James joyce, p.29
James Joyce, page 29
The Irish Catholic did not take long to get into its stride in the Split. Before the Kilkenny election it wrote, ‘The fight which we have now to fight is a good, a holy, and a glorious one. It is a conflict into which, we believe, men might go as Christian soldiers did of yore, crucifix on breast and shield, into which our priests might well descend, crucifix in hand; for it is a struggle in which are ranked powers of light and darkness, of Heaven and of Hell, of Virtue and adultery!’66
It thus hailed the result: ‘To Catholic Irishmen it seemed as if that Providence which watches over our country and its Faith had again, by an inscrutable decree, ordained that the gates of hell shall not prevail against them. To all, the great victory in Kilkenny conveyed that, whatever to other lands may befall, to Ireland the cause of patriotism and morality is placed by a faithful and virtuous race high beyond the reach of treason or corruption.’67
The paper proclaimed that ‘finally and irretrievably [Parnell] has been banished from his once high place as leader of the Catholic people of this Catholic country.’68 It declared that ‘if the repudiation of Mr. Parnell’s leadership meant civil war instead of merely the turmoil of electoral contention, the present is one of those occasions upon which honest citizens should not shrink from responsibility.’69
The relevance for Joyce lies in the hybridity of the editorial position of the Irish Catholic. The paper invoked absolute Catholic moral prescriptions and timeless Irish fealty to the precepts of the Church but espoused in the same breath the imperatives of the Liberal-nationalist alliance. While championing Irish Catholic morality, its editorials enunciated an explicitly contemporary political argument that was aligned with that of the Liberal party and of the publicists of the ‘nonconformist conscience’.
The way in which the editorials of the Irish Catholic became still more shrill from August 1891 reveals the vicious dialectic of the Split and of its gathering bitterness even before Parnell’s death. This was after Parnell’s marriage to Katharine O’Shea, and after his third defeat in the Carlow by-election, and is not explicable simply by reference to moral indignation at Parnell’s marriage to a divorced woman. Its anathematisation of the defeated Parnellites was a calculated radicalisation of the Split. Its opportunistic Catholic supremacism complemented and was broadly synchronised with Healy’s escalating rhetoric from June 1891 as he sought to entrench his predominance among the anti-Parnellites. The common premise was that Parnellism was not tolerable even as the allegiance of a minority. The persistence of Parnellism in defeat was an affront to a now hegemonic Catholic nationalism. It was less Parnell than Catholic Parnellites who were now the target.
Seizing on a letter received from the Archbishop of Dublin condemning the Freeman’s Journal’s condonation of Parnell’s marriage, the Irish Catholic characterised Parnellism as ‘the very negation of Christianity in any form, a foul invention devised by designing men to entrap the unwary into fatal error, and calculated to develop into an anti-Christian revolt fraught with deplorable consequences.… Parnellism is not merely irreligious, it is infidel.… The renegades of old who tramped on the Cross were not more openly the enemy of Christian teaching than those who now deride the mandates and warnings of the Sacred Scriptures and assail the representatives of God.’70
Parnell was ‘a convicted libertine’, whose guilt was ‘full of infinite abomination in the sight of God’:
When, then, we find championship of the claims of such a man, allied with the display towards him, of a grovelling servility and with an exhibition towards our priests and prelates of an aggravated hostility, we are surely provided with knowledge which should enable us to understand the phenomenon which we witness. We are today face to face with what, despite its disguises, is undoubtedly a revolt against God, against the authority of the Church, against the teachings of the Church, against the teachings of morality, and against the first principles of Divine and human legislation. This is a fact which can neither be denied nor suppressed. Parnellism is an anti-Christian movement, having for its object the apotheosis of immorality.71
A week later it proclaimed, ‘Evil—evil unexpiable and unforgivable—enshrouds Parnellism, and is of the very essence of the movement.’72 The following week it characterised the battle to be fought as ‘a renewal of the ancient warfare between religion and irreligion, between the spiritual and the temporal, between Christ and Anti-Christ’. It warned darkly that ‘those who protest that politicians owe no allegiance to morality and ethics forget, or pretend to forget, that politicians have souls to be saved, and that heaven is as glorious and hell as terrible a fact in their case as in that of other men’. It celebrated the vanquishing of Parnell: ‘Our quarrel with Mr. Parnell is not a political one, nor one to be judged by political rules. We have repudiated him as a leader because he is unfit to be the chieftain of a Christian people. We have stricken down Parnellism, and mean to crush it under foot, because its tendency has been proven to be towards hostility to religion, and towards disregard of the teachings of morality.’73
The aggressive moralising of Dennehy’s Irish Catholic found its most notorious expression in its editorial response to Parnell’s death, which United Ireland characterised as ‘blasphemous and indecent’:
To Catholics the close of the career of Mr. Parnell will present itself with a terrible significance. Death has come upon him in the home of sin; he has died and his last glimpse of the world has been unhallowed by the consolations of religion, his memory is linked for ever with that of her whose presence seems to forbid all thought of his repentance. And we know that he passed into eternity with never a sigh of sorrow for the insult he offered to morality, and for the revolt which he sought to create in his native land against the anointed prelates and ministers of God’s Church. The darkness is pierced by the cry of sorrow, but the light of hope shines not, and there is nought but darkness, dread and horrid.74
Katharine Tynan wrote in response in United Ireland,
… this man doth smite
The dead man lying in the rain at night
And having smitten the sad body
Spares not to smite the trembling soul … 75
Dennehy’s editorial—like that of the Evening Press on the day that news of Parnell’s death reached Dublin which proclaimed that Parnell ‘lay dead in the house of a woman who was his betrayer’76—was never forgiven by those who had remained loyal to their leader. Coupled with the inflammatory riposte of United Ireland written by John McGrath, these editorials launched the cycle of unrelenting recrimination that followed Parnell’s death.
Dennehy’s onslaughts on Parnellism, with their distinctive Catholic nationalist eschatological edge, kept pace with Healy’s more conventionally political attacks. The later course of Dennehy and the Irish Catholic affirmed the nexus with Healy. The paper was to be a principal vehicle of Healyism through the 1890s. Dennehy had assisted in the foundation of the National Press and edited the Healyite Daily Nation from 1897. He was briefly the editor of the formerly Parnellite Irish Independent when William Martin Murphy acquired the paper in 1900. He was the secretary to the Citizens’ Committee appointed to arrange for the receptions of Edward VII and George V on their first visits to Dublin on their accessions.77 In the lockout of 1913, the Irish Catholic discovered that socialism, like Parnellism before it, ‘is essentially Satanic in its nature, origin, and purposes.’78 Dennehy’s 1905 articles ‘Nationality within the Empire’ confirmed the feebleness of his conception of nationalism.79 An advocate of devolution, he believed that Home Rule would come from the Conservatives.80
Dennehy’s obituarist in the Irish Catholic wrote that ‘ever vigilant where the interests of religion and morality were concerned, courageous and outspoken in the expression of his views, he always bore in mind that the proper place of the Catholic lay journalist is one of the most docile subordination to the official authorities of the Church.’81 The docility was highly debatable. Aside from the stubborn idiosyncrasies of his own opinions, Dennehy sought to bring the views of lay and clerical zealots to bear on the hierarchy. There is little that more strikingly exemplifies the disordering wrought by the Split than Archbishop Walsh’s fleeting alignment with the Irish Catholic. It did not take long for Walsh’s antipathy to the Irish Catholic to reassert itself. In 1894 he had sent his administrator to advise its editor that ‘the publication of the paper as a Catholic paper was seriously injurious to religious interests.’82 The natural order of the 1880s was restored, so that in the ‘Aeolus’ episode of Ulysses, under the heading ‘The Crozier and the Pen’, in the office of the Freeman’s Journal and National Press, Red Murray states gravely that ‘his Grace phoned down twice this morning’.83 The comment subtly marries very considerable political awareness with artistic purpose. Forming part of an initially inaudible overture, it is the second in the suite of evocations of the era of Parnell that runs through the chapter, of which the first is giving the Freeman’s Journal its full title, which records its amalgamation with Healy’s National Press in 1892. The suggestion of episcopal dictation merges insensibly into a deft characterisation of the wearisome meticulousness of the Archbishop of Dublin.
The professed ancientness of Dennehy’s Catholic piety belies its innovativeness. There is no real historical precedent for the Irish Catholic. The paper asserted itself to be at once unimpeachably nationalist in its politics and undeviatingly orthodox in its submission to the moral dictates of the Catholic Church applied to the political domain. It ignored the historically fraught relationship of the Church to nationalism and blandly asserted an immanent and timeless solidarity of bishops and clergy with a Catholic people. Its position could only be sustained through a radical reconceptualisation of Irish nationalism as an explicitly Catholic phenomenon. The paper stood on the far right of Catholic opposition to Parnell. As the most thoroughgoing exponent of a Catholic nationalism, the paper functioned as the eschatological outrider of Healyite anti-Parnellism. Its articulation of an overt Catholic supremacism and its anathemising of Catholic Parnellites, even though not shared by most anti-Parnellites, signify a shift in the disposition of power within the nationalist polity. Its rhetoric was an early indication that the Split had brought about not merely the fall of Parnell but an enfeeblement of the authority of any secular nationalist leadership that might succeed his.
Joyce apprehended the significance of the Irish Catholic in the Split. In A Portrait he brilliantly sets in motion the ferocious dialectic of militantly Catholic anti-Parnellism. The rhythm of the Split, and the dérapage of Irish politics by the time of Parnell’s death, is rendered in microcosm in the Christmas dinner scene of A Portrait. The bitterly moralistic Dante Riordan treats Parnellism as the repudiation of Catholicism, goading Mr Casey into a rhetorical repudiation of God, which she receives with a cry of triumph. In the micro-politics of the Split, she can be taken as an assiduous reader of the Irish Catholic, whose absolutist anti-Parnellite argument her declamations faithfully reproduce. The alignment of Dante with the Irish Catholic rather than with the more mainstream—if still ferocious—anti-Parnellite National Press seems deliberate. The viciously personalised idiom of the Split, more typical of Healy and the National Press, is evoked, with the sly feminisation characteristic of Joyce’s treatment of Healy, through the ‘old harridan’ at the Arklow meeting who chants, ‘Priesthunter! The Paris Funds! Mr Fox! Kitty O’Shea!’, and into whose eye Casey spat the tobacco he was chewing.84 Joyce’s incorporation of the trajectory of the Irish Catholic in the Christmas dinner scene reflects his appreciation that a decisive eruption of assertively Catholic nationalism in a modern form had occurred in the Split and permitted him to present the crisis of Church and nation at its most philosophically stark.
In the Christmas dinner scene in A Portrait, Joyce realised a stylised model of the Split. The role of the Church, the merging of Catholic and nationalist values in Healyite rhetoric, the anathematisation of Catholic Parnellites that was such a marked feature of the Split, and the role of the Irish Catholic in overreaching Healy and his National Press combine to provide the Christmas dinner with an extratextual historicity that enhances its harrowing verisimilitude.
The conviction that Irish politics had frozen itself led Joyce to freeze-frame Irish politics in the Split, from the divorce decree to the immediate aftermath of Parnell’s death, a period that ran from November 1890 to December 1891. It is only in this limited sense that it is valid to speak of what the historian and biographer of Parnell F.S.L. Lyons termed, a little patronisingly, Joyce’s ‘arrested Parnellism’.85
The Lyceum: The Jesuits and the Parnell Split
Jesuit thinking, or a form of it, finds expression in the Lyceum (1887–94). It was founded and first edited by Fr T. A. Finlay, though some of its religious content came from the pen of his more austerely hard-line younger brother, Fr Peter Finlay, a theologian.86 The Lyceum was closely associated with University College.87 In his memoir of his university life, which with characteristic diffidence followed his memoir of Joyce, Constantine Curran describes the journal as ‘conservative without being reactionary … observant and critical of the new trends in literature, practical in analysis, cautious, and beyond measure reticent in domestic politics’: ‘From start to finish, that is to say from 1887 to 1894, over the period of the land agitation, the later Home Rule movement and throughout the Parnell “split”, the name of Parnell or of the Land League or of the National League, so far as I can see, does not occur in the paper. It is true that during the “split” in 1892 and 1893 there are three articles of an expository character—I should think from the pen of Father Peter Finlay—on the relation of Church authority with politics. But that is all.’88
These ‘three articles of an expository character’ (actually four) prompted the comment in the Jesuit history of the college that ‘these are in a sense strongly political articles, but the Parnell controversy brought politics into the sanctuary itself to religion’s very great detriment’.89 Probably, as Curran suggests, written by Peter Finlay, the articles are barren of historical argument—the Jesuits were determined to cut off the Fenian-Parnellite argument concerning the political role of the Irish Church from the Act of Union90—and essentially theologically exegetical. The Jesuits were perhaps more conscious than the diocesan clergy and hierarchy of the need to tread a fine line in warning of the pernicious consequences of anticlericalism while avoiding any suggestion that anticlericalism had any immediate prospect of taking hold in Ireland, seeking in that way to articulate not a vulgar triumphalism from the Split (such as that of the Irish Catholic) but rather the quiet confidence of Catholic order restored. It was in its own way just as galling. Joyce was always intrigued by the professed dispassionateness of Jesuit ratiocination and jousted with it with feigned urbanity in University College, but was to repudiate its intellectual abstractness in Stephen Hero. It is a dimension of Joyce’s revolt that is inadequately acknowledged.
The first Lyceum editorial article was entitled ‘The Anti-clerical Cry’. While acknowledging that bishops and priests could in theory err in the political domain, it concluded with what would be termed in contemporary electoral law, skewed as that was, a spiritual threat (or perhaps a reminder of a spiritual threat) to Catholic Parnellites who challenged the role of the clergy:
To arouse angry feelings against the priesthood is to inflict grievous injury upon the church.… Teach the people to contemn or hate their clergy, the practice of religion will not long survive the change of feeling. Non-Catholics cannot of course be expected to rate this consideration highly. In their eyes it might even be a move for encouraging an anti-clerical agitation. But with Catholics it must be otherwise.… It must be a very great and a very certain political good which can prove a set-off against the injury to souls; and be the good what it may, those Catholics will have a serious account to render, who, unauthorised, and heedless of the means provided for redress, seek to remedy their grievances by dividing priest from people, to win a passing temporal success at the cost of large eternal interests.91
The author, probably Peter Finlay, of this sequence in the Lyceum reflected in the second article the Catholic internationalism of the Jesuits, to which Joyce’s socialism can be seen in one aspect as an adaptive riposte:
In Ireland, our Bishops too have ventured to declare that the moral should not be unconsidered in the domain of politics, and that a certain line of public conduct is necessary to give effect to the principle; at once the French anti-Catholic cry: l’ennemi c’est le clericalisme, has been raised in Ireland, and the clergy have been denounced on the platform and in the newspaper as unmeasuredly and as unreasonably as by any French atheistic and Freemason officials. ‘No Bishop, no Priest, in politics’ was adopted as the watchword of a party, composed largely of men who were born in the Church and should not ignore its doctrines.92
It was not, of course, that Ireland was threatened by ‘the anti-Catholic policy’ of ‘M. Gambetta, or Prince Bismarck, or Signor Crispi’, in France, Germany, and Italy, respectively: ‘We are dealing with a mere hypothesis.’93
The third, and most revealing, article followed the success of the Parnellite petition in the South Meath election which resulted in setting aside the anti-Parnellite victory at the general election. The outcome, further discussed in this chapter, controversial as it was, represented a check in the progress of anti-Parnellism after Parnell’s death. What put the Lyceum editorialist under greater pressure than in the preceding articles was the setting aside by a judge (even if a Catholic judge: ‘We do not regard Mr. Justice O’Brien as an especially enlightened exponent of Catholic theology’)94 of an election on the grounds of improper ecclesiastical influence in the anti-Parnellite interest, which starkly posed the issue of the proper domain of ecclesiastical authority. The effect produced was extraordinary. It prompted Peter Finlay, the presumed editorialist, to engage in an unrelenting rehearsal of the ultramontanism of the first Vatican Council of 1869–70,95 situating Ireland in response to the Parnell Split squarely in the great deferred wave of reaction to the French Revolution and its outfall that swept through continental Catholicism in the nineteenth century.96 Finlay upheld the view of Church doctrine of Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, one of the most influential and politically unscrupulous advocates of ultramontanism at the Council and after, against Gladstone’s then-famous and still-resented The Vatican Decrees in Their Bearing on Civil Allegiance: A Political Expostulation of 1874.97 He cited with approbation Manning’s statement that ‘it is clear that the Civil Power cannot define how far the circumference of faith and moral extends. If it could, it would be invested with one of the supernatural endowments of the Church’. Finlay put it plainly: ‘The attitude of men who would claim to be Catholics, while questioning or rejecting the Church’s rights to define her own jurisdiction, can only be paralleled by that of the Jansenists … and that of Dr. Dollinger’s followers in more recent times’. Finlay’s argument cast a penumbra of ecclesiastical authority beyond infallibility: the Church ‘has unquestionably the right to determine, and that infallibly, what the limits of her jurisdiction in faith and morals are.’ The bishops singly or in council had the right ‘to determine—fallibly but authoritatively—all questions of faith and morals which are neither “greater causes” reserved to the Holy See nor the subjects of controversy among grave theologians’. Taking as his point of departure a somewhat inept observation of the High Court judge who heard the petition, Finlay epitomised the issue of the Split in its moral aspect:
