’s efforts to introduce Ivan Turgenev and Anton Chekov to an English-language readership had also failed to elicit an Irish response. Although Griffith felt that there was ‘no … difference as to essentials’ between his and Yeats’ attitudes towards literature, he would infuriate Yeats by making a claim (which he defended in detail) that J.M. Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen was a story derived from classical Greek mythology and redressed as if it was an Irish creation. Griffith maintained that Irish writers should ‘not be allowed to go unchallenged’ if they exhibited a desire to ‘construct fifty “Irish” plays out of the Decameron’

If changing the names of Greek characters and places into Irish ones can provide us with Irish plays, the converse should be true. Diarmuid and Grania, with an Hellenic baptism, should represent to the world Greek drama.24

Although its membership did not include a single novelist, the National Literary Society (the progenitor of the theatre movement) had spoken ambitiously since its inception of its desire to create a completely new Irish literature, but Yeats, the most notable writer in its ranks, was a poet, concerned with symbolisms, rather than an author of credible fiction (including theatre). Most of his compatriots, such as William Magee (a.k.a. ‘John Eglinton’), were critics, not artists.

To Griffith, the National Literary Society’s chief shortcoming lay in its members’ social attitudes. Even the architecture of Dublin itself led many to view the city’s Georgian past with far more sympathy than contemporary society, with which Griffith felt they were unable to connect due to their unwillingness to deal with themes of poverty (urban or rural). In turn, Griffith believed they were prone to a debilitating form of affectation that was born of social snobbery. This was a mentality that he repeatedly satirised with deliberately bad comic verses such as ‘Oh Lucinda! My beaming, gleaming star, I would that I were good enough, to dwell in dear Rathgar [a strictly upper-class Dublin suburb].’25 Even George Sigerson, the most convivial and intellectually gifted of the National Literary Society’s leaders (he was a polymath, UCD science lecturer, prolific author and man of strong democratic–republican sensibilities), had, when dwelling on literature, nevertheless spoken of Irish society purely in terms of ‘the lord and the peasant’.26 W.P. Ryan’s judgment at this time that ‘literary Ireland, in fact, does not know itself’ was another reflection of this disconnection between the world of Irish letters and Irish life.27 Meanwhile, if contemporary Irish artists’ attraction towards mysticism (which Griffith, as a self-professed realist, satirised as an obsession with ‘spooks’)28 was spiritually enlightened—in so far as it was ‘creationist’—it also reflected a deliberate disengagement from material realities. This essentially echoed past failures within Irish society rather than challenged them.

For the seven years that the United Irishman was in print, the touchstone of virtually all contemporaries’ reaction to Irish cultural debate lay in their response to the rise of the Gaelic League and its propaganda. This had also been true of Griffith and Rooney. While they shared many attitudes on the national question, as their writing styles demonstrated, they were men of noticeably different temperaments. Rooney’s prose always exhibited a desire to be impartial in the manner of a young student of essay writing: he enjoyed taking part in non-political cultural debates and was certainly open to persuasion. Griffith, by contrast, always believed in the importance of being persuasive at all times and, if necessary, to employ shorthand rhetorical techniques, such as witty satire or the declamatory tone of an ideologue, to undermine rivals in debate. Indeed, it was undoubtedly Griffith’s acerbic prose that caused some readers (invariably religious individuals) to write to the United Irishman in protest against its offensive use of language,29 just as many journalists would come to secretly admire Griffith’s ‘power of killing his adversaries with the point of his pen’ without any seeming need for exegeses.30 Michael MacDonagh, the greatest Freeman journalist of Griffith’s lifetime who now led the much-respected Irish Literary Society of London, offered an alternative perspective. He credited Griffith’s journal with being ‘as clever and interesting a paper as Dublin has ever produced’, but suggested that its ‘lack of humour’ was evidence that its young editors were still a little wet behind the ears.31

After he achieved a degree of fame, Griffith developed the reputation in some quarters of being a politically ambitious journalist. However, he never quite escaped his established role as a review editor. Even when his journals effectively became party-political newspapers (after 1917), they retained their reputation as reading matter exclusively for the bookish section of working-class opinion.32 While most review publications contained several lengthy essays that were dressed in the academic garb of impartiality, the format of Griffith’s publications was always singular. They invariably encompassed newspaper-column length digressions on political or cultural matters by various contributors that appeared alongside random commentaries by Griffith himself upon a potpourri of politicians, as well as other publications’, activities. These commentaries were often delivered with a Mitchelite verbal punch and were presented as highly topical and political, but frequently they read as mere exercises in criticism.33 This was because they originated in Griffith’s own selection each week of whatever seemed to him as symbolic of how political events were developing.

This trait of Griffith’s publications reflected the fact that he was more often than not a critic, including a comically satirical one,34 rather than a preacher of original ideas. Even after he launched significant political initiatives of his own, their limited promise led him to write editorials that continued to focus primarily on other quarters, such as internal debates within the Ulster and Irish Parties. In doing so, Griffith invariably sided with William O’Brien’s wing of the Irish Party as well as the dissenting ‘Independent Orange Order’ wing of the Ulster Party against their respective party leaderships. Often, this material was printed alongside articles of historical research that sometimes hinted at contemporary parallels. Griffith himself was probably much more familiar with intimate details of the history of both the Irish Party and the Orange Order than were many members of those organisations in his own day. Like Mitchel, he tended to subscribe to a cyclical conception of the course of history and, therefore, believed that quoting the past against the present could see similar fault lines emerge in society once again.

Often the logic of Griffith’s prose was to assail all quarters in the expectation that this would prompt readers to follow his line of reasoning instead. However, as most of his readers were confined to subscribers to his publication rather than part of the fluctuating and larger demographic of newspaper consumers, he was effectively preaching to the converted, or whatever readers ‘never tired as from week to week he reiterated his thesis in all the varied tones of appeal, denunciation, mockery and argument’, utilising ‘all the powers of a singularly clear, serene and forcible mind’. While Mitchel had acquired fame through adopting such tactics for about fifteen months, Griffith would do so ‘when no other Irishman did it’ for about fifteen years, and ‘there hardly exists in the history of journalism another instance of such patient, passionate and consistent propaganda’, as one of Griffith’s more critical Ulster unionist readers noted:

Very few men in such a task would not have made themselves tiresome and ridiculous and have brought upon their principles either hatred or contempt. What saved Arthur Griffith was his personality [as reflected in print] … It was not that he was always wise and right, for he was often wrong and unwise: it was not that he was always just and fair, he was often hard and sometimes curiously obstinate when most manifestly in the wrong; but he had the faculty of convincing his readers of his personal honesty and sincerity. His style was most marvellously adapted to his purpose: it was clear and sinewy and flexible, never rising to any great height of eloquence or passion but never slovenly or vague or weak. It was the direct expression of his character.35

Similarly, the mutual dislike between Griffith and George Moore did not prevent the latter from crediting Griffith with having ‘the power of putting life into the worn-out English language’.36 As many simply disliked Griffith, however, and equated him with an alien presence in the world of politics and literature because he did not always play the role that he was expected by his peers to play within what became known as ‘the Irish Ireland movement’.

Rooney had been much more prepared than Griffith to overlook differences in politics among the membership of the Gaelic League, befriending, for example, J.J. O’Kelly (a.k.a. ‘Sceilg’), a conservative and clericalist editor with the Freeman’s Journal, the organ of the Irish Party and the favoured newspaper of the Catholic hierarchy. Although O’Kelly greatly admired Rooney’s tolerant personality, he was never fond of Griffith who detested anyone connected with the Freeman’s Journal,37 which indeed was a semi-governmental organ that was closely connected with Dublin Castle. The manner by which the membership of the Celtic was absorbed into various Gaelic League subcommittees by October 1902 determined what role Griffith was expected by his peers to play as a review editor. As had been the case since 1892, the politics of Irish education continued to be the subject that polarised opinion.

The Celtic had lost the support of Trinity public intellectuals for opposing the Boer War. This prompted Catholic businessmen associated with the Freeman to step into this breach, assuming the status of the Celtic’s patrons and discouraging it from continuing to champion non-denominational education. This occurred while a debate, dormant since the early 1880s, upon the possibility of Irish industrial development was revived in response to the establishment of new local government councils. Hitherto, socialists had joined Griffith and Rooney in arguing in favour of a state-controlled economy but disagreed with their ideal of Irish independence, which they deemed to be retrogressive.38 Griffith was now persuaded to join a Gaelic League subcommittee set up to examine the Irish industrial question.39 This became Griffith’s connection with the Gaelic League, while his old anticlerical mentor Henry Dixon was persuaded to join a Gaelic League subcommittee on the question of public libraries, in the process disappearing from the public eye.

By 1902, the Gaelic League had the support of the leaders of Clonglowes College, Blackrock College, Rockwell College, Saint Patrick’s Catholic teacher-training college in Drumcondra and Archbishop Walsh. It also had trans-Atlantic support from the recently revived Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) whose American wing succeeded in encouraging American Catholic universities to support the Gaelic League’s mission in Ireland while priests as far as Argentina collected funds for the same purpose.40 In Ireland itself, Catholic bishops began chairing most Gaelic League feiseanna while the AOH, a militant supporter of the Irish Party, was responsible for creating a demand to make Irish the nation’s first ‘official language’.41 The politics of ‘home rule’ had taken on a definite new tinge, as if it was seeking to establish a separate cultural identity for that subordinate imperial parliament that had been envisioned by Gladstone. At the same time, however, Catholic support for the Gaelic League was undoubtedly motivated by a simple determination to use the absence of a linguistic nationalism in the state’s education system as a means of bolstering the church’s argument for a religiously-controlled education system and putting more pressure on the Irish Party to stand by that Christian–democratic principle in the face of any potential British governmental opposition.42

Notwithstanding the Gaelic League’s anti-Trinity bias, the Irish-Ireland movement’s creation of an alliance between the cause of the language and religious education also made the Church of Ireland’s national magazine sympathetic towards the Gaelic League, which could only be accused of being sectarian in so far as Archbishop Walsh and Douglas Hyde were being sectarian in maintaining that nationalist ideologues were mistaken in their Napoleonic equation of state control of education with the existence of the nation state.43 Hitherto, Griffith had made no secret of his opposition to this anti-statist position. Just as he argued in favour of state grants to enable the working classes attend university and the establishment of more state institutes of technical education, he was particularly adamant that no education system, or university, could possibly be national if it was under denominational rather than purely state management:

We do not believe with those who would keep the present Protestant University in College Green, establish one for Catholics at Saint Stephens Green or elsewhere, and one for Presbyterians somewhere in Belfast. If three such universities were in existence tomorrow, we would regard them merely as part of the system whose chief object is to keep the people of Ireland in two or three opposing camps—such a system, in whatever guise it comes, we will continue to oppose, however strong the influences that support it.44

In opposition to Archbishop Walsh, Griffith expressed support for the stance of the Presbyterian Church in Belfast, which declared that non-denominational schools and universities were not detrimental to religion and were also more conducive to the progress of the nation-state and the material wellbeing of its citizens.45 This reflected the fact that the YIL’s call for the conversion of Trinity College into a national university under non-denominational management had been more in keeping with egalitarian Protestant dissenter than Protestant Episcopalian or Catholic social attitudes. The possibility of continuing to promote such an idea had been undermined, however, by the fact that the Gaelic League’s official organ, An Claidheamh Solus (edited by Eoin MacNeill, a militant supporter of the Catholic hierarchy’s stance on education ever since the 1892 controversy), was using Trinity College’s lack of support for the language movement as a basis for a political onslaught on that college, claiming that in the struggle for control of the future direction of Irish education ‘the combatants are Trinity College and the Irish people’.46 The sectarian divisions in Irish education were also an extension of the sectarian divisions that existed in the Irish business community, but it would be some time before Griffith came to understand the significance of this fact.

So long as Griffith defied the stance of Archbishop Walsh in the politics of education, both the Leader and An Claidheamh Solus were highly dismissive of the right of the United Irishman to have a voice in the debate on Irish education. Although Rooney had been co-opted as a member of the league’s committee for organising Oireachtas meetings, he was always denied membership of its executive council.47 Meanwhile, Griffith’s relationship with the Gaelic League was often less than cordial. This is hardly surprising, as Griffith had initially made no secret of the fact that he wished ‘a speedy extinction’ upon all those who ‘babbled of the Gael’ while claiming that ‘nationality is not a thing of rights, arms, freedom, franchises, brotherhood, duties’.48 Griffith was a firm believer in the republican idea that a man was either a citizen or a slave, ‘for there is no middle term’,49 and that patriotic citizenship was essential to the nation-state. By contrast, in keeping with papal encyclicals, Catholic educators throughout Europe and America defined both patriotism and the nation in purely cultural terms in order to minimise the power of state to control education. This was in keeping with a mainstream European trend whereby many writers and artists (including, perhaps most potently of all, musicians and composers; a trend admired by Griffith)50 were simultaneously celebrating indigenous folk cultures while attempting to portray the progressive appeal of a cultural patriotism in an essentially modernist or didactic way. In central Europe, for instance, the Czechs succeeded particularly well in creating a new national theatre in their minority-spoken language, with Catholic clergymen’s support, as part of a broader campaign in resistance to exclusive control of education by a central imperial parliament.51 This was why, with the moral support of London Gaelic Leaguers, An Claidheamh Solus maintained that Irish writers would have to do the same and expressed a disappointment with contemporary Irish productions.52 Griffith, whose own knowledge of the Irish language was limited,53 disagreed, however. He cited the example of the United States and Switzerland as evidence of the fallacy of Schlegel’s oft-quoted maxim ‘no language, no nation’ while, like many working-class figures, he also regarded the purely cultural definition of nationality embodied in the ‘new patriotism’ as a deliberate attempt to ignore political and economic realities.54

Griffith was not without prejudices of his own, of course, and it is clear that he was particularly annoyed that many Gaelic Leaguers questioned the capacity of fans of contemporary English literature to be Irish patriots. For example, he was not above typifying as ‘ignoramuses’ those pious Gaelic Leaguers who celebrated the fact that all surviving Irish language texts, dating mostly from early-modern times, were on religious rather than literary themes (a reality that motivated many priests’ zealous support for the league):

Years ago an ignoramus would have sneered at the language. Now the ignoramus yells out in bad English that all who do not speak it are mere Englishmen. This is a sure sign that the Gaelic League is going to achieve its object. A movement that at the same time is supported by the man of intellect and the profound jackass cannot fail … [When the Gaelic League] tells us in its funny way that Emmet and Tone and Davis are not Irish, and that O’Grady and Yeats will never write a line that will touch the heart of a single Irish ignoramus, one feels compassion for the Gaelic League and trusts it may be saved from its illiterate friends … The cause of the Irish language is a noble and national one, but it can be injured by allowing fools and hypocrites to pose as its champions.55

Thus spoke Griffith in 1901, but his ascribed role within the Gaelic League after 1902—to deal with the question of Irish industrial resources on a subcommittee that was headed by Fr Tom Finlay S.J.—potentially placed him in a subordinate role to that which was being played by the Jesuits.

The Jesuits viewed the Gaelic League as providing a forum whereby economic debate within Ireland could be made a vehicle for propagating Catholic ideas of social justice (creating a more caring and homogenous society without disturbing the Gladstonian fiscal consensus established during 1886) and whereby cultural debate within Ireland could be accommodated with what might be described as a Catholic variation of modernism. In particular, it was desired to counter critiques (popular with republicans and British nationalists) of Catholics’ alleged failure to acknowledge progressive tendencies within the modern nation-state by arguing that Catholicism had inherent progressive tendencies that were compatible with any true programme of modernisation. As the intellectual cult of modernism, itself an anti-individualist philosophy, was frequently wedded to the cause of the nation-state, propagating a Catholic variation of modernism was seen as a necessary counter in the intellectual debates of the new (twentieth) century.56 Meanwhile, to reflect the Jesuits’ view that the British state was intrinsically Protestant and that a modern nation-state should not be defined without reference to religion,57 D.P. Moran deliberately twisted republicans’ traditional propaganda against any manifestations of royalist flunkeyism by maintaining that such flunkeyism was something that could only be expected from a Protestant.58 His ‘philosophy of Irish Ireland’ also attempted to imbue the Gaelic League with a brash self-confidence that generally manifested itself as a refusal to listen to any claim that Catholics were capable of anything other than the most progressive or modernist of political tendencies.

While this was not essentially a popular Catholic position,59 the success of the Jesuits in equating ‘Irish ideas’ with a Christian–democratic conception of church–state relations was made clear by the birth of a tradition whereby politicians who declared their support for the Irish language generally did so only as a means of indicating, or reaffirming, their support for the churches’ educational interests without running the risk of openly saying so and thereby providing an avenue for ideologues (be they nationalists or socialists) to mount an effective political criticism of the Christian–democratic position. Meanwhile, in William Martin Murphy, a very successful business entrepreneur, dedicated financier of Catholic projects and political associate of T.M. Healy and John Sweetman (Griffith’s new patron), the Jesuits found an ideal role model for presenting their vision of Irish economic development. Although never a popular man, Murphy was a highly professional figure whose success in establishing the Irish Independent as a non-party organ during 1904 and making it a far more popular newspaper in Catholic Ireland than the Irish Party’s Freeman’s Journal (whose sales perpetually dropped thereafter) marked a significant new departure;60 one that actually provided an avenue for Griffith to find an audience of his own. Although Murphy’s followers supported the existing British imperial economy, they had a more urban appeal than the Irish Party, whose members notoriously combined farmers’ interests with a slavish identification with the culture of the British state. The role of Murphy’s followers in encouraging a real element of social consciousness to Gaelic League propaganda could also make it appealing to young urban intellectuals. It was essentially the latter dynamic, however, that ultimately created a significant counter reaction from within the Gaelic League’s own ranks.61

The first substantial critique of this trend in Irish politics came from Frank Hugh O’Donnell, the former United Irishman patron who later became a historical lecturer for the Gaelic League of London.62 In The Ruin of Education in Ireland, O’Donnell argued that the Catholic education system was producing lay graduates who were ill equipped for entering various modern professions and civil services, being better suited to entering religious orders or else acting as teachers in schools where they had to surrender all personal and intellectual freedoms to the local bishop as much as any Catholic curate. Claiming to speak on behalf of dissatisfied Irish national-school teachers and unemployed Catholic university graduates everywhere, O’Donnell argued that the Jesuits who were directing the Irish educational movement were masking the fact that the church’s ambition to control education was purely self-aggrandising, partly in their desire to create more priests, and that its ambition was also governed by avarice—charging school fees and opposing the nation-state policy of free education—rather than any altruistic wish for the good of Irish society. O’Donnell suggested that the European Catholic experience demonstrated that the reason why Catholic involvement in state universities had been discouraged for the past century, ever since the rise of Napoleon, was that it had always stifled productive critical analyses and creative thinking for laymen, if not for theologians, in the social science departments.63 Owing to Archbishop Walsh’s prominence on the National Education Board, these arguments were considered as too polemical for virtually any Irish political commentator to touch. Reflecting this, Griffith would not embrace such a polemical viewpoint, while O’Donnell, who was formerly close to T.P. O’Connor, was reputedly in the pay of London Tories.64 The counter arguments being put forward by UCD students were not particularly persuasive either, however.

Tom Kettle was a celebrated figure among UCD academics and students because, as an essayist, he was perceived to have considerable literary skill in defending that idea to which each of them were necessarily wedded in a career sense; namely, that Catholic theories of social justice had an all-embracing applicability and the ethics of a Christian humanism was inherently more beneficial to society than a political rationalism.65 This gave Kettle an appeal in contemporary Ireland comparable to that of the Englishman G.K. Chesterton, who considered the independent Irish clericalist politician T.M. Healy to be ‘the most serious intellect in the present House of Commons’.66 In his contributions to Griffith’s and other journals, Kettle mirrored Chesterton’s defence of Christian ethics in literature, albeit in a less inspired and humourless way.67 On being appointed to a professorship of economics at Maynooth College by Archbishop Walsh, Kettle would reject the relevance of Griffith’s analyses of the Irish Party’s support of unionist taxation practices on the grounds that statistics were mere ‘bloodless actualities’ that meant nothing to the heart.68 In an attempt to justify Catholic social theory as being more valuable to society than economic analyses, Kettle would also argue (to the delight of ambitious UCD students such as Kevin O’Higgins) that, ultimately, a government meant nothing more than the compassionate hearts of ‘you and me and the man around the corner’ and that ‘the wise custom of scholasticism’, inspired by St Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas Aquinas’ philosophies of education, was intellectually superior to statistical analyses.69

Accused by Griffith of being tongue-tied by his political loyalty to the Irish Party (for which he became the party’s official finance spokesman),70 Kettle’s celebrated career in Irish Catholic academia was actually honour bound to Archbishop Walsh, whose patronage extended to allowing Kettle to become the sole layman to attend secret monthly Dublin diocesan convocations on how to increase the temporal power of the church in politics.71 Kettle’s literary role as a dilettante perhaps reflected the extent to which he was expected as a Catholic university academic to act more as a lay defender of the church’s interests than as a purely independent professional. An essential context to his circle’s grievances, however, was the belief that a long-term legacy of historic British discrimination against Catholics up until shortly before the British state effectively became secularist was that those Catholics who now wished to enter the professions were ill equipped to capitalise fully upon the rise of a modern professional society to a central place in British political and economic life in the wake of the UK educational reforms of 1880 and the resulting expansion of the civil service.72 The Catholic University student who protested this point most eloquently during 1903 was Edward (later Eamon) DeValera,73 who was destined to replace Kettle as the chief lay-confidant of Archbishop Walsh. Reflecting the logic of O’Donnell’s critique, however, DeValera initially felt that he had no career options except to move to England to teach in a Benedictine school as a stepping-stone to becoming a priest. This ambition of DeValera’s was partly shaped by his belief that priests ‘are the natural leaders of the people and are looked up to as such’,74 as if the professional leaders of Catholic society were inherently the clergy themselves. Being denied this opportunity due to his illegitimacy, DeValera became but one of many well-educated Irish Catholic youths who combined part-time school teaching in Ireland with voluntary activism within the Gaelic League while acting under close priestly supervision. As the editor of a small review, Griffith himself was able to sidestep this need for church patronage to a significant degree and so hold tenaciously to his storybook Young Ireland ideal, while political developments that occurred during 1903 helped him to capitalise upon growing anti-royalist sentiment within the Gaelic League.

Griffith’s republican protests against Queen Victoria’s visit had failed to find an audience because the Irish Party, which favoured the visit, was focused on the challenge of reunifying their party. However, the British government’s decision to send Edward VII to Ireland as a patron of the 1903 Irish land act coincided with a period of division in Irish Party circles that was represented by a rural–urban divide within the UIL. The UIL leader William O’Brien, who had inspired the land act through his negotiations with the Tory landed aristocracy, was driven out of the UIL and the Irish Party by John Dillon, the former Irish Party leader who always remained a far more significant figure than John Redmond, a former Parnellite with Tory connections, in shaping party discipline and policy (hence, many contemporaries’ perception that Dillon was still the real party leader). In an attempt to capitalise upon this, Griffith defended O’Brien against Irish Party critiques and stormed a UIL meeting in Dublin in an attempt to force the Lord Mayor of Dublin to express opposition to the royal visit. Thereafter, with the support of Seamus MacManus and Maud Gonne, a new body (‘The People’s Protection Association’) was formed that Griffith soon titled as the ‘National Council’. This, he argued, existed to unite home rulers and nationalists upon the ‘one purpose on which both can agree—the stamping out of flunkeyism and toadyism in this land’.75

Griffith’s initiative won the support of Edward Martyn’s new Abbey Theatre, various republicans as well as a couple of newspaper editors in rural Ireland, while John T. Keating (formerly of the Cork City IRB but now chairman of the American Clan na Gael) came to Ireland in support of their efforts.76 A couple of days after Keating’s return to the United States, Dublin City Council voted against issuing of a welcoming address to the King by a narrow margin (forty votes to thirty-seven). While Griffith claimed this as a victory for the National Council, it was J.P. Nannetti MP (who was elected as the new mayor the following year) who actually played the decisive role in defeating the motion by persuading many figures in the Dublin UIL to vote accordingly.77

Although this opposition to the royal visit did not spread elsewhere, these surprising events in Dublin led many to conclude that the Gaelic League and most young Irish nationalists were not supportive of the Irish Party. Meanwhile, with Clan na Gael support, a ‘Keating Branch’ of the Gaelic League was formed in Dublin and became a recruiting ground for the new IRB.78 Catholic university students led by Tom Kettle responded by forming a new ‘Young Ireland Branch’ of the UIL in defence of the Irish Party. Meanwhile, sensing opportunities, Griffith noted gleefully that among the many dissenters from the Irish Party’s politics there were ‘many law bachelors who are Gaelic Leaguers … these are the stuff of which politicians are made ... their influence could permeate every phase of Irish life.’79 The deep reservations that Griffith had expressed hitherto about the cultural connotations of the Irish-Ireland movement now became far less important to him than his declared belief that it presented a far more potent means of overthrowing the established political order than a republican rebellion:

The taking of the Bastille was an upheaval. A revolution is not an upheaval. A revolution is the silent, impalpable working of forces for the most part undiscerned in their action … That nationalists feel the working of a new order of things in Ireland at the present day, no-one will be prepared to doubt.80

Seeking to capitalise upon this trend, Griffith would soon commit himself to drafting a comprehensive critique of the established political order in Ireland. As he was the editor of a review rather than a newspaper, however, it was fellow writers rather than politicians who generally took most notice of his efforts. Another reason for politicians to be dismissive of Griffith’s critiques was the degree to which he merely echoed Irish Tory arguments. Griffith argued that it was O’Brien’s willingness to work with the Irish Tories that had secured good terms for Irish tenant farmers, while he would also echo the Tories’ response to Britain’s difficulty in bringing closure to the Anglo-Boer War.81 This was to claim that the Empire had become overstretched, necessitating the initiation of a nationalistic policy of economic protectionism by placing less emphasis upon the commercial value of the colonies.

The peak of Griffith’s popularity among writers took place during the brief burst of literary fame he acquired upon the publication of The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel for Ireland (Dublin, 1904). This prompted various famous figures in the Irish literary world to act as contributors, making the period 1904–5 the peak of the United Irishman’s status as a notable review. The commercial success of this book also brought about another change in Griffith’s lifestyle. Having escaped from real poverty two years previously, he now became the centre of a circle of professional and literary friends who met once or twice a week at private rooms in Bailey’s, an expensive restaurant off Grafton Street. As he grew confident about the niche he had found for himself in the world of letters, Griffith would occasionally make fun of the loneliness of other writers, once claiming, for example, that he saw in George Moore’s memoirs a determination ‘to get people to laugh at him, for certainly none could have laughed with him … I think there is not an unhappier or lonelier old man in the world.’82 If Griffith no longer felt vulnerable in society, however, he remained an intensely private figure who did not win many friends. As his good friend James Starkey (the writer ‘Seamus O’Sullivan’) testified, ‘in spite of the strong well-set jaw bone which gave Arthur Griffith a rather stern—even to those who knew him … a rather militant, even a belligerent, expression’, and in spite of his well-developed upper body which ‘suggested immense strength’ and strength of character, the impression Griffith always made on social occasions was ‘an innate and unconquerable shyness’. Even if he could be ‘a great companion’, he was incapable of greeting friends by their first name and conversation could die quickly if he was not in the company of people who were also omnivorous readers and liked to talk about books.83

Close friends acquired at this time included Seamus O’Kelly and Darrel Figgis (notable Catholic writers and journalists), poet Padraic Colum, engineer James Montgomery, medical student Oliver St John Gogarty, future lawyer Constantine Curran (a mutual friend of Kettle) and painter Lily Williams, the latter being someone with whom Griffith could share his love of the countryside and, most of all, music; a trait he had inherited primarily from his mother Mary, whose family (the Whelans) were no less cultivated than the Griffiths.84 George Russell (AE) began inviting Griffith to art exhibitions and even suggested that he work as an art editor but as Griffith did not feel qualified to be art critic he delegated Williams and especially Starkey to write on artistic matters in his journal.85 Indeed, from 1905 onwards, Griffith generally confined his art commentaries to speculations on whether or not Dublin City Council overpaid for various paintings in municipal galleries; a purely materialistic perspective that few, if any, of his artistic or literary friends ever felt to be justifiable: ‘poor Griffith; the devil is in him. Poor devil and poor him.’86 St John Gogarty was initially responsible for introducing Griffith to various college students but, although he had dreamed of being a university student in his youth, Griffith initially found their company a little disconcerting. For example, when he was invited by Gogarty to attend a bizarre house-warming party at the Sandycove Tower that also served as a home for the young writer James Joyce, Griffith pleaded with Starkey to come with him to prevent him from feeling ‘helpless and alone’.87

During 1907, James Joyce would take an interest in Griffith’s writings due to Gogarty’s sympathy for his journalism and willingness to write anti-enlistment articles for Griffith’s journal.88 Ultimately, Joyce’s experimental novel Ulysses (Paris, 1922) would be set in Dublin on the same day (16 June 1904) as the last of Griffith’s ‘Resurrection of Hungary’ articles appeared in the United Irishman. While it would use the political contest involving J.P. Nannetti and Griffith’s National Council as a distant backdrop for its storytelling, Joyce would not depict this as a defining political moment but rather suggested, in a literary monument to inhumanity, that particularly exaggerated religious or political claims upon individuals’ allegiance, such as frequently existed in Ireland, could perversely lead to the needs of a man and his wife to go unfulfilled.89

Griffith’s own principal contribution to (non-political) Irish literature would be to publish the earliest works of James Stephens, a Protestant orphan who, like Griffith, had known great poverty in his youth living in inner-city Dublin tenements where ‘no daring wind, light-hearted, from a garden blows, its sweetness here from any rose’.90 In his earliest poems, which were published in Griffith’s journal, and his first novel, The Charwoman’s Daughter, a portrayal of an impoverished Dublin girl living in a tenement, Stephens might be said to have come closest to producing that Dublin literature which Griffith had desired to see come into being. During the 1910s, Stephens (a writer idolised by Joyce) arguably far surpassed Yeats, Lady Gregory or indeed any other living Irish writer in depicting a fantastical world inspired by mythology and he would also write the most immediate (and popular) account of attitudes in Dublin to the GPO rebellion of 1916, but his connection with his hometown lessened thereafter and it would be a long time before an Irish writer (with the notable exception of Sean O’Casey) would again embrace the world of the Dublin poor as his subject.91

Griffith’s popularity with writers took a nosedive when his journal supported the Gaelic League boycott of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, which was officially boycotted by both the league and UCD on moral grounds just as Yeats’ Countess Kathleen had been boycotted a decade earlier. Characteristically, Yeats saw this as an ignoble betrayal of himself. Various factors were generally overlooked in this Gaelic League inspired controversy, however. First, Griffith’s literary editor Máire Butler was not only a deeply religious Catholic (she died on a pilgrimage to Rome) but also close to Patrick Pearse, the editor of the Gaelic League’s national organ An Claidheamh Solus, a publication to which she was also a chief contributor. Second, Griffith was at the time seeking the political support of John Sweetman, a strong advocate of literary censorship. In this way, Griffith had an editorial responsibility to reflect Gaelic League social mores at this time even if they did not quite match his own. As ‘reparation’, not long after the Playboy controversy ended, Griffith published a series of celebratory cartoons by Grace Gifford of contemporary Irish writers before concluding the series with a self-penned caricature of himself drawn in the image of Satan and ‘depicted according to the idea and for the consolation of all who have been caricatured in Sinn Féin’.92

A common denominator to Griffith’s attitude towards literature throughout his bachelorhood was his difficulty in accepting any production (including the Playboy) that did not match his own idealised vision of women. As a shy teen, he had written a fantasy about being loved by a beautiful blonde woman whose ‘mind is as deep and pure as the deepest well’.93 As an equally shy young adult, he had typified a failure to appreciate an idealised vision of romantic love from (what he imagined to be) a woman’s point of view as ‘thinking like a rascal Englishman’.94 Meanwhile, his chaste relationship with Maud Sheehan, to whom he became engaged around the time of his father’s death during 1904, was probably governed by a fear of losing her moral approval. She was not only a devout and reserved woman but also the sister of two Catholic monks in what was a close-knit and self-consciously middle-class family. Griffith, meanwhile, had not left his working-class social background behind. Both before and after his father’s death in 1904, Arthur had to financially support his old mother (who lived for another fifteen years) and his younger (unskilled) sister Frances, with whom he lived in their Summerhill flat. He simply could not afford to marry Miss Sheehan. As his closest friend knew, ‘to a man of such deep and tender domestic qualities, this was a severe cross’.95

Griffith’s only real hope of acquiring a significant livelihood was through attaining a political success. This reality no doubt played upon his mind while he was writing his most substantial work, The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel for Ireland, which sought to readdress Anglo-Irish relations and, in the process, redefine Irish nationalist debate. Griffith would do so, however, while characteristically avoiding any direct engagement with what most other contemporaries judged to be the most pressing issues in current affairs.