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The Enigma of Arthur Griffith. Colum Kenny
Читать онлайн.Название The Enigma of Arthur Griffith
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781785373169
Автор произведения Colum Kenny
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
The Griffiths moved in the shadow of ‘Monto’, a notorious district centred on Montgomery Street and known for prostitution. James Joyce memorialised it as ‘Nighttown’ in Ulysses. A description of the adjacent Gardiner Street about 1900 is graphic:
Fifty years ago this street was inhabited by professional people and other rich residents, and every house had its carriage, its coachman and its butler. To-day this imposing stretch of street has sunk to the condition of a street of tenement houses, inhabited not alone by the lowest class of society but by the tramp and vagrant, and mendicant classes. The area around it … constitutes, perhaps, the greatest blot upon the social life of Dublin and of Ireland. There is no such area in London, or in any other town of Great Britain, that I ever saw or heard of. Within this area the trade of prostitution and immorality is carried on as openly as any branch of legitimate business is carried on in the other portions of Dublin.22
Many impoverished Dubliners joined the army. Molly Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses lies in bed musing on the attraction of a lost soldier, recalling one she liked who was killed on the British side in the Boer War: ‘he was a lovely fellow in khaki and just the right height over me … he was pale with excitement about going away … and I so hot as I never felt’.
Griffith and other contributors to his papers sometimes idealised Irish women and protested against certain theatrical depictions of them. There is a curious mixture of respect and chauvinism in his admonition to young Irishmen: ‘Do not talk lightly of women. To do so is to be English.’23 His attitude was partly informed by the degradation and exploitation that he saw before his eyes. When he conducted a campaign against Irish girls walking out with soldiers on Dublin’s main thoroughfare, he was not simply being priggish. His principal objective was to discourage recruitment, but he also saw the effects of economic deprivation on people’s options and of prevalent venereal disease on their health. In 1918 Francis Hackett wrote of those who followed James Connolly in rebellion that ‘They knew that incest and prostitution and syphilis accompanied that slum life, a life of indecencies so unmentionable that no one can fully quote the government reports [e.g. of 1914].’24 Unlike some of the clients of ‘Nighttown’, people who lived near it had not fragrant homes in the suburbs to which to retreat.
When he became an editor, Griffith liked to meet friends over a glass or two of stout, but he never grew rich and was widely believed to have refused better-remunerated journalism in Dublin and abroad in order to continue working on his advanced nationalist papers. Chrissie Doyle, an activist, later said that he was ‘awfully badly off … The story is true of his working in his office in stockinged feet while his shoes, the only pair he had, were being repaired at the shoemakers. He was the most simple of men … he would eat anything served to him’.25 Dan McCarthy, who helped Griffith to produce the United Irishman, described him as ‘poverty-stricken’, and McCarthy and others commented on his worn clothing.26
Sinn Féin, 13 November 1909. By Austin Molloy (‘Maolmhuaidh’). Dirty streets added to the threat of diseases such as TB and typhoid.
James Joyce appreciated Griffith’s efforts to improve the lot of his people. In 1906, in Italy, he wrote that
as far as my knowledge of Irish affairs goes, he was the first person in Ireland to revive the separatist idea on modern lines nine years ago. He wants the creation of an Irish consular service abroad and of an Irish bank at home … He said in one of his articles that it cost a Danish merchant less to send butter to Christiania and then by sea to London than it costs an Irish merchant to send his from Mullingar to Dublin. A great deal of his programme perhaps is absurd but at least it tries to inaugurate some commercial life for Ireland and to tell you the truth once or twice in Trieste I felt myself humiliated when I heard the little Galatti girl sneering at my impoverished country. You may remember that on my arrival in Trieste I actually ‘took some steps’ to secure an agency for Foxford Tweeds there.27
The Parnell Affair
The political divisions that marked Parnell’s downfall were deeply felt by Griffith. There was a pervasive bitterness such as Joyce encapsulated in his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when a row over Christmas dinner in Bray ends with an angry but gleeful cry: ‘At the door Dante turned round violently and shouted down the room, her cheeks flushed and quivering with rage: – Devil out of hell! We won! We crushed him to death! Fiend! The door slammed behind her.’
When Parnell fell in disgrace for having an affair, and died soon afterwards, the door slammed shut for years on the prospect of Ireland winning back a measure of political independence through ‘Home Rule’, which Irish parliamentarians at Westminster had been seeking. Griffith as a young man emotionally defended Parnell, although he was not an enthusiast for Parnell’s parliamentarianism. He regarded Parnell’s downfall as an example of the factional distractions that destroy political movements, and to the end of his days insisted on the primacy of the fight for political independence over all else. This is the key to understanding his loss of interest in artists when they diverged on an individualistic or subjective track.
Similarly, he drew a clear distinction between private and public life when this suited his objectives. During the Parnell split certain leading English politicians and some members of the Irish Catholic hierarchy and of the Irish Parliamentary Party responded to news of Parnell’s relationship with Katharine O’Shea by turning on the leader. But Griffith articulated in the United Irishman a general principle that ‘A man can be a good patriot without being virtuous in his private life.’28 This was not the later sentiment of an anonymous writer of a Sinn Féin pamphlet in September 1917 who declared ‘The only way to be a patriotic Irishman is to do your best to become a perfect man.’29 Griffith in 1900 contrasted the example of an Arab leader who unwisely appointed ‘a notorious libertine’ to be keeper of the harem with one who appointed such a man as the State Treasurer:
I do not see, unless the libertine were also a rogue, why he should not prove himself a faithful public servant. I do not believe that a political leader should be deposed for any save a political offence. I believe the Irish people made themselves ridiculous by their treatment of Charles Stewart Parnell. He had committed no political crime. He had not sinned against them.
This led to debate in his paper between himself and a regular contributor, the nationalist priest Fr Patrick Fidelis Kavanagh.30 Griffith’s position was consistent when it came to the scandalous Oscar Wilde and his homosexuality, a sexual orientation into which Griffith may have had some personal insight due to the warmth of his devotion to his close friend William Rooney who died young:
Last week one of the most brilliant Irishmen of the century, Oscar Wilde, died. Our highly moral Dublin newspapers printed the announcement in their back columns. The Evening Herald timidly referred to the passing of Wilde in order to bring in a compliment to Mr John Redmond. For it appears that Mr Redmond had the moral courage, once upon a time, to quote some lines of Wilde’s poetry to the British House of Commons … It was not because Wilde was a sinner that our cowardly journals kept silence – it was because they feared to shock the fetid conscience of pharisaical England.31
And when reviewing A Treasury of Irish Poetry in the English Tongue, edited by S.A. Brooke and T.W. Rolleston, Griffith complained of Wilde’s omission: ‘We have not Wilde. ’Twould have offended the virtuous Englishman to have included him.’32 That Griffith thus distinguished between Wilde’s public and private lives may surprise some who assume that his criticism of Synge’s Playboy was merely prudish.
Griffith’s inclusiveness meant that he wished the cause of Irish nationalism to encompass all who desired to embrace it. He made this clear in the first issue of his United Irishman, and repeated and endorsed that position in the issue of 18 May 1901 when wrapping up what had become a somewhat bitter exchange in the paper as to whether ‘there is no Irishman but the Gael’ (or ‘the Irish are now a composite race’). Of this proposition he wrote:
That the very same test which is the hall-mark of the American citizen ought to be the test of the Irishman,