singing them aloud. James Joyce had a better singing voice than Griffith and even came close to winning the tenor competition of the annual Feis Ceoil. He shared with Griffith a taste for the everyday and is said to have known hundreds of songs ‘composed by Irish men and women … about wars, battles, patriotism, nature, love, drinking, all in an Irish context … known and sung by the Irish’. They included ‘The Memory of the Dead’ and some other pieces that featured in the talk about the ‘songs of our fathers’ that Griffith gave publicly in 1899.20 Joyce’s short, well-known story ‘The Dead’ poignantly evokes the kind of recreational evening of mixed song, piano accompaniment and recitation that was long a feature of Dublin life, especially at Christmas even into the present author’s youth, and that Griffith and his friends enjoyed in their societies.
Imprisoned with Griffith in Gloucester during the Irish War of Independence, Robert Brennan was fascinated by his knowledge of song:
There was no opera which I had seen, up to that time, which was strange to A.G. Now and again he used to sing snatches from The Barber of Seville or Faust, but never for an audience. He had rather a poor baritone voice, but he whistled very well. He was a typical Dubliner in his fondness for Wallace and Balfe, and as for drama, he knew his Congreve, Sheridan, and Goldsmith very well. He had a keen appreciation of Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher. He knew and loved every melodrama that had been produced in the Queen’s Theatre for a generation.21
Later, during the strained weeks in London embroiled in negotiations for an Anglo-Irish Treaty, Griffith took himself off as a respite to the Hammersmith Theatre to enjoy its new production of The Beggar’s Opera. On 27 October 1921, he did so with Michael Collins and Kitty Kiernan.22
Across the table from Griffith at the negotiations in Downing Street sat Winston Churchill, whose father and Arthur Balfour had both featured in a satirical ballad which, in 1889, Griffith had quoted in his paper for the Leinster Debating Club – but he presumably did not sing this to his select audience in Whitehall.23
After Griffith died, Piaras Béaslaí edited a pamphlet containing two dozen ballads that Griffith himself had composed. These ranged from the fiercely political ‘Twenty Men from Dublin Town’, which sings of United Irishmen who left Dublin after the 1798 insurrection and joined the rebellious Michael Dwyer in the mountains, to his humourous ‘Thirteenth Lock’. This features the drunken skipper of a canal barge negotiating Dublin’s Grand Canal by Dolphin’s Barn and Inchicore. It takes sideswipes along the way at certain Trinity College professors who were hostile to the Irish language.
Visiting Paris, Griffith was impressed by J.B. Duffaud’s painting ‘Les Anglais en Irlande 1798’, referencing the French-backed rebellion in Ireland that year,24 and a number of times called for Irish artists to paint significant historical scenes. He thought that the Irish also deserved new theatrical works of art that that would be accessible. Referring to those ‘known in England as the lower-middle-class and bred on Poe, Cowper and Macaulay’, he wanted for their Irish counterparts ‘[a] few simple farces and ordinary plays on conventional lines, with an Irish flavour … Shapespeare wrote Julius Caesar and his Lucretia for this class, and his Hamlet and his Sonnets for the other’. Griffith warned in fatherly fashion that as regards such Irish people, ‘symbolism affrights them as darkness does a child’.25
Some of Griffith’s verses, published after he died. On the cover is the portrait of Griffith by Lily Williams now in Dublin City Gallery/The Hugh Lane.
6
His ‘Best Friend’ Rooney Dies
Arthur Griffith loved his close friend William Rooney (Liam Ó Maolruanaidh). Rooney’s dark hair, good looks and romantic vision thrilled his contemporaries (Plate 5). When Rooney died in his late twenties, Griffith was so devastated that he was admitted to hospital.1 The following year, Yeats dedicated his signal play Kathleen Ni Houlihan to Rooney’s memory.2 Joyce criticised Rooney’s poetry but did not forget the man.
Griffith and Rooney both attended the Christian Brothers’ school in Strand Street, and together trawled bookstalls for works by Irish poets and activists.3 As they grew older, they broke into journalism by writing for the Evening Herald a series on the graves of notable Irish patriots, hoping to resurrect the spirit of Irish independence. They later launched and edited the new United Irishman, which ultimately impelled the foundation of Sinn Féin. Griffith thought Rooney a Thomas Davis for the twentieth century: ‘Davis spoke to the soul of the sleeping nation – drunk with the waters of forgetfulness. He sought to unite the whole people. He fought against sectarianism and all the other causes which divided them,’ according to Michael Collins.4
William Rooney: Thine Own Sweet Tongue
Griffith, when he recovered from the trauma of Rooney’s death, published his late friend’s poems and ballads.5 He gave pride of place to ‘Ceann Dubh Dílis’ (‘O Dear Dark Head’). Written in English, it was addressed to Mother Ireland. Hanna Sheehy Skeffington thought it ‘embodies in poetic form the story of her [Ireland’s] life-long dream for freedom’.6 By placing first this poem by Rooney in the collection that he published in 1902, Griffith makes Rooney a promise:
O Dear Dark Head, bowed low in death’s black sorrow,
Let not thy heart be tramelled in despair;
Lift, lift thine eyes unto the radiant morrow,
And wait the light that surely shall break there.
What, though the grave hath closed about thy dearest,
All are not gone that love thee, nor all fled;
And though thine own sweet tongue thou seldom hearest,
Yet shall it ring again, O Dear Dark Head.
Both Griffith and Rooney were ‘northsiders’, with Griffith born in 1871 on Dominick Street and Rooney in 1873 on Mabbot Street. The latter led into the notorious red-light district mentioned in Ulysses by Joyce: ‘The Mabbot street entrance of nighttown, before which stretches an uncobbled tramsiding set with skeleton tracks, red and green will-o’-the-wisps and danger signals. Rows of grimy houses with gaping doors. Rare lamps with faint rainbow fans.’
Griffith and Rooney left school before the age of fourteen to find work. Griffith became a printer’s apprentice and Rooney a solicitor’s junior clerk.7 Where Griffith’s father was a printer, Rooney’s was a coachbuilder. In 1902 a former schoolfriend recalled that Rooney ‘took a hard position as clerk which hardly brought him a comfortable competence. He, the most energetic, the best informed, and the ablest of them all, elected to occupy a humble position in order to work for Ireland.’8
We know very little about Rooney’s family and personal life. None of his papers appear to survive.9 About 1888, he and Griffith attended the Irish Fireside Club. Here they learnt some Irish language, and discussed works by Thomas Davis and John Mitchel. Their friendship subsequently grew in the Leinster Literary Club/Society, of which Griffith became president and into which Rooney followed him. In February 1893 Rooney founded the Celtic Literary Society, of which Griffith was president at the time of the former’s death. This was a significant cultural forum that by its very name asserted that literature was not the preserve of the English or Anglo-Irish alone. The two friends also supported Douglas Hyde’s Gaelic League, founded later in 1893. Rooney played an active role in that league to the end. The intensity of his personality is evident from an incident said to have occurred when he arrived one night at the rooms of the Celtic Literary Society to find some men playing cards: ‘He neither remonstrated nor argued, but, with his eyes blazing and his face stern, threw the cards into the fire, kicked over the table, and pointed to the door.’10
They were apart for nearly two years when Griffith in 1897 went to South Africa. During that period Rooney published his poem ‘An Exile’s Shamrock’, likely if not actually calculated to make Griffith yearn for home by referring to ‘voices of friends beloved of boyhood years’ and ‘the strong true friendship time nor space can kill’.11 Maud Gonne said of Griffith that ‘home-sickness brought him back to Ireland’ in the