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