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 rose’.90 In his earliest poems, which were published in Griffith’s journal, and his first novel, The Charwoman’s Daughter, a portrayal of an impoverished Dublin girl living in a tenement, Stephens might be said to have come closest to producing that Dublin literature which Griffith had desired to see come into being. During the 1910s, Stephens (a writer idolised by Joyce) arguably far surpassed Yeats, Lady Gregory or indeed any other living Irish writer in depicting a fantastical world inspired by mythology and he would also write the most immediate (and popular) account of attitudes in Dublin to the GPO rebellion of 1916, but his connection with his hometown lessened thereafter and it would be a long time before an Irish writer (with the notable exception of Sean O’Casey) would again embrace the world of the Dublin poor as his subject.91
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
