In addition to Sweetman, another valuable patron Griffith found at this time was Walter Cole. He was a successful Liverpool-born fruit merchant and Catholic community activist who served on Dublin city council as an alderman. A former Healyite within the YIL, Cole also admired Michael Davitt’s politics. Upon joining Cumann na nGaedhael, Cole not only established a close friendship with Griffith but also offered him much needed personal financial assistance. This certainly did not go unappreciated. Henry Egan Kenny, Arthur’s closest friend, once recalled that Griffith told him that ‘Walter has been Mother, Father and ideal friend to me. I could not have lived through those days of stress without his unexampled care and princely hospitality.’109 While Griffith’s family had fallen completely apart due to poverty several years previously, after the cessation of the Boer War the support Griffith received from his new Catholic patrons allowed him to rescue his ailing father from the workhouse and the Griffith family were able to resettle in a small family home of their own, based in Summerhill, for the first time in almost a decade.110
At the relatively late age of thirty-two, Griffith’s life began to undergo a significant change due to the fact that he had finally found a career. Thanks to Maud Gonne’s initiative, he had found a means of leaving the very insecure life of poverty he had known behind him and to embark on a journalistic career with a degree of confidence because he had found stable financial backing from well-to-do individuals. After years of troubling ill health from living in slum conditions, he was certainly lucky to escape the same fatal fate of Rooney and his older sister Marcella, and to not have to follow the same path as had been taken by his brothers, most of his youthful friends (including former United Irishman contributors) and other former pro-Boer activists (including James Connolly), which was emigration to perform menial labouring jobs. Not surprisingly, he was not prepared to throw away his recent good fortune.
Arthur Griffith’s days of working overnight for a minimum wage, dressed in the ink-stained overalls of a compositor or the sweat-soaked clothes of a South African miner, were now over. Instead, he would begin to revel in his newfound role as a respectable and well-dressed, if far from well off, editor of a ‘national review’. If the stylish pince-nez that now adorned Griffith’s face betrayed a degree of personal affectation, however, it was his already well-developed and incisive intelligence that would ultimately allow him to catch the public eye.
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