James joyce, p.91
James Joyce, page 91
Griffith described the scene as Parnell left the terminus of the Midland Great Western Railway at Broadstone in Dublin on 26 September 1891 for his last meeting, playing on the fact that none of the Parnellite parliamentarians accompanied him. Parnell was ‘wretchedly ill’: ‘His face was livid and haggard, one of his arms bandaged, and the hand I shook no longer had the firm grip I had felt previously. His eye was still keen and his mouth firm, but it was evident it was a case of Parnell using his iron will to surmount his physical pain.’82
Griffith wrote something that certainly caught Joyce’s attention: ‘Even still there are many in Ireland who do not believe him dead. I heard of a group of men at ten o’clock on Sunday night at the base of his memorial reiterating their belief that he was not dead and that he would come back again.’ Griffith discounted this: the Parnell he had met in Broadstone station was dying, although Griffith had not realised this at the time. What Griffith wrote has some importance for Joyce, as there is relatively little to document the existence of the belief that features in Ulysses that Parnell was not dead. Griffith made the connection to Parnell’s first return to Dublin in the Split: ‘When Parnell came to Dublin after his followers betrayed him to the English Liberals, he told those who rallied round him on the raw winter’s morning that he would fight to the death and he did. That he knew when he was going to Creggs that the railway journey sealed his doom, I now believe, but the pledge he had given that British Liberalism would never conquer him while he lived he kept.’83
Griffith concluded his assessment of Parnell’s attributes: ‘Parnell has passed into the region of history and his place is determined. He stands beside Shane O’Neill—the Irish leader whom England could neither bend nor trick. Parnell outmatched all her statesmen, outgeneralled all her diplomatists.’84
Joyce’s piece appeared some six months after Griffith’s, and it was not prompted by Griffith alone. In ‘The Shade of Parnell’, he referred to ‘recent criticism’ that had sought ‘to minimise the greatness of this strange spirit’. This was a reference to Frank Hugh O’Donnell’s History of the Irish Parliamentary Party, published the previous year. O’Donnell’s two volumes had a single refrain: everything Parnell did originated with, and was largely achieved by, others. Principal among these was of course O’Donnell himself: ‘I founded the [obstructionist] policy. I trained its first exponents. When Mr. Parnell became my runaway apprentice, I had taught him every detail of the trade he spoiled. Pauvre ingrat! Pauvre Roi de Carton!’ He adopted the argument that Healy had plied remorselessly in the Split, that from the early 1880s it was Parnell’s lieutenants who did the work for which the credit accrued to the increasingly absent Irish leader: ‘They were Parnell’s men, and they were Parnell, the ubiquitous, untiring, inexhaustible, ever-ready, non-existent Parnell’.85 The impossibly narcissistic and affected, inconstant, and disloyal O’Donnell was to resurface in Finnegans Wake, brilliantly dubbed ‘Hyacinth O’Donnell B. A’.86
Joyce’s article drew significantly on Richard Barry O’Brien’s Life of Charles Stewart Parnell. It is quite likely that Joyce looked at or read the biography in the National Library on its first publication in 1898. He had in his library in Trieste the cheaper Nelson Library edition of 1910, and he may have first read or read thoroughly the book in that edition.87 It does not, of course, necessarily follow that Joyce acquired his 1910 edition immediately on its publication. What is clear is that he had access to O’Brien’s biography of Parnell when he was writing his article on the Irish leader. It was to become the most important published source for Joyce’s understanding of Parnell’s character.
O’Brien’s biography of Parnell is an extraordinary work which had a significant impact on how Parnell was perceived a decade after his death and historically. Much has been written in one way or another of Parnell’s elusiveness: this extended to the comparative ephemerality of the historical record as it related to Parnell personally. Parnell was not an avid correspondent and did not keep letters. Aside from his quasi-conspiratorial dealings with extreme nationalists, and his negotiations with English political leaders, his life was acted out on the public stage. The major parliamentary and public episodes had been identified in the myth while he lived. O’Brien knew Parnell reasonably well and collated the views of Parnell’s Irish collaborators and others. His two volumes are replete with anecdote. O’Brien honed the Parnell anecdotes, those that were already known or were new to his book. These are not the anecdotes of the conventional Victorian biography of the political great man, which were often tales of reassuring humanity, not always free from condescension or from pomposity in the retelling. Instead, they were moments on the edge of great events when Parnell delivered himself of judgements that were shrewd, tart, and often wry. They were as much as was known, at least before the appearance of Katharine Parnell’s memoir in 1913 (O’Brien refused to be drawn into Parnell’s relations with her), of the personality and character of the public man. Those personal glimpses of Parnell,88 supplemented by the columns of Hansard and of the press reports of speeches, a couple of family memoirs or reminiscences, and over time the memoirs and biographies of Parnell’s contemporaries and their correspondence when it became accessible, were all there was. The account O’Brien rendered permitted contemporaries to form an estimate of Parnell’s character and thinking. This was especially important for Joyce, as it enabled him to flesh out what had been an understanding of Parnell gleaned from newspapers beyond what he had heard as a boy from John Kelly. It is difficult to conceive of Joyce’s collusive identification with Parnell in Trieste without O’Brien. The biography conformed to, and did something to shape, Joyce’s exigent criterion that what was written or said about Parnell should be Parnellian—which is to say that it should maintain some consonance with the attributes of Parnell himself.
Joyce proceeds on the premise that the Home Rule bill would be enacted: ‘The House of Commons has resolved the Irish question’. This had occurred after the long century from the Act of Union: ‘It was a century adorned by seven Irish revolutionary movements that, with dynamite, eloquence, boycotts, obstructionism, armed revolt and political assassination, managed to keep awake the slow, apprehensive conscience of English Liberalism’.89 It is uncertain how Joyce computed his seven, but it is clear from the sentence that they encompassed movements that were constitutional, agrarian, and insurrectionary. It is an idea with a Parnellite ring to it. His subject matter and the introduction of the bill shift Joyce back towards Parnell and render him less close to Sinn Féin than in the earlier articles. He instinctively anticipates that independence will have a fusionary effect on the disparate Irish movements.
Joyce criticises the reduction in the Irish representation at Westminster under the bill and surmises that it would lead to the alignment of the nationalists with the small Labour Party ‘so that from this incestuous embrace a coalition will probably arise and function as the far left’, under Liberal auspices.90 If this owes a little to Griffith,91 it reflects Joyce’s dismissive view of British socialism. He criticises also the financial provisions. He makes clear, however, that he did not adopt the stance of Sinn Féin, which at a convention on 13 April had adopted a resolution refusing to accept ‘as a final settlement … any arrangement which leaves a single vestige of British rule in Ireland’.92 Joyce wrote somewhat dismissively, ‘The Irish separatist party would like to reject this Greek gift,’ and continued, ‘No matter: the appearance of autonomy is there’. Joyce referred to the national convention which had taken place in Dublin on 23 April, where ‘the denunciations and protests of the nationalists belonging to the bitterly sceptical school of John Mitchel did not greatly disturb the popular jubilation’.93 The delusive promise of the Home Rule bill brought Joyce into fleeting agreement with Kettle, who spoke at the convention.94
For Joyce, an important aspect of the seeming ineluctability of the passage of the bill, now that the veto of the House of Lords was to become suspensory in nature, was that it did something to close the controversy of the Split in a way that Joyce considered would be a bitter vindication of Parnell. This reflected how the diminishing numbers of Parnell’s remaining ardent loyalists felt, though Joyce retained a certain edge of implacability and restrained sarcasm: ‘In two years’ time at the latest, with or without the assent of the House of Lords, the doors of the old parliament in Dublin will re-open, and Ireland, freed from her century-long imprisonment, will set out towards the palace like a new bride accompanied by music and nuptial torches. A grand-nephew of Gladstone (if there is one) will scatter flowers beneath the feet of the sovereign, but there will be a shade at the feast: the shade of Charles Parnell.’95
The historical outcome was to be vastly more protracted and fraught, but the prevailing belief that the bill would lead to the realisation of Home Rule permitted Joyce to render his assessment of Parnell. This setting is important because the circumstances in which Irish independence was actually achieved made it virtually impossible to trace any direct lineage to Parnell. Joyce began by addressing F. H. O’Donnell’s critique. Even if it was to be conceded that independent opposition, obstructionism, and the Land League were devised by others, such ‘concessions evince all the more the extraordinary personality of a leader who, with no forensic gift or original political talent, forced the English politicians to follow his orders. He, like another Moses, led a turbulent and volatile people out of the house of shame to the edge of the Promised Land.’96 This, apart from the reference to ‘a turbulent and volatile people’, was consistent with the received perception of Parnell. Joyce moreover was happy to adopt the comparison of Parnell to Moses that was frequent in the Split.
Joyce continued, addressing Parnell’s true enigma, his mesmeric command of the Irish nationalist populace: ‘The influence that Parnell exercised over the Irish people defies the critic’s analysis. Lisping, of delicate build, he was ignorant of the history of his country. His short, broken speeches lacked all eloquence, poetry or humour. His cold, polite behaviour divided him from his own colleagues. He was Protestant, a descendant of an aristocratic family, and (to complete the affliction) he spoke with a distinctly English accent.’97
Joyce again was prepared to accept the tropes of the Parnell myth, even those that were negative. He was wedded to the idea that Parnell had a slight impediment of speech, which is probably an inference he drew from Parnell’s notoriously halting utterance on his first entry into public life. He accepted and even accentuated the idea already inherent in the received myth of Parnell that political leadership did not require conventional eloquence or erudition. It did require purpose, resolve, and depth of personality: ‘Neither the applause nor the anger of the crowd, neither the invectives nor the praises of the press, neither the denunciations nor the defences of the British ministers ever perturbed the forlorn serenity of his character.’98 It was this characterisation of Parnell as having an intimation of the tragic gracefully borne, developed in the article, that went beyond O’Brien, and indeed Griffith.99
Joyce rehearsed some of the set pieces of the Parnell legend before picking up on Gladstone’s description in an interview with O’Brien included in the biography of Parnell as ‘an intellectual phenomenon’:100 ‘Nothing more singular can be imagined than this appearance of this intellectual phenomenon in the midst of the stifling morals of Westminster. Now, looking back over the scenes of the drama and listening again to the speeches that caused his listeners’ souls to tremble, it is useless to deny that all the eloquence and all those strategic triumphs begin to taste stale.’101
Joyce was searching for the persona that lay behind the frozen tableau of the myth. It is in this article that he makes the devastating comparison of the character of Parnell with those of Benjamin Disraeli and Gladstone, the Conservative and Liberal leaders whose rivalry had seemed to define British party politics in the latter half of the nineteenth century: ‘But time is more merciful towards the “uncrowned king” than towards the wag and the orator. The light of his mild, proud, silent and disconsolate sovereignty makes Disraeli look like an upstart diplomat dining whenever he can in rich people’s houses, and Gladstone like a portly butler who has gone to night school. How little Disraeli’s wit and Gladstone’s culture weigh in the balance today!’102
Aside from renewing his attack on Gladstone, who in 1858 had published his Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, Joyce was subverting the conventional adversarial twinning of Gladstone and Disraeli to mark Parnell apart from the conventional conception of the Victorian statesman.
Joyce noted that ‘although Parnell’s tactic was to avail himself of any one of the English parties, Liberal or Conservative, according to his pleasure, a set of circumstances involved him in the Liberal movement.’103 Joyce understood the asymmetry of ‘independent opposition’ in practice: the Conservatives set their face against Home Rule, which became a defining difference between them and the Liberals in British politics:104 ‘The elastic quality of Gladstone’s Liberalism must be borne in mind if we are to appreciate the extent and degree of Parnell’s task’, and ‘Parnell, convinced that such a liberalism would only yield to force, united every element of national life behind him, and set out on a march along the borders of insurrection.’105 Gladstone was driven to introduce the First Home Rule Bill.
Joyce charted Parnell’s abrupt fall: ‘He fell helplessly in love with a married woman’; in fact, Parnell’s relationship with Katharine O’Shea dated back to 1882. In the wake of the O’Shea divorce proceedings, Gladstone and John Morley refused to commit to legislating for Home Rule if, as Joyce nicely rendered it, ‘the felon stayed on as leader of the Nationalist Party’. Parnell denied the right of a minister (Gladstone was in fact out of office) ‘to exercise a veto over the affairs of Ireland, and refused to resign. He was deposed by the Nationalists obeying Gladstone’s orders. Of the eighty-three deputies, only eight remained faithful to him.’106 This was a substantial underestimate: the final division was forty-five to twenty-seven, excluding Parnell.107 It is possible Joyce was confusing the outcome with that of the 1892 general election which left the Parnellites with nine seats.
Joyce now turned implacably to the course of the Split in Ireland: ‘The Irish press poured the phials of their spitefulness over him and the woman he loved. The peasants of Castlecomer threw quicklime in his eyes. He went from county to county, from city to city, “like a hunted hind”, a spectral figure with the signs of death upon his brow. Within a year he died of a broken heart at the age of forty-five.’108
What was thrown at Parnell in Castlecomer was not quicklime, but Joyce succeeds in rendering the terrible motion of the Split. He is careful to emphasise that the press attacks on Parnell encompassed Katharine, a thrust at Healy’s National Press. The comparison to ‘a hunted hind’ occurs in O’Brien: J. J. Horgan, Parnell’s election agent in Cork, remembered seeing Parnell after his speech there at the outset of the Split: ‘He looked like a hunted hind; his hair was dishevelled, his beard unkempt, his eyes were wild and restless.’109 The ‘signs of death upon his brow’ may owe something to Griffith, who had written that he had not realised at the time of seeing Parnell in Broadstone station that ‘it was death and not wasting illness that was written in his face’.110
Joyce continued, in the closing paragraph, ‘The shade of the “uncrowned king” will weigh upon the hearts of those who remember him, when the new Ireland soon enters into the palace fimbris aureis circumamicta varietatibus: but it will not be a vindictive shade’.111 The Latin is from Psalms 44:14–15 in the Vulgate translation: ‘girded with golden fringes, in varied colours’.112 This was the prelude to Joyce’s brilliantly wrought denunciation of those who betrayed Parnell. The first was on the leading anti-Parnellite nationalist, whom as a matter of taste and Parnellite principle he did not name: ‘The sadness that devastated his soul was, perhaps, the profound conviction that, in his hour of need, one of the disciples who had dipped his hand into the bowl with him was about to betray him.’ The depiction of T. M. Healy as Judas permitted Joyce to insinuate the identification of Parnell with Christ. The casually blasphemous equation had been made in Parnellite rhetoric in the year or two after the death of Parnell but had long since ceased to be heard in the anti-Parnellite and clerical ascendancy that followed Parnell’s death. The second was on the Irish nationalist people, or at least on the enfranchised portion of that people. That also had some precedent in the bitter anguish of Parnell’s death but had never found expression as incisive as Joyce’s: ‘In his last proud appeal to his people, he implored his fellow-countrymen not to throw him to the English wolves howling around him. It rebounds to the honour of his fellow-countrymen that they did not fail that desperate appeal. They did not throw him to the English wolves: they tore him apart themselves.’113
The ‘English wolves’ originated in Parnell’s manifesto ‘to the people of Ireland.’ The stated purpose of the manifesto was in response to Gladstone’s letter to Morley ‘to put before you [the Irish people, to which it was addressed] information … which will enable you to understand the measure of the loss with which you are threatened unless you consent to throw me to the English wolves now howling for my destruction’.114 The phrase, widely considered at the time to represent a misjudgement on Parnell’s part, was validated as a trope by Joyce, who calculatedly redirected it against the people to whom it was addressed.
Lest the violence of Joyce’s concluding image should seem extravagant, it is worth citing an exchange that later appeared in the memoirs of Sir Edward Clarke, published in 1918. Clarke was a prominent English barrister and Conservative parliamentarian who held the office of Solicitor-General when he appeared for Captain O’Shea in the divorce proceedings. He recalled a conversation with David Plunkett, an Irish Unionist advocate and parliamentarian: ‘I once said to David Plunkett, “I knew I was throwing a bombshell into the Irish camp, but I did not know it would be quite so much mischief”. “Ah”, said he, “you didn’t know that when it burst they would pick up the pieces and cut each other’s throats with them”’.115 ‘The Irish camp’ was the Irish Party. Joyce widened his attack to the Irish people.
