James joyce, p.27
James Joyce, page 27
Joyce at other points of writing comes close to the ‘two masters’ proposition. As he left Ireland in 1912 for the last time, he wrote in ‘Gas from a Burner’,
O Ireland my first and only love
Where Christ and Caesar are hand in glove!9
But it is in ‘Telemachus’ that the proposition acquired the complete and definitive formulation that had theretofore seemed to elude Joyce.
‘The Bishops and the Party’: The Role of the Church in the Split
To understand the origins and political cogency of Joyce’s ‘two masters’ thesis, one has to consider the role that the Church played in the overthrow of Parnell, and the co-mingling of Irish Catholicism and the ‘nonconformist conscience’ in Britain which had a lasting impact on Joyce.
The two most politically preponderant Irish Catholic bishops—William Walsh, Archbishop of Dublin, and Thomas Croke, Archbishop of Armagh—had held back from immediate intervention after the granting of the divorce decree nisi, hopeful (more so in Walsh’s case than Croke’s) that Parnell would resign, and persuaded that the Irish Party should act first.10 It was a delay Parnell was to exploit.11 On 3 December 1890, in the course of debates in Committee Room 15, the standing committee of the episcopacy issued an address condemning Parnell on moral grounds and ‘as Irishmen devoted to our country.’12 That condemnation was affirmed in the declaration of the hierarchy of 25 June 1891:
We, the Archbishops and Bishops of Ireland, assembled in General Meeting for the first time since the issuing of the declaration of our Standing Committee last December, hereby record the solemn express of our judgement, as Pastors of the Irish people, that Mr. Parnell by his public misconduct, has utterly disqualified himself to be their political leader; that since the issuing of that declaration, Mr. Parnell’s public action, and that of his recognised agents and organs in the Press, especially their open hostility to ecclesiastical authority, has supplied new and convincing proof that he is wholly unworthy of the confidence of Catholics; and we, therefore, feel bound, on his occasion, to call on our people to repudiate his leadership.13
The interventions of the Catholic Church were not confined to the two formal statements. Catholic clerics were vociferous in their opposition to Parnell. Bishops pronounced against Parnell in pastorals and in visitations of their dioceses. Priests delivered sermons, deployed their moral authority and social influence, and campaigned in elections against him.
Timothy Michael Healy, the dominant anti-Parnellite, exulted in the support of the bishops and clergy and sought to maximise its political impact, not least in demoralising the Parnellites. Of the inauguration of the National Federation in March, the National Press, established by Healy, boasted that ‘every priest who has been prominent in the national movement was present at the meeting. Almost every bishop in Ireland concurred in its benediction.’14 Healy exultantly asked at the meeting, ‘I wonder how many hillsiders Mr. Parnell would give for the four archbishops?’15
In late May, Archbishop Croke embarked on a visitation of his archdiocese thundering against Parnell. He denounced Parnell’s weekly meetings, ‘these Sunday excursions, so dishonouring to the Sabbath, which are meant to spread Parnellism over the length and breadth of the land, and to demolish the Irish Church.’ He claimed that ‘a most particular friend’ of Parnell had told him that Parnell had said that ‘the purpose’ of the meetings was for ‘knocking the bottom out of the priests.’16 When Croke went on to demand at Kilteely an audit of national funds, Healy seized on the ‘terrible indictment of Dr. Croke’ to launch the ‘Stop Thief’ sequence of editorials in the National Press. ‘He never suggested that Mr. Parnell was a thief. We say so.’17
The difficulty for the Parnellites was that any attack on the abuse of clerical influence was immediately seized on by Healy and ecclesiastical publicists as an attack on the Catholic faith and the Church itself. Parnell had always viewed the clergy with equanimity. On his death, an ‘Old Disciple’ wrote,
It has been said that Mr. Parnell, being a Protestant, had a latent antipathy to the Irish priesthood. Even when they were against him in the early days of his land agitation, the contrary was the fact. ‘They are the purest and most democratic priesthood in the world’, he once said to the writer, ‘when they are let alone. They have power and like to keep it’. Only two months ago he complained bitterly that they should pursue him so relentlessly—boycott his followers in every parish. ‘They are good men’, he added apologetically, ‘but they were never safe in politics. They mean well, but they do not know anything about English parties. Gladstone will teach them a little’, and he laughed cynically.18
Barry O’Brien wrote that while Parnell ‘felt the pressure of the priests at every turn’ during the Split, he only saw him show anger once. When it was announced that priests were proposing to act as personation agents in North Kilkenny, Parnell was furious and demanded that a protest be prepared to go to the sheriff. The candidate pointed out that the priests had a legal right to act and asked him to dissuade Parnell from registering the protest. O’Brien pointed out to Parnell that if the priests had to be fought, it should be by Catholics, not by Protestants, and Parnell relented: ‘A Protestant leader must not do this. But the system must be stopped. You Catholics must stop it. The priests themselves must be got to see that it is wrong.’19
Parnell as a Protestant was thus to a degree confessionally constrained in dealing with the issue. He did so in a way that was both measured and direct. He emphasised the demarcation of spheres of professional competence. He retorted to Croke’s attacks during the visitation of the diocese, ‘I will only say to his Grace that while I believe his Grace to be a most excellent archbishop, I don’t believe him to be a good political leader.… If you want advice about politics or political service I advise you to go to men who have served their time at it, and who understand it.’20
Clerical dictation became a theme in its own right on the Parnellite side. Parnell declared in April, ‘The struggle has been changed, and materially changed, in its character since its commencement. Influences have been used, intimidation has been exercised against the due exercise of the constitutional right of Irishmen, which will have to be met and defeated (cheers and cries of ‘No Dictation’), and this battle will have to be fought out.’21
He made other like pronouncements thereafter and went a step further in emphasising the importance for Home Rule of ‘tranquillising the alarm of the Protestants of Ireland.’22
Parnell’s Catholic lieutenants were more at large to address the theme of clerical dictation and bore the brunt of the furious anti-Parnellite and ecclesiastical retaliation. It began with Kilkenny. The Parnellites insisted that their defeat was the direct result of clerical intervention. The Freeman’s Journal deprecated the ‘wholesale intimidation that was practised upon the voters.’23 Tim Harrington at the National League characterised the anti-Parnellite victory as ‘a clerical success’, through a political combination of which he as Catholic felt ashamed. Reflecting Parnell’s own objection, he enumerated the priests who were the sole anti-Parnellite personation agents in the seven divisions of the constituency and hinted at an election petition.24 This speech was immediately designated by the Insuppressible, in what was an excellent illustration of Healy’s journalistic tactics, as ‘Mr. Harrington’s No Popery Oration’.25
The principal spokesmen of the hierarchy proved thin-skinned. Croke irately denounced Harrington’s suggestion that the episcopal attack on Parnell reflected ‘an innate love of Whiggery’ by invoking his own record as a nationalist.26 The more febrile Walsh, provoked by anodyne editorial criticism in the Freeman’s Journal of an article that appeared in the Revue Française, despatched a furious protest against the Freeman’s Journal, a paper with which he had had an active association, to the Irish Catholic, a journal which he had in the past openly disdained. He asserted that the Freeman article dealt with the question of Parnell’s ‘leadership’ in ‘a spirit not unworthy of the traditions of some leading organ of the atheistic Freemasonry of the continent’:
The mask, so clumsily worn for the last few weeks, has at length been thrown aside. There is no longer to be kept up even a semblance, even a pretence of respect for the religious teaching of the religious guides of Catholic people of Ireland. Morality, it is now openly proclaimed, is henceforth to take only a second place in public affairs.… At all events it is my duty, the duty of the Bishop of the diocese in which the Freeman’s Journal is published to put the Catholics of Dublin upon their guard against its poisonous teaching.27
Walsh’s disenchantment with the Freeman’s Journal found expression in a further letter to the Irish Catholic in August, in which, to that paper’s great satisfaction, he referred to the Freeman as ‘the apostate journal’.28
A number of the bishop’s Lenten pastorals were broadsides against Parnell and the Parnellites. Michael Logue, the Archbishop of Armagh, forcefully articulated his primitive conception of God’s relation to Ireland in words lauded by the Irish Catholic.29 He declared it was no longer possible when the people were being misled by partisan speakers and partisan journalists ‘to ignore, despise, trample under foot principles that lie at the very foundation of religious life and social purity’:
The question which comes up for immediate solution is—are we to sacrifice these principles for some passing temporal advantage, even were that advantage real and placed within our reach? We know how our forefathers have answered that question. By an act of national apostasy they might have secured for themselves temporal prosperity, political influence, the goodwill of monarchs, the fostering care of an empire, rich, powerful, prosperous. Did our forefathers consent to the sacrifice? No; in defence of their grand old faith; in defence of that religious teaching which safeguarded the honour of their wives and the purity of their daughters; in defence of that spirit of piety which made Ireland the Island of Saints, and which makes her still, even amid her sorrows, a model to the nations, they doomed themselves and their posterity to three hundred years of persecution, confiscation, poverty, and political extinction. And are we, their descendants, to abandon that inheritance of faith, piety, virtue for which they resisted even unto blood!30
The Bishop of Galway deplored that ‘we are called upon to still accept as the Moses of our race a man steeped to lips in moral turpitude.’ The Bishop of Clogher wrote a letter to his clergy urging them to ‘rally our people to the side of virtue and honour, teaching them that in union alone is our strength, that all our efforts were vain without the help of the Liberal party, in whom, under Mr. Gladstone, we have every ground of confidence, and that even Home Rule, under the dictatorship of a vile adulterer might be only a calamity and a curse.’31
The Parnellite retort was that the issue of Parnell’s leadership was a political rather than a moral or religious issue. The Parnellites argued, insistently if tendentiously, that the assertion that it was a moral issue could not be squared with the fact that the bishops had waited sixteen days after the divorce verdict before pronouncing against Parnell,32 and had only done so after Gladstone’s intervention, nor with the somewhat conflicting pronouncements of the episcopacy on whether Catholics or priests in their diocese were entitled to support Parnell.33 The argument from the timing of the episcopacy’s formal intervention, furiously disputed by Walsh,34 achieved particular prominence in the controversy of the Split. A subset of the wider Parnellite argument concerning Liberal dictation, it had something of the aspect of a retaliation against the bishops for entering the political domain to oppose Parnell. The independent-minded and plain-spoken Parnellite Andrew Kettle drew back from this argument: ‘Although it may be fairly open to argument, yet I altogether disagree with those who contend that the Irish bishops were influenced in their action against Mr. Parnell by the Englishman’s letter, or by other English influence. I believe the delay in issuing their manifesto was caused by the stunning effect of the crisis, by the disagreeableness of the task, and by consideration for the man, and I further believe that the mistake of mixing the moral and the political question arose from their intense and honest interest in the success of the National cause.’35
What was undeniable was the thoroughgoing confusion of political and moral considerations in the denunciations of Parnell and the Parnellites by the Catholic priests and bishops. Parnellite publicists retaliated by pointing to the deficient patriotic record of the episcopacy in Irish politics. This related chiefly to the episcopal support of the Act of Union of 1800, the failure to sustain the tenant right movement, and the episcopal support of John Sadleir and William Keogh, who took office in Aberdeen’s government at the end of 1852. Both instances were frequently cited in Parnellite speeches and were the subject of some extended articles and letters in the Parnellite press, all pseudonymous or anonymous.36 The record extended into the contemporary era. An analysis of the Parnell campaign in the 1880 general election stated of Parnell’s contest with William Shaw for the leadership of the Irish Party, ‘This fighting minority, then as now, had to face of the opposition of the Bishops.’37
If the argument from history generally did not extend to the period before the Act of Union, there were exceptions. Croke incautiously asked when all the Irish bishops were wrong in their political opinions, at the same time, on the same question. ‘A Leinster Priest’ took up the gauntlet in a letter to the Freeman’s Journal:
We might reply, more Hibernico, when were the majority of the Irish bishops right at the same time on any political question? Not when they opposed the policy of the Nuncio and Owen Roe O’Neill. Not when they—notably the archbishops and Dr. Troy, then Bishop of Ossory—published pastorals ordering prayers for the success of his Majesty George III’s arms against his revolted American subjects. Not at the time of the Union, or during the agitation for its repeal, when the bishops as a body were as much opposed to the Liberator and the Nation as they appear to be nowadays to the Freeman and Ireland’s great benefactor C S Parnell. Will this sad history keep repeating itself until the extreme demand of ‘no free choice for the laity in matters purely political’ will be met by the other extreme and anti-Catholic cry of ‘no priests in politics’?38
This spirited protest enlisted the support of a writer calling himself ‘Historicus’, the pseudonym of Barry O’Brien.39 He impugned, as Joyce would do later, the record of the episcopacy from the time of the Norman invasion:
Commencing with the Norman Invasion down to the time of James I—four hundred years nearly—we do not find a single one of that body (if we except St. Laurence O’Toole) who could be credited with any profession of patriotism. We find them all, on the contrary, acknowledging from the first moment Henry II arrived in Ireland, the authority of the English King to appoint, or at least to approve of the selection of, the occupants of their various sees. The several so-called insurrectionists of the native population, which were never really attempts to throw off the foreign yoke, never found an active supporter or warm sympathiser in the Irish bishops.40
He went on through the Confederation of Kilkenny in the 1640s, the Act of Union, Catholic emancipation, and the tenant right movement to the Split, and ended, ‘The same episcopal class who in 1800 to a man, actively, openly and ably supported the Union, are, unconsciously, let us hope, proving themselves the traditional agents of the same perfidious policy. Dr. Croke has appealed to History, let History answer him.’41
The argument concerning the bishops—the clergy were specifically exempted from his strictures—was unhistorical without being altogether wrong in point of fact. It had a certain political force and was deeply disquieting to the bishops in tracing a fissure in the patriotic legitimacy of the Catholic Church in Ireland. The heroic phase of collaboration between the political leadership of nationalism under Parnell and the episcopacy had, it had been hoped, healed some of the wounds of controversy over the role of the Church in the Act of Union. The hostile chronicle of the role of the Irish bishops, certainly from the Act of Union, was not new. While it was not confined to the Fenians, it had in their long contest with the Church come to be identified primarily with them. If Parnell was badly worsted in the trial of strength with the Church, the historical indictment of the role of the episcopacy in modern Irish history acquired in the Split a new currency.
John O’Leary’s Recollections of Fenians and Fenianism, published in 1896 but partially written in the course of the Split of 1890–91, was replete with excerpts from the editorials in the Irish People of 1863–65, principally those of Charles Kickham impugning the legitimacy and political competence of ecclesiastical denunciations of Fenianism and of the paper. O’Leary observed, ‘History is for ever repeating itself, and often with astonishing closeness.’42 His strangely abridged memoir, which professes to eschew the immediately contemporary and ends with his own conviction for treason felony in 1865, derived its principal contemporary salience from the renewed political incursion of the bishops and clergy in the Parnell Split.
On the left, historical criticism of the political role of the Church was to find cogent expression in 1910 in the foreword to James Connolly’s pamphlet Labour, Nationality and Religion,43 written to rebut the arguments of Fr Robert Kane, S.J. in his Lenten Discourses against Socialism in Gardiner Street Church. Joyce did not need to read Connolly to apprise himself of the argument. He learnt it from the Split in Parnell’s lifetime and in the aftermath of his death. The Parnellite critique of the political role of the Church found expression in ‘L’Irlanda: Isola dei santi e dei savi’, Joyce’s lecture delivered at the Università Popolare in Trieste on 27 April 1907:
