The cessation of the Anglo-Boer War might have led to the permanent cessation of the United Irishman were it not for the ongoing political conflict over the financing of Irish education. In particular, the challenge that the Jesuits’ university, University College Dublin (UCD), was posing to the state’s universities, principally Trinity College Dublin (TCD), had become a very pivotal one because the Tory government had promised to establish a completely new ‘national university of Ireland’. This stimulated a significant market for creating and perpetuating review publications, perhaps most notably UCD’s New Ireland Review. Griffith would tackle the politics of the university question on a fairly regular basis but his readership was not generally an academic one.
The United Irishman’s popular front-page feature ‘All Ireland’ covered new publications and cultural events to make it a useful calendar for all who were interested in Irish literary life. This feature was compiled by William Rooney, up until he fell terminally ill in March 1901, and subsequently by Máire Butler, a Catholic fiction writer who was closely related to the propertied Galway family of Edward Martyn, the chief patron of Catholic sacred music in Ireland and a playwright.6 This literary side to the review was enhanced by its weekly ‘Ireland in London’ feature, which was designed to keep writers in Ireland and London informed of each other’s activities. Henry Egan Kenny (‘Sean Ghall’), Griffith’s closest friend, compiled this feature. Kenny now worked in London for the customs and excise office and also wrote (alongside Tomas Cuffe, a historian of Dublin) most of the Irish historical articles in the United Irishman (later, he was commissioned by historian Alice Stopford Green to do research for her publications).7 The veteran journalist Michael Cusack, who turned Griffith into a particularly enthusiastic fan of ‘the fine art’ of GAA hurling, was the author of all of its sporting columns.8
Later, a myth developed that Griffith wrote virtually everything that appeared in his publications. This occurred because during a pivotal period of Irish political debate (the early 1910s) Griffith was forced to do so for a time and, all things considered, he shouldered this burden extraordinarily well. This was the exception rather than the norm, however. Particularly during the early years, aside from writing occasional book reviews under pseudonyms, Griffith’s only personal contribution was to make political commentaries in brief editorials and to choose what Celtic Literary Society lectures to republish (the United Irishman was effectively the organ of this society). The latter practice ceased during 1902, as the Celtic began to crumble after Rooney, its founder, passed away. Ultimately, Griffith came to view his earliest days as a participant in debating societies as a youthful irrelevance; a viewpoint that reflected his sense that he had now moved on to more rewarding activities.
The formative stages of the United Irishman were commemorated by the publication of Rooney’s historical ballads and essays as books. This initiative of Griffith’s was supported by Seamus MacManus, a Donegal-born writer and frequent United Irishman contributor (he later became associated with Notre Dame University in Ohio), who also published in book format the poems of his recently deceased wife Anna Johnston (‘Ethna Carbery’ and daughter of Robert), the former co-editor of the Belfast Shan Van Vocht.9 Griffith paid tribute to Rooney’s memory by attributing to him an iconic image comparable to that which surrounded Thomas Davis, who had been Rooney’s literary role model.10 The United Irishman, however, had not been notable for containing original literature. Indeed, its declared intention to promote the ideals of long-deceased figures such as Davis and Wolfe Tone reflected a tendency to rely upon a simple historicism. Other writers, who were no less sincere than Griffith in their admiration of Rooney, lamented that he literally ‘burnt himself out’ through his futile attempt to repeat the example of Thomas Davis (a man who died equally young) as a historian who attempted to be an all-embracing essayist on Irish cultural matters.11
A focus upon Irish history had sometimes created religiously tinged disputes in the United Irishman columns. This was in keeping with contemporary trends. Catholic religious publications, being a lesser priority of the British firms who monopolised the market, were the chief product of Irish publishers.12 In addition, clergymen often supervised Irish newspapers’ literary supplements, which invariably included unremarkable melodramatic fiction with a religiously motivated punch line.13 This trend, which became particularly noticeable during the 1880s,14 was reflected in the United Irishman by Máire Butler’s celebration of the didactic novels of Canon Sheehan, whose work she portrayed as the pinnacle of contemporary Irish literature due to the theologically-inspired intellectualism that underpinned all his work. While Butler viewed this as evidence of his realism, old republicans, by contrast, ridiculed his novels in the United Irishman as typically anti-republican and anti-individualist Catholic writings that were entirely unrealistic depictions of Irish society: ‘a realist, by all the Gods! Let any Irish novelist try to do so and every Father Sheehan in Ireland will denounce him’.15
Religiosity certainly shaped many contemporaries’ reaction to W.B. Yeats’ launching of the Irish Literary Theatre, the forerunner of Edward Martyn’s Abbey Theatre. This was perhaps inevitable because an Eastern-mysticism derived pantheism was the essential inspiration behind Yeats’ art,16 while his most talented playwright John Millington Synge, a depressed Darwinist, decided to focus on a perceived nature-worshipping tradition among peasants in the west of Ireland. Orthodox Christians, if not many artists and some intellectuals, equated Yeats and Synge’s pantheism with retrogressive, or unhealthy, social tendencies. Griffith’s reaction to this controversy reflected his own individual sensibilities. Unlike Rooney,17 Griffith greatly admired Yeats’ ability as a poet, crediting him with being ‘the greatest of Irish poets’ due to his facility in simultaneously ‘interpreting the Celt to the world and to the Celt himself’. He reviewed a collected edition of Yeats’ poems by suggesting that every Irishman should acquire a copy of the book even if he had to steal it.18 Meanwhile, Yeats’ greatest defender in these debates, the equally pantheistic painter and poet George Russell (AE), was described by Griffith as ‘one of the few men whose good opinion I sincerely value’.19 Nevertheless, Griffith was unconvinced of the value of the plays that Yeats patronised or produced. He ignored the religious criticisms of the plays. Declaring himself to be totally indifferent to ‘the moral character of an artist’, he noted that ‘I should still love Byron’s poetry were he ten times the libertine he has been painted’ and he denied absolutely that religious figures had a right to censure artistic creations.20 Instead, the United Irishman focused on the absence of a recent tradition of Irish theatre outside the staging of popular melodramas and described Yeats’ attempts to draw inspiration from the classics (‘the severe simplicity of Greek drama appeals to very scant audiences now’)21 as a novel but misjudged initiative.22
Griffith’s prior criticisms of the South African writer Olive Schreiner had reflected his belief that modern literature needed to be grounded in realism, or experiences with which contemporaries could identify. In a survey of modern Irish novelists, he lamented the proliferation of writers with underdeveloped talents. He believed that this had occurred due to the persistence of the romantic, or introspective, tradition of the exploration of purely personal themes while ignoring the challenge of capturing the nature of Irish society itself.23 As an urbane Dubliner hoping to witness the creation of a more realistic Irish literature, he had much reason to be disappointed with writers’ choice of themes. Ireland was certainly not producing any Emile Zolas, while Griffith was not at all convinced that the obsession of Yeats’ theatre circle with rural folklore was genuine, as their preoccupation was clearly with mythologies rather than the nature of contemporary rural Irish society. T.W. Rolleston’s efforts to introduce Ivan Turgenev and Anton Chekov to an English-language readership had also failed to elicit an Irish response. Although Griffith felt that there was ‘no … difference as to essentials’ between his and Yeats’ attitudes towards literature, he would infuriate Yeats by making a claim (which he defended in detail) that J.M. Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen was a story derived from