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 classical Greek mythology and redressed as if it was an Irish creation. Griffith maintained that Irish writers should ‘not be allowed to go unchallenged’ if they exhibited a desire to ‘construct fifty “Irish” plays out of the Decameron’
If changing the names of Greek characters and places into Irish ones can provide us with Irish plays, the converse should be true. Diarmuid and Grania, with an Hellenic baptism, should represent to the world Greek drama.24
Although its membership did not include a single novelist, the National Literary Society (the progenitor of the theatre movement) had spoken ambitiously since its inception of its desire to create a completely new Irish literature, but Yeats, the most notable writer in its ranks, was a poet, concerned with symbolisms, rather than an author of credible fiction (including theatre). Most of his compatriots, such as William Magee (a.k.a. ‘John Eglinton’), were critics, not artists.
To Griffith, the National Literary Society’s chief shortcoming lay in its members’ social attitudes. Even the architecture of Dublin itself led many to view the city’s Georgian past with far more sympathy than contemporary society, with which Griffith felt they were unable to connect due to their unwillingness to deal with themes of poverty (urban or rural). In turn, Griffith believed they were prone to a debilitating form of affectation that was born of social snobbery. This was a mentality that he repeatedly satirised with deliberately bad comic verses such as ‘Oh Lucinda! My beaming, gleaming star, I would that I were good enough, to dwell in dear Rathgar [a strictly upper-class Dublin suburb].’25 Even George Sigerson, the most convivial and intellectually gifted of the National Literary Society’s leaders (he was a polymath, UCD science lecturer, prolific author and man of strong democratic–republican sensibilities), had, when dwelling on literature, nevertheless spoken of Irish society purely in terms of ‘the lord and the peasant’.26 W.P. Ryan’s judgment at this time that ‘literary Ireland, in fact, does not know itself’ was another reflection of this disconnection between the world of Irish letters and Irish life.27 Meanwhile, if contemporary Irish artists’ attraction towards mysticism (which Griffith, as a self-professed realist, satirised as an obsession with ‘spooks’)28 was spiritually enlightened—in so far as it was ‘creationist’—it also reflected a deliberate disengagement from material realities. This essentially echoed past failures within Irish society rather than challenged them.
For the seven years that the United Irishman was in print, the touchstone of virtually all contemporaries’ reaction to Irish cultural debate lay in their response to the rise of the Gaelic League and its propaganda. This had also been true of Griffith and Rooney. While they shared many attitudes on the national question, as their writing styles demonstrated, they were men of noticeably different temperaments. Rooney’s prose always exhibited a desire to be impartial in the manner of a young student of essay writing: he enjoyed taking part in non-political cultural debates and was certainly open to persuasion. Griffith, by contrast, always believed in the importance of being persuasive at all times and, if necessary, to employ shorthand rhetorical techniques, such as witty satire or the declamatory tone of an ideologue, to undermine rivals in debate. Indeed, it was undoubtedly Griffith’s acerbic prose that caused some readers (invariably religious individuals) to write to the United Irishman in protest against its offensive use of language,29 just as many journalists would come to secretly admire Griffith’s ‘power of killing his adversaries with the point of his pen’ without any seeming need for exegeses.30 Michael MacDonagh, the greatest Freeman journalist of Griffith’s lifetime who now led the much-respected Irish Literary Society of London, offered an alternative perspective. He credited Griffith’s journal with being ‘as clever and interesting a paper as Dublin has ever produced’, but suggested that its ‘lack of humour’ was evidence that its young editors were still a little wet behind the ears.31
After he achieved a degree of fame, Griffith developed the reputation in some quarters of being a politically ambitious journalist. However, he never quite escaped his established role as a review editor. Even when his journals effectively became party-political newspapers (after 1917), they retained their reputation as reading matter exclusively for the bookish section of working-class opinion.32 While most review publications contained several lengthy essays that were dressed
