ARTHUR GRIFFITH--THE TRUTH
A small man, very sturdily built, nothing remarkable about his appearance
except his eyes, which are impenetrable and steely, taciturn, deliberate,
speaking when he does speak with the authority and the finality of genius,
totally without rhetoric, under complete self-control, and the coolest and
best brain in Ireland.
Griffith is not alone the ablest Irishman now alive, but the ablest
Irishman since John Mitchel, and the only political thinker since Mitchel
who has displayed the statesman's mind. He is the master of a style which
is more nearly akin to that of Mitchel, and that of Swift, than to any
modern style, and is certainly the greatest political writer now concerned
with Ireland, and far and away the most potent political influence.
Parnell, in his day, said that the Fenians were the backbone of
Nationalism in Ireland, and that saying stands as true to-day as it was
then. Political parties, and political movements, come and go, but the
uncompromising Separatists, the Fenians, are always there, thrusting, it
may be, from behind the mask of an open organisation, but always there
directing and planning. Griffith can hardly be numbered amongst them. He
has never believed in physical force, but has always believed that all
Ireland standing together could force an honourable settlement without
physical force. And yet it may be said that no man alive is more
responsible for the Fenian spirit in Ireland than Griffith. From 1899 to
1911 the "United Irishman" and its successor, "Sinn Fein," were the chief
inspiration of all extreme propaganda and extreme discussion in Ireland,
and although from 1911 until 1914 "Irish Freedom" more properly
represented the Fenian element, yet the influence of Griffith has gone
heavily in the same direction. It is pretty safe to say that it was the
rallying point which the "United Irishman" provided in the early critical
days of the movement, its circulation into places where an organiser, even
if they had one, could not penetrate, its examination and vindication of
the whole case for Ireland, its inculcation of self-reliance and work, and
its comprehensive national philosophy generally, that made the later
developments of militant nationalism possible.
Arthur Griffith knows Ireland as no other man of his time does, or did,
save perhaps his early comrade, William Rooney. There is no epoch of Irish
History, no phase of the many-sided Irish problem, that he cannot
elucidate. History, biography, economics, politics, literature, in their
Irish connexion he has at his fingers' ends. And outside Ireland he is
widely read and far flung. When a comparatively young man he emigrated to
the Transvaal, but Ireland drew him and drew him, and he returned to edit
the "United Irishman" and to write, when Kruger declared war, that it
would take the whole strength of England to win the war--probably the only
true prophet amongst the publicists of the time.
England in Ireland he loves to refer to, following John Mitchel, as
"Carthage," and in all his writing and all his thinking the great battle
is the battle between Ireland and Carthage. Every sentence of his is as
clean as a sword-cut, and as terrible in its effect as a battle-axe, and
his genius for marshalling facts, like artillery, and concentrating them
all at once in the direction he is working at is unequalled. His domestic
policy for Ireland is the policy of Sinn Fein, and his foreign policy for
Ireland is equally logical and equally inevitable. Ireland, he holds, has
no business having, at present, any kind of a foreign policy but a
defensive one: that is to say that while its domestic policy ought always
to be governed by the fact that it is in bondage and fighting for its
life, its foreign policy should be governed by precisely the same
considerations. In these circumstances abstract right and wrong in
continental matters are luxuries he cannot afford to take to his heart.
And whenever any event outside Ireland seems worth his comment, he sits
down, scalpel in hand, and analyses patiently until he has discovered
where England is. And then he has also discovered where Ireland ought to
be, and, in so far as he can, he places her there.
He is naturally a believer in evolutionary methods in politics rather than
in revolutionary methods, and, in a free Ireland, would I think be found
on the side of what the "Times" would call "stability." He is no great
believer in the rights of man, and modern radical catch-cries leave him
cold: his creed being rather the rights of nations and the duties of man,
the rights of a nation being the right to freedom and the right to the
allegiance and service of all its children, and the duties of man being to
fear God and serve his nation. He believes in the State as against the
individual, and when in 1913 the great Dublin strike was on foot he
opposed it unflinchingly, unheeding the unpopularity of that course,
because he believed that the strike was injurious to Ireland. Poverty and
sweated labour and social problems generally he would remedy, not by
strikes or sabotage, but by State action, and in such action he would have
as little leaning towards employers as towards employees, his one guiding
principle being the good of the nation.
He believes intensely in himself, and he has no real faith in anybody
else, so that he is always more or less cold towards anybody who tries to
do any political work on his own, in or about his own particular sphere.
And this unfortunate tendency in him has been strengthened by the fact
that his immediate friends and co-workers in Dublin are all far below his
level in intellect and outlook, follow him blindly, and are equally
suspicious of any other attempt to do similar work. He has never had any
hero-worship for anybody save William Rooney, and for him he, as well as
all Rooney's co-workers, had the affection and the awe which the Young
Irelanders had for Davis. Since the death of Rooney he has been alone
intellectually, and while that has doubtless strengthened him, it has also
strengthened the difficulty of working with him amicably without being a
mere echo. When he got married, everybody gasped, but whatever he may be
as a family man, in public life he has continued to be just the same
aloof, impenetrable sphinx as before.
It is a pity that circumstances have put him in the way of making
propagandist speeches extensively, for it is not his work. He is an
effective speaker. He will stand on a platform and, coolly and without the
least trace of passion or emotion, will be more effective in the pungent
deadliness of half-a-dozen sentences, without word painting or
ornamentation of any kind, than the most flambuoyant orator. But his
weapon is the pen, and one article in his best style is worth more than a
dozen of his platform speeches. As leader-writer he is unequalled, and as
a writer of obituary notices he is unsurpassable.
Once he has made up his mind on anything he never changes. In controversy
he is like a bull-dog; he is always the last to let go, and by that time
there isn't much left of the other man's case. As a controversialist he is
able and totally unscrupulous, but he is nearly always right.
Until the recent strenuous period set in, his paper was like a huge magnet
which attracted to itself from the length and breadth of Ireland all the
poets and budding litterateurs. Its contributors have included W. B. Yeats
and AE and John Eglinton; Seumas O'Sullivan and Padraic Colum; Thomas Boyd
and Alice Milligan and Ethna Carbery; finally James Stephens. But in his
heart he believes that
"The poets all are foolish
And some of them are wild,"
and eventually there comes an estrangement, if not a quarrel. He has held
the minor poets, but the major poets, after doing their best work in his
company, have escaped.
In addition to the poets, the paper attracts to itself first-hand
information about all political moves in Ireland and suggested moves. Upon
these things his information is usually premature, startling, and
eventually extraordinarily accurate. He has his finger on all the strings
that control Irish political happenings, and seems to know secret
political history almost as well as those who make it.
He always splits his infinitives.
In the years to come, when we his contemporaries and himself are all dead,
the historian will attempt to analyse the rapid Anglicisation of Ireland
in the nineteenth century, and the desperate struggle at its close to
arrest and reverse that Anglicisation. He will give the greater praise to
that small company of men and women who formed the Gaelic League in 1893
and by their hard work saved the language and arrested the tide of
Anglicisation; but, without detracting from either, he will dwell perhaps
most lovingly on the work of Arthur Griffith from 1899 to 1911, upon the
brain that took the several strands of the Irish Ireland movement, took
every constructive and quickening national idea there was, and wove them
all into the most complete and comprehensive national philosophy that has
been given to Ireland.