James joyce, p.47
James Joyce, page 47
John Francis Taylor and The Language of the Outlaw
Joyce’s most formal treatment of the issue of the revival of the Irish language is his deployment of the speech of John Francis Taylor of 24 October 1901, in the ‘Aeolus’ episode of Ulysses. The debate in which Taylor spoke captures the contemporary state of the debate on the Irish language in its political aspect, and its use in Ulysses, after an interval of some two decades from its delivery, casts a great deal of light on Joyce’s intellectual response to, and imaginative treatment of, the movement for the revival of the Irish language. Taylor made his speech at the inaugural meeting of the Law Students’ Debating Society of the King’s Inns. The auditor’s address was entitled ‘The Irish Revival’. Taylor moved the vote of thanks, and Lord Justice Gerald Fitzgibbon, who was the president of the society, wound up the debate. For reasons which will become apparent, the debate attracted copious press coverage and Taylor’s speech acquired instant political celebrity on the streets of Dublin.
Richard Ellmann considered that Joyce ‘appears to have attended the meeting’26 or ‘probably’ did so.27 It is highly improbable that he did, though this is not a matter of great consequence. He certainly came to hear about it and read the detailed account in the Freeman’s Journal and possibly in the other newspapers that covered it (the Irish Daily Independent, the Daily Express, and the Irish Times). Ellmann points out that Joyce had access to a four-page leaflet entitled The Language of the Outlaw which contained an outline of the speech.28 That slim pamphlet (undated but published in the United Irishman on 17 February 1906) is a curious document: it incorporates a letter written by ‘X’ to the Guardian on 14 November 1902, shortly after Taylor’s death, together with an ardently revivalist narrative which positions the displacement of the native language as a deliberate and decisive step in the English conquest (‘The language of a people is the fortress which the enemy first assails; and once that fortress is captured, and its stones levelled with the ground, every other stronghold of nationality must inevitably fall.’)29 Though Joyce was unaware of the fact, the pamphlet was published by Roger Casement with a short commentary of his own on the speech and on X’s letter to the Guardian.30 The identity of X remains unknown.31
The account of the speech by X in the letter to the Guardian is significant because Joyce drew on it, together with the contemporary newspaper reports, to remind himself of Taylor’s speech when writing ‘Aeolus’. This is certain because Joyce replicates some of the errors of the pamphlet’s commentary on the speech. One of those errors is Casement’s, who writes in his gloss on the letter that ‘the only record available’ of the speech of ‘one of the most eloquent of modern Irishmen, the late Mr. J. F. Taylor QC’, was contained in X’s letter to the Guardian. Joyce knew that to be incorrect but seized on and archly accentuated it as an enhancement of the idea that the speech was unprepared and that it survived chiefly in oral memory. Professor MacHugh in ‘Aeolus’ asserts, ‘That he had prepared his speech I do not believe for there was not even one shorthandwriter in the hall.’32 This affords a slight but perfect example of Joyce’s fictional method applied to subjects of historical factuality, extending to matters actually known to him. Joyce may have taken as correct other errors or uncertain interpolations in X’s account, including the date (not ‘last November’), the location (not Trinity’s ‘college historical society’, as professor MacHugh asserts), and the order of speakers (professor MacHugh repeats X’s error that Taylor spoke after Fitzgibbon: ‘When Fitzgibbon’s speech had ended John F Taylor rose to reply.’)33 What Joyce made most out of was X’s assertion that the Taylor who rose to reply ‘had been very ill, and had come straight from his bed, and without food’ and so began his speech ‘with some difficulty’ before reaching his stride.34 Professor MacHugh, ‘in ferial tone’ addressed to J. J. O’Molloy, says, ‘Taylor had come there, you must know, from a sickbed.… His dark lean face had a growth of shaggy beard round it. He wore a loose white silk neckcloth and altogether he looked (though he was not) a dying man.’35
The account of X scarcely did justice to Taylor’s speech but did capture its concept: ‘[Taylor] set out the arguments which a fashionable professor with an attachment to the Egyptian Court might have addressed to Moses.’36 X’s rendering of the substance of Taylor’s speech was a flat and abbreviated paraphrase, but flares into life at its close: ‘ “And”, broke out the speaker, “if Moses had listened to these arguments, what would have been the end? Would he ever have come down from the Mount with the light of God shining on his face and carrying in his hands the Tables of the Law written in the language of the outlaw?”’37
The speech as rendered in Ulysses is closer to Taylor’s original than the limp paraphrase of X, which confirms that Joyce was aware of Taylor’s speech when it was delivered and had a remarkable recall of what Taylor was reported to have said, or at the very least a high familiarity with the moves in the contemporary debate for and against the revival of the Irish language. The letter of X that was republished in the pamphlet served as a prompt, but the principal source for ‘Aeolus’ was Joyce’s recollection of what he had read, and perhaps been told, about the speech.
To appreciate the contemporary impact of Taylor’s speech and why it had made an impression, it is necessary to go back to the debate itself, of which the four principal Dublin daily papers—the nationalist Freeman’s Journal and Irish Daily Independent, and the Unionist Daily Express and Irish Times—carried extensive reports in their editions of 25 October 1901.38 The extent of the press coverage owed as much to the prospect of the encounter of Taylor and Fitzgibbon as to the subject. The debate in the dining hall of the King’s Inns was recognised as a remarkable political occasion in the city even before Taylor and Fitzgibbon had uttered a word, and this accounted for the large and unusually diverse audience. As well as many who might be expected professionally to attend, the audience in the dining hall included a complement of Gaelic League supporters. The Freeman’s Journal, in its characteristic manner that was to be affectionately parodied in Ulysses, carried a list of many of those present, including William Walsh, the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, ‘Patrick H. Pearse BL’, John (Eoin) MacNeill, and Maud Gonne; the Archbishop of Armagh, Cardinal Logue, sent apologies.
The debate was a rhetorical joust between champions of the two Irelands, a first set-piece confrontation on the still-new issue of the Irish Revival. Gerald Fitzgibbon (1837–1909) had been an advocate of high distinction who had served as Solicitor-General in Ireland from 1877 to 1878 and had not ceased, on his appointment as a Lord Chief Justice of Appeal in 1878, to be a figure of immense political influence. Undeviatingly Conservative and of legendary intelligence and political acumen, Fitzgibbon was considered the pre-eminent intellectual figure of Irish unionism. He had remained close to Lord Randolph Churchill, whom he had met when Churchill was in Ireland during his father the Duke of Marlborough’s lord lieutenancy from 1876 to 1880, and he significantly influenced Churchill’s policies and pronouncements on Ireland.39 The shrewdest commentator on the Irish judiciary wrote in 1890 that Fitzgibbon had been a candidate for appointment to the judicial committee of the English privy council (and membership of the House of Lords) in 1889, but that a sufficient obstacle to his promotion was ‘his friendship with Lord Randolph Churchill, whose friends are not admitted to as the friends of the present [Conservative] government. Lord Randolph has stayed more than once with the Lord Justice, in his pleasant red-brick house that overlooks the sea from the Hill of Howth’.40
John Francis Taylor (1853–1902) was a respected but not especially successful member of the Irish bar. Passionately nationalist and notoriously irascible, his principal fame was as an itinerant nationalist orator, if mostly in Dublin city centre, within the confines of the two canals. That geographical confinement was mitigated by sociological depth. Yeats wrote in the Trembling of the Veil, in an instalment of his brilliantly fraught characterisation of Taylor in his autobiographical writings, ‘He spoke in the most obscure places, in little halls in back streets where the whitewashed walls are foul with grease from many heads, before some audience of medical students or of shop-assistants, for he was like a man under a curse, compelled to hide his genius, and compelled to show in conspicuous places his ill-judgement and his temper.’41 He was ‘a great orator, the greatest I have heard, doomed by the violence of his temper to speak before Law Students Debating Societies, obscure Young Ireland Societies, Workmen’s Clubs’.42 Taylor’s status in Britain was more securely institutionalised as the Dublin correspondent of the Manchester Guardian. He was marginalised during Parnell’s ascendancy chiefly by reason of his refractory independent-mindedness, to which the tier below Parnell of the party leadership were acutely alert. In the O’Shea divorce crisis, he initially rallied to Parnell before reversing into alignment with the Gladstonian Liberal Party. He became estranged from the anti-Parnellites, but neither repented of nor critically addressed his anti-Parnellism in the Split in the politically long interval between Parnell’s death and his own. That was a bitter silence. It might be said that Taylor’s political life was twice broken by Parnellism. By the time of the debate in the King’s Inns, he was close to Arthur Griffith, and a contributor to the United Irishman whom Griffith greatly valued. He had one final moment which for once he did not miss.
The debate was defined by its moment in political time. Irish Unionists were gratified by the enfeeblement of nationalism occasioned by the Parnell Split. A Unionist government was in office in Westminster from 1895 and would continue until 1906. Ameliorative Conservative measures characterised as ‘killing Home Rule with kindness’, principally in the domains of land purchase and local government, achieved a degree of success. The advances of nationalism under Parnell had nonetheless deeply unsettled the confidence of Irish Unionists, so that their hegemony in Ireland was marked by persisting unease masked by the sedulously maintained posture of confidence of Irish Unionist politicians and publicists.
J. F. Taylor spoke after the auditor’s paper. He invoked Thomas Davis and welcomed the auditor’s address ‘because of its reinforcement of personal and national dignity’: ‘Many distinguished Irishmen were fond of going about saying they were Irishmen. He did not know of anything more humiliating than to see intellectual Irishmen going from one country house to another in England with cap and bells and turning their poor country into ridicule (applause). If this new movement did nothing more than make these men ashamed it would be a gain.’43
FIGURE 8.1. Sketch of John Francis Taylor by James Walker. Reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Ireland, PD 3099 TX 13.
Taylor passed to the issue of migration from Ireland and thence to the Irish language, in the brilliant rhetorical flight that drew on the book of Exodus and won the speech its renown:
Now as regards the language, suppose a great message was to be given to the human race, in what language was it likely to be given? What was the greatest message ever given to man? Christian and non-Christian alike were agreed upon that matter. Was that message given in the language of Imperial Rome or the language of intellectual Greece? No, it was given in the rustic dialect of the far-off land ‘out of which no good could come.’ Had that fact any meaning for them there and now? He could very well understand an intellectual Egyptian speaking to Moses ‘Why bother about these people of yours in Egypt? I know possibly we have not treated them very well, but all that is over now, and you may be chosen to rule over Egypt, and every public position is open to your people. I have no patience with you talking about your history and literature. Why, I asked one of the learned professors of your literature the other day what it was like, and he told me it was made up of superstitions and indecency’ (prolonged applause and laughter). If Moses had listened to the counsels of that learned Professor he would never have come down from the mountain, his face glowing as a star, and bearing the Tablets of the Law (applause). Had these facts no meaning for them here and now. He did not mean that they should expect any great message from the Irish language in the future, but if there was such a great message, it would come, not from a language encrusted with commercialism and materialism, but it would come from some pure language that was kept aloof and unsullied with contamination with the world (applause).44
The passionate though habitually over-vehement orator had found a still point of vantage in the equation of the destiny of the Irish with the Jews. He attained a high cogency on a great occasion that required it. It was a famous triumph.
Quite apart from the invocation of Moses and the comparison of the Irish and the Jews, Taylor’s speech was of supreme political intelligence. It was not only directed at Fitzgibbon. It was a masterclass in political nationalism, and almost imperceptibly a rebuke, to a younger generation infatuated with the revival of the Irish language, for which it was almost a creed in itself. With grizzled audacity he appropriated the idea of a revival of the Irish language to deliver a magnificent restatement of the political argument for Irish nationalism that owed little to revivalism. Taylor was never a committed revivalist of the Irish language, and his reservations as a political nationalist about revivalism matched those of Arthur Griffith, though Griffith was to find himself constrained to embrace revivalist ideas. Taylor’s view of revivalism was not far removed from Joyce’s own: Joyce was suspicious of revivalism but held back from creating a rift with his own political generation by condemning it, thereby showing a capacity for calculated restraint not easily accommodated within the conventional understanding of Joyce. Though the debate in the King’s Inns was a contest between nationalist and Unionist Ireland, it embraced a contest between two conceptions of Irish nationalism. The contest within nationalism was to shift almost beyond recognition in the two decades that ensued, when the Irish language became a defining ensign of a radical political nationalism, which it did something to inspirit, and was a prominent feature in the politics of the Irish Free State (in part because it was instrumentalised by Sinn Féin and its successor parties to distinguish it from the Irish Parliamentary Party). Yet if the line of demarcation between revivalism and political nationalism became confusingly blurred, it was never effaced.
Taylor was speaking in anticipation of Fitzgibbon’s winding up of the debate. As in Taylor’s speech, the issue of the Irish Revival was overlain by the contest of unionism with nationalism. It transpired to be the last occasion on which a plaidoyer for unionism in Ireland as it stood after the Conservative chief secretaryships of Arthur Balfour (1887–91) and of his brother Gerald (1895–1900), and during the currency of that of George Wyndham (1900–1905), was delivered to a politically mixed audience. It was an event that had already become uncommon in Dublin and was only made possible by the fact that the Irish Revival, heavily Anglo-Irish in its initiation, was not yet tribally polarised, and because the King’s Inns was an integral institution, albeit (like the Irish bar itself, and the Irish judiciary) an institution in political flux.
Fitzgibbon lacked, or through his long occupancy of judicial office had lost, the cunning in a public meeting that Taylor had come to possess in abundance through long practice in dreary venues. With lawyerly exhaustiveness, Fitzgibbon complacently rehearsed all the cogent arguments against the revival of ‘this old language … an object of intense interest and affection from his very earliest days (applause)’. He dismissed the idea of bilingualism (‘no man could have two mother tongues. No man could think in two languages’). He placed much emphasis on the issue, provocative to nationalists, of what he called ‘the voluntary giving up of the Irish language’: ‘He took the best proof that English was spoken in those remote parts of Ireland where the inhabitants possessed it as their native language—he took as the clearest proof the case of Daniel O’Connell himself, the greatest master of invective and the greatest advocate of his day. He was speaking no foreign tongue when he spoke in English, either in the courts of this country or in the Parliament across the water.’45
He asked ‘what Irish they were going to revive’, noting the difference between ancient and modern Greek. This was a subliminally racial theme of nineteenth-century scholarship in Britain and Germany, connected to the proposition that there was no bloodline connecting modern Greeks with the ancient inhabitants of their country. Fitzgibbon’s most cogent argument was pragmatically Darwinian, that the Irish language had not survived as a viable medium of communication: ‘No living language could stand still. The inevitable law of life was that they must either be growing or decaying applied to a language as it did to a tree or a living being, and in that respect the history of the Irish tongue was eminently melancholy, for, arrested in its progress beyond doubt or question for more than a hundred years, it [lacked?] for that long period the perpetuation which no living tongue could ever do without, the perpetuation of contemporaneous literature, which would recall it as it was spoken.’46
Fitzgibbon was bravely trying to make a difficult and important argument, but the sympathy that it might have attracted was lost in the barristerial exhaustiveness of his argument, and its overt pro-unionism.
Fitzgibbon stated that the Irish language was exceedingly difficult to learn, and there were considerable regional variations. In conclusion he addressed the auditor’s assertion that the loss of the Irish language had been fatal to Ireland as a nation. Here his imperialism brought him eerily close to the idiom of the ‘intellectual Egyptian’ of Taylor’s speech, with the difference that he was asserting that Ireland was already, rather than prospectively, a partner in an imperial project of incomparable vastness:
Their friends or neighbours across the water were very proud of what they called Great Britain. We heard perhaps too much of the Empire on which the sun never set, and so forth. But what was that Great Britain? New Zealand was as large as the United Kingdom; Australia was as large in solid land as the whole of Europe, together with the Black Sea and the Mediterranean thrown in. These two taken together could be laid on the vast colony and territories of Canada, and have patches all round them quite big enough to prevent them falling off. Through the whole of that vast aggregation English was the language, with a few scattered exceptions, of the inhabitants and in the winning and making, aye, and in the governing of that vast aggregation of land, the lion’s share had not gone to the lion, but to the Gael (applause). Scotch and Irish had been the wings that had carried the body forward as it spread over the whole earth. Was there no greater Ireland?47
