Griffith’s popularity with writers took a nosedive when his journal supported the Gaelic League boycott of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, which was officially boycotted by both the league and UCD on moral grounds just as Yeats’ Countess Kathleen had been boycotted a decade earlier. Characteristically, Yeats saw this as an ignoble betrayal of himself. Various factors were generally overlooked in this Gaelic League inspired controversy, however. First, Griffith’s literary editor Máire Butler was not only a deeply religious Catholic (she died on a pilgrimage to Rome) but also close to Patrick Pearse, the editor of the Gaelic League’s national organ An Claidheamh Solus, a publication to which she was also a chief contributor. Second, Griffith was at the time seeking the political support of John Sweetman, a strong advocate of literary censorship. In this way, Griffith had an editorial responsibility to reflect Gaelic League social mores at this time even if they did not quite match his own. As ‘reparation’, not long after the Playboy controversy ended, Griffith published a series of celebratory cartoons by Grace Gifford of contemporary Irish writers before concluding the series with a self-penned caricature of himself drawn in the image of Satan and ‘depicted according to the idea and for the consolation of all who have been caricatured in Sinn Féin’.92
A common denominator to Griffith’s attitude towards literature throughout his bachelorhood was his difficulty in accepting any production (including the Playboy) that did not match his own idealised vision of women. As a shy teen, he had written a fantasy about being loved by a beautiful blonde woman whose ‘mind is as deep and pure as the deepest well’.93 As an equally shy young adult, he had typified a failure to appreciate an idealised vision of romantic love from (what he imagined to be) a woman’s point of view as ‘thinking like a rascal Englishman’.94 Meanwhile, his chaste relationship with Maud Sheehan, to whom he became engaged around the time of his father’s death during 1904, was probably governed by a fear of losing her moral approval. She was not only a devout and reserved woman but also the sister of two Catholic monks in what was a close-knit and self-consciously middle-class family. Griffith, meanwhile, had not left his working-class social background behind. Both before and after his father’s death in 1904, Arthur had to financially support his old mother (who lived for another fifteen years) and his younger (unskilled) sister Frances, with whom he lived in their Summerhill flat. He simply could not afford to marry Miss Sheehan. As his closest friend knew, ‘to a man of such deep and tender domestic qualities, this was a severe cross’.95
Griffith’s only real hope of acquiring a significant livelihood was through attaining a political success. This reality no doubt played upon his mind while he was writing his most substantial work, The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel for Ireland, which sought to readdress Anglo-Irish relations and, in the process, redefine Irish nationalist debate. Griffith would do so, however, while characteristically avoiding any direct engagement with what most other contemporaries judged to be the most pressing issues in current affairs.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Resurrection of Hungary and the Birth of Sinn Féin (1904–5)
Tom Kettle of University College Dublin considered The Resurrection of Hungary to be the publication that gave a policy to the Irish revolutionary underground for the first time.1 This was because its unilateral definition of Anglo-Irish relations without reference to British requirements was informed by trends in Catholic diplomacy that also shaped the Irish Party’s politics.
Hitherto, the clandestine activities of Ireland’s self-styled republican conspirators had always reflected British foreign policy interests regarding the republics of the United States and France. This situation had changed by 1904 when an Anglo-French diplomatic alliance ended centuries of Anglo-French conflict: hence the sudden political retirement of Maud Gonne, amongst others. By 1904, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was effectively the last great Catholic power, or explicitly Catholic state, on the European continent. Since the days of the Congress of Berlin (1878) its significance in British foreign policy rested on its role as a key intermediary for Britain between Germany and Russia in all matters, as well as between Britain and Russia regarding the perpetual disputes over the Balkans. There was no actual link between Ireland and Britain’s new principal enemy, Germany, aside from links between the Irish and German Catholic immigrant communities in the United States, both of whom now maintained that ‘Europe, not England, is the mother country of Europe.’2 This trend of opinion reflected the growth of a greater diplomatic role for the Catholic Church in the United States. This in turn made it a factor in Anglo-American relations.
There was nothing new about suggesting a parallel between the Anglo-Irish and Austro-Hungarian political relationship. It had occurred to several political leaders—British as well as Irish—during the mid-Victorian era and it still exercised an influence over political opinion during the mid-1880s.3 Reviving this idea after 1904 could serve to remind politicians that the Catholic Church had been the key player in the Anglo-Irish agreement of 1885–86. Both the President of Maynooth College and the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster supported Griffith’s publication. This development reminded the Irish Party that Catholic support was inherently conditional precisely because Griffith’s book included a stinging criticism of the Irish Party in its conclusion. Reflecting this, John Redmond paid a personal visit to the Vatican shortly after Griffith’s book became a top-selling publication to reassure the Pope that the Irish Party would again faithfully represent the Catholic interest in the British imperial parliament for both Ireland and Britain.4 An essential context to Griffith’s publication, therefore, was the church’s ambiguous relationship with the Irish Party, which had connotations not only for Anglo-Irish relations but also the general tenor of Irish political debate.
Along with John MacBride, Griffith had essentially been the chief spokesman for the republican underground ever since his return from South Africa. They had maintained that ‘there is no constitution in Ireland’ because a constitution is something ‘founded by the people and for the people’ and that for any political community not to act upon this reality ‘daily enfeebles the oppressed whilst it more than in the same proportion strengthens the usurper’.5 In common with T.M. Healy’s clericalist wing of the home rule movement and some Irish Tories, they also maintained that the obsessive emphasis of the Irish Party upon maintaining a monolithic political platform within Ireland had become deeply debilitating and unproductive, cultivating ‘the habits of servitude’, political idleness and lack of critical thinking among the Irish populace at large.6
The key general election of 1885 was preceded by preparatory actions by political elites in an attempt to manipulate the outcome within Ireland of the enfranchisement of half of adult British males. Parnell decided during the summer of 1884 to alter the financial management of Irish Party support bodies in both Ireland and America by placing them in Catholic clergymen’s hands,7 while Dublin Castle’s security department simultaneously rounded up and imprisoned the IRB’s leadership, leading to the implosion of the revolutionary underground on both sides of the Atlantic.8 These developments formed the backdrop for several things: Parnell’s decision to grant Catholic clergymen the right to be ex-officio members of all National League committees, the Irish Catholic hierarchy’s decision to make a public statement in October 1884 that it was prepared to rely on Parnell’s party to represent the Catholic interest in the British imperial parliament and the launching of secret negotiations between Dublin Castle, the Irish Party and the Catholic hierarchy through the medium of Sir George Fottrell and the Freeman’s Journal.9 The results of these negotiations was that the Irish Party not only committed itself to trust