Griffith’s initiative won the support of Edward Martyn’s new Abbey Theatre, various republicans as well as a couple of newspaper editors in rural Ireland, while John T. Keating (formerly of the Cork City IRB but now chairman of the American Clan na Gael) came to Ireland in support of their efforts.76 A couple of days after Keating’s return to the United States, Dublin City Council voted against issuing of a welcoming address to the King by a narrow margin (forty votes to thirty-seven). While Griffith claimed this as a victory for the National Council, it was J.P. Nannetti MP (who was elected as the new mayor the following year) who actually played the decisive role in defeating the motion by persuading many figures in the Dublin UIL to vote accordingly.77
Although this opposition to the royal visit did not spread elsewhere, these surprising events in Dublin led many to conclude that the Gaelic League and most young Irish nationalists were not supportive of the Irish Party. Meanwhile, with Clan na Gael support, a ‘Keating Branch’ of the Gaelic League was formed in Dublin and became a recruiting ground for the new IRB.78 Catholic university students led by Tom Kettle responded by forming a new ‘Young Ireland Branch’ of the UIL in defence of the Irish Party. Meanwhile, sensing opportunities, Griffith noted gleefully that among the many dissenters from the Irish Party’s politics there were ‘many law bachelors who are Gaelic Leaguers … these are the stuff of which politicians are made ... their influence could permeate every phase of Irish life.’79 The deep reservations that Griffith had expressed hitherto about the cultural connotations of the Irish-Ireland movement now became far less important to him than his declared belief that it presented a far more potent means of overthrowing the established political order than a republican rebellion:
The taking of the Bastille was an upheaval. A revolution is not an upheaval. A revolution is the silent, impalpable working of forces for the most part undiscerned in their action … That nationalists feel the working of a new order of things in Ireland at the present day, no-one will be prepared to doubt.80
Seeking to capitalise upon this trend, Griffith would soon commit himself to drafting a comprehensive critique of the established political order in Ireland. As he was the editor of a review rather than a newspaper, however, it was fellow writers rather than politicians who generally took most notice of his efforts. Another reason for politicians to be dismissive of Griffith’s critiques was the degree to which he merely echoed Irish Tory arguments. Griffith argued that it was O’Brien’s willingness to work with the Irish Tories that had secured good terms for Irish tenant farmers, while he would also echo the Tories’ response to Britain’s difficulty in bringing closure to the Anglo-Boer War.81 This was to claim that the Empire had become overstretched, necessitating the initiation of a nationalistic policy of economic protectionism by placing less emphasis upon the commercial value of the colonies.
The peak of Griffith’s popularity among writers took place during the brief burst of literary fame he acquired upon the publication of The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel for Ireland (Dublin, 1904). This prompted various famous figures in the Irish literary world to act as contributors, making the period 1904–5 the peak of the United Irishman’s status as a notable review. The commercial success of this book also brought about another change in Griffith’s lifestyle. Having escaped from real poverty two years previously, he now became the centre of a circle of professional and literary friends who met once or twice a week at private rooms in Bailey’s, an expensive restaurant off Grafton Street. As he grew confident about the niche he had found for himself in the world of letters, Griffith would occasionally make fun of the loneliness of other writers, once claiming, for example, that he saw in George Moore’s memoirs a determination ‘to get people to laugh at him, for certainly none could have laughed with him … I think there is not an unhappier or lonelier old man in the world.’82 If Griffith no longer felt vulnerable in society, however, he remained an intensely private figure who did not win many friends. As his good friend James Starkey (the writer ‘Seamus O’Sullivan’) testified, ‘in spite of the strong well-set jaw bone which gave Arthur Griffith a rather stern—even to those who knew him … a rather militant, even a belligerent, expression’, and in spite of his well-developed upper body which ‘suggested immense strength’ and strength of character, the impression Griffith always made on social occasions was ‘an innate and unconquerable shyness’. Even if he could be ‘a great companion’, he was incapable of greeting friends by their first name and conversation could die quickly if he was not in the company of people who were also omnivorous readers and liked to talk about books.83
Close friends acquired at this time included Seamus O’Kelly and Darrel Figgis (notable Catholic writers and journalists), poet Padraic Colum, engineer James Montgomery, medical student Oliver St John Gogarty, future lawyer Constantine Curran (a mutual friend of Kettle) and painter Lily Williams, the latter being someone with whom Griffith could share his love of the countryside and, most of all, music; a trait he had inherited primarily from his mother Mary, whose family (the Whelans) were no less cultivated than the Griffiths.84 George Russell (AE) began inviting Griffith to art exhibitions and even suggested that he work as an art editor but as Griffith did not feel qualified to be art critic he delegated Williams and especially Starkey to write on artistic matters in his journal.85 Indeed, from 1905 onwards, Griffith generally confined his art commentaries to speculations on whether or not Dublin City Council overpaid for various paintings in municipal galleries; a purely materialistic perspective that few, if any, of his artistic or literary friends ever felt to be justifiable: ‘poor Griffith; the devil is in him. Poor devil and poor him.’86 St John Gogarty was initially responsible for introducing Griffith to various college students but, although he had dreamed of being a university student in his youth, Griffith initially found their company a little disconcerting. For example, when he was invited by Gogarty to attend a bizarre house-warming party at the Sandycove Tower that also served as a home for the young writer James Joyce, Griffith pleaded with Starkey to come with him to prevent him from feeling ‘helpless and alone’.87
During 1907, James Joyce would take an interest in Griffith’s writings due to Gogarty’s sympathy for his journalism and willingness to write anti-enlistment articles for Griffith’s journal.88 Ultimately, Joyce’s experimental novel Ulysses (Paris, 1922) would be set in Dublin on the same day (16 June 1904) as the last of Griffith’s ‘Resurrection of Hungary’ articles appeared in the United Irishman. While it would use the political contest involving J.P. Nannetti and Griffith’s National Council as a distant backdrop for its storytelling, Joyce would not depict this as a defining political moment but rather suggested, in a literary monument to inhumanity, that particularly exaggerated religious or political claims upon individuals’ allegiance, such as frequently existed in Ireland, could perversely lead to the needs of a man and his wife to go unfulfilled.89
Griffith’s own principal contribution to (non-political) Irish literature would be to publish the earliest works of James Stephens, a Protestant orphan who, like Griffith, had known great poverty in his youth living in inner-city Dublin tenements where ‘no daring wind, light-hearted, from a garden blows, its sweetness here from any