above the building that had once housed the old pre-Union Irish parliament. Joyce was prompted to write mischievously in Ulysses:
Sunburst on the titlepage. He smiled, pleasing himself. What Arthur Griffith said about the headpiece over the Freeman leader: a homerule sun rising up in the northwest from the laneway behind the bank of Ireland. He prolonged his pleased smile. Ikey [Jewish] touch that: homerule sun rising up in the northwest.25
Griffith jokes at his own expense (Sinn Féin, 9 April 1910).
Griffith’s satirical streak is evident also in certain verses or poems that he wrote, as well as from a witty if lengthy article on the Royal Irish Academy that appeared under his pen name ‘Lugh’ in 1901, and another on the ‘Royal Academy Auf Musicke’ that spoke up for Irish compositions that same year. A ‘delightful’ piece on Professor Atkinson of Trinity College reportedly filled readers with ‘great glee’.26 His ability to quip is also evident in the United Irishman. On 16 March 1901 he wrote ‘The Australian Leader is wrong in supposing that the United Irishman would back the devil if that personage attacked England. The United Irishman would not interfere in a family quarrel.’ He published a cartoon of himself as the devil, to please his detractors.
Liam Ó Briain, a founder member of Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe, the Irish-language theatre, insisted that Griffith could be delightful company.27 On one occasion Griffith brought an old acquaintance with him to meet friends. He extracted much amusement from pretending that his companion was a Hungarian baron interested in Griffith’s proposal to adapt the Austro-Hungarian constitutional model for Ireland.28 And for all the economics and politics he read, he sometimes liked to help sleep come by reading a popular romance such as Charles Garvice’s Her Heart’s Desire.29
When interned in Reading in 1916, Griffith grew a beard, about which he joked, and kept up the spirits of fellow prisoners by organising games of handball and other activities that included the writing of verses. A fellow prisoner later thought that Griffith was ‘never depressed in jail, or never appeared to be depressed’.30 Even during the tense weeks at 22 Hans Place in London, lodged with his team negotiating an Anglo-Irish treaty in late 1921, his private secretary found evidence of his sense of humour and composure.31
Shyness and Obstinacy
Maud Gonne wrote that she got to know Griffith well in 1899: ‘He was not an orator, and was at first very shy and inaudible when addressing meetings’.32 George Lyons too met him then, at a session of the Celtic Literary Society after Griffith’s return from South Africa:
Griffith, from his studious and bookish habits and his long spells of solitary companionship with his pen, became somewhat shy and retiring, and to many who knew him but slightly appeared cold and unsocial, but this was not his true nature. He would pass through the streets of Dublin without noticing his associates or even his friends. He would enter a hall or a crowded meeting place and pass through without saluting any one. There were three reasons: firstly, his eyesight was extremely defective … secondly, he was usually preoccupied in his thoughts, but, strongest reason of all was, he really never thought that anyone wanted a nod from him; he really believed himself to be an unknown and an unnoticed man and he was entirely oblivious of the fact when he walked through a crowd that anyone paid the slightest importance [sic] to his actions.33
Seán T. O’Kelly, later president of Ireland, was an assistant in the National Library when he first encountered Griffith – whom he said made ‘constant’ visits and spent many hours researching there in the 1890s. They subsequently worked together in Sinn Féin, and O’Kelly wrote ‘He was a very difficult man to know. He was always very reserved. His friends were few – that is, those he took into his intimate confidence. It was some years before I could say I had won his confidence.’34
Lyons thought ‘In organisation affairs he oft-times failed to check an abuse through his inability to realise that he held any sort of authority, and in no possible circumstances could he ever be conceived in the position of ordering people about their duties.’35 Griffith wrote in the United Irishman of 24 June 1899: ‘We have at all times opened our columns to our critics. The want of a free, tolerant, and intelligent public opinion in Ireland is directly traceable to the Irish politicians and their press.’ This willingness to permit a range of views to be expressed in his papers, however admirable, allowed people such as F.H. O’Donnell and Oliver Gogarty to indulge their prejudices in a manner that continues to dog Griffith’s reputation. Maume believes that ‘Like many professional unmaskers, Griffith’s scepticism shaded into paranoia, and he was susceptible to demented cranks.’36
However, Griffith was also at times stubborn in his interpretation of a question, and this offended some nationalists who failed to change his mind. Tongue-in-cheek, his friend Padraic Colum later wrote:
People in Dublin said he was intolerant of ideas, and that he preferred to have with him second-rate men who accepted the whole of his doctrine rather than first-rate men who differed from him on a point. I must say that I never knew any of the first-rate men who differed from him on a point offering their services to him.37
Colum may have had in mind persons such as Patrick Pearse. Pearse, like de Valera, did not join Sinn Féin before 1916. Indeed, in an open letter that he published as editor of An Barr Buadh on 18 May 1912, Pearse admitted ‘I have never loved the same child [Sinn Féin].’ But this did not deter him from urging Griffith to change before it was too late. As Sinn Féin weakened, Pearse wrote he was ‘sorry to see its father being killed.’ While he described Griffith as narrow-minded, distrustful and overbearing, he confessed that the latter was also best placed in Ireland to lead the movement, and thought it a great pity that Griffith might fail because nobody else could work under his leadership.
If some found Griffith difficult, others were more sanguine. In 1917 the socialist Cathal O’Shannon told the Irish Labour Party leader Tom Johnson,
Arthur Griffith of course is narrow and stubborn – always was and I suppose always will be. I, however, have found that I can always get along with him even when we differ. Most of our people on both sides have a way of saying things that might be more effectively said in another way – there is a great deal in the way a thing is said.38
Notably, even a number of those who supported the opposing side during the civil war, such as Seán T. O’Kelly and Maud Gonne, later wrote kindly of Griffith.
One of those who disliked Griffith was the writer Sean O’Casey, who opposed the treaty. He mocked Griffith’s championing of Thomas Davis, the hero of Young Ireland, and even sneered at Griffith’s gait:
Right enough, there was Up Griffith Up Thomas a Davis, hunched close inside his thick dark Irish coat, a dark-green velour hat on his head, a thick slice of leather nailed to his heels to lift him a little nearer the stars, for he was somewhat sensitive about the lowness of his stature. His great protruding jaws were thrust forward like a bull’s stretched-out muzzle; jaws that all his admirers spoke of, or wrote about, laying it down as an obvious law that in those magnificent jaws sat the God-given sign of a great man … As plain as a shut mouth could say, he said he was Erin’s strong, silent man. What was he thinking of as he stood there, grim and scornful?39
Dan McCarthy, who worked with Griffith, also thought that he put a cork wedge in his boots to make himself higher. Griffith did walk unusually, in footwear made for him by Barry’s of Capel Street, perhaps because of a minor disability. In South Africa from 1897 to 1898 he was nicknamed ‘Cuguan’, an approximation of the sound made by doves and attributed alternatively to his gentleness with black employees who were accustomed to brutality and whippings or to the manner of his walking.40 He often used ‘Cuguan’ as one of the pseudonyms on his articles.
James Moran, an early acquaintance of Griffith, described him as ‘One of the finest men it was ever my good fortune to meet; modest, sensitive, courageous, clean-minded, with a keen sense of humour, he was utterly selfless, a friend in need, and a boon companion, who could discuss almost any subject without obtruding himself.’41
Reading, Swimming and Chess
Throughout