*
The Politics of Irish Literature
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
If Chamberlain were not the Machiavelli behind O'Donnell's lawsuit, he was, temporarily at least, the chief gainer by it. The Times retained the attorney general, a member of Salisbury's government, as its defense counsel. Snubbing the plaintiff and ignoring his absurd litigation, he turned the courtroom into a Unionist political rally against Parnellism and crime. For piece de resistance he introduced into evidence a packet of brand new incriminating letters, some purportedly by Parnell, others by Patrick Egan. Among them was this letter dated from Kilmainham jail and addressed to Egan:
This forgery was a good deal less imaginative than the Times's first. There was also a marked orthographic degeneration to be seen in the word "hesitency." The augmented scandal now demanded some sort of action by the House of Commons. A special commission was set up to examine evidence on the Parnellite charge of forgery, and in addition, to study the history of Ireland and its multitudinous troubles. The Parnellites instituted a desperate search to find the forger. They suspected two men. One was Captain O'Shea. The other was Richard Pigott, former publisher of the Old Fenian newspaper, the Irishman. Pigott had once attempted to extort money out of Egan, and later the two had corresponded about the sale of his printing presses to the Land League. When Egan read in a newspaper in Nebraska the text of the newest forgeries, he took out his file of correspondence and discovered in it Pigott's misspelling of "hesitency." He wrote at once to the Pamellites, "Dick Pigott is the forger." In October 1888 Pigott was lured to a house in London where Parnell was waiting to confront him. He cheerfully admitted everything but he refused to disown his forgeries in public. He had been promised a fee of five thousand pounds, he said, to serve as the Times's witness, and he had no way of knowing what Parnell's side might want to offer. The special commission went to work. After five months spent in grilling Parnell, Davitt, Sexton, O'Brien, and miscellaneous Land Leaguers, after proving that Davitt had been a Fenian, that Parnell was Land League president, and that there had been a land war, after hearing O'Shea's assurances that the Times letters were genuine, it finally got around to Pigott himself in February 1889. He went to the witness table gaily enough, but was quickly trapped not by his misspelling, but by the introduction of a blackmail letter he had written to William Walsh, archbishop of Dublin, just before the publication of the first forged letter in April 1887. He had reported to the archbishop that a sinister plot involving spurious documents and endangering the future of Ireland was about to be perpetrated, and could he have the privilege of a private conference with His Grace on this matter? He could not explain this letter. He could not explain why Parnell and Egan had written each other in the same handwriting though with different signatures (traced from genuine autographs held against a window pane). At last he could not explain anything. After three days of tortured testimony he vanished and was traced to Madrid. When arrested for extradition on a perjury charge, he excused himself to the Spanish police, went into the hotel bedroom, and put a bullet through his brain. When the House of Commons met in session the next day, Parnell's entrance was greeted with a standing ovation, an honor that had not been accorded a fellow member for a hundred years. Gladstone invited him to Hawarden Castle as house guest. The Times apologized and prepared to defend itself as best it could against his action for damages, for he had at last accepted its invitation to sue. There were mutterings that Salisbury's resignation and a dissolution of Parliament were in order. The ministry was implicated in the scandal through the attorney general and also the home secretary, who had cooperated in the conspiracy by giving Pigott leave to contact the convicted Irish Dynamitards in English prisons with an offer of a free pardon if they would corroborate the forged letters in court. (He got no takers.) Salisbury's ministry did not have clean hands; but unlike the guilty French ministry in the Dreyfus case, it was wise enough not to double its bets on the frame-up. The special commission was not disposed to protect the government's jackal Pigott but it did protect the government itself, refusing to allow the Parnellites to subpoena the membership list of the Unionist conspiratorial organization that had financed Pigott's activities. A few names came to light accidentally-Gladstone's former chief whip, for one, and for another, a name familiar here, Sir Rowland Ponsonby Blennerhassett. None of these names held any embarrassment for the prime minister. There was no dissolution, no new election. Salisbury, like Gladstone and Parnell, took up the waiting game himself, hoping that the embarrassments from the Pigott scandal would fade away with normal public forgetfulness. The Tory ministry survived the forgery crisis nicely, and nought was lost save honor. III With Richard Pigott we are back once more on the Judas theme in Irish history, and once more we find Joyce in the thick of it. While everybody in Dublin had known for years that Pigott was a scoundrel, he was ostensibly a nationalist, almost an Old Fenian; and what better proof that Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow? The episode also bore an added attraction in its Joycean rummaging for clues among verbal slips. Joyce simplified Pigott's career into a detective story turning on a fatal misspelled word. The word "hesitency," accompanied by its doublet "hesitancy" thus replicates merrily through Finnegans Wake, and Mrs. Adaline Glasheen, who discovered the referent for the word, has given us her assurance that whenever "hesitency" occurs, "somebody is lying." Yeats's letters show that he was not only aware of the Pigott episode, but watched it closely. During the week in which Pigott killed himself Yeats wrote to Katharine Tynan: "Poor Pigott! One really got to like him, there was something so frank about his lies. They were so completely matters of business, not of malice. There was something pathetic too in the hopeless way the squalid latter-day Erinyes ran him down. The poor domesticminded swindler."s Noteworthy is the phrase about the "squalid latter-day Erinyes." Leading the actual Erinyes were the Irish House members, including Parnell himself, all inclined to be less philosophical about poor Pigott's frame-up than the Irish poet of Bedford Park, Chiswick.* Among the Erinyes were numbered, too, all the rest of the Irish nationalists of every degree; for in Dublin, Pigott's was the most warmly applauded suicide since John Sadleir, M.P., drank his dram of prussic acid on Hampstead Heath thirty years since. IV While Parnell moved from triumph to triumph, nobody could deny that a measure of domestic ambiguity prevailed in the O'Sheas' arrangements at Eltham. Captain O'Shea, for himself, had never cared particularly for Eltham, or for Mrs. O'Shea either. Long before she ever met Parnell he had moved out and taken quarters downtown in order to pursue his private pleasures. In twenty-three years of married life, he had spent a total of one year at home. In his absence, Parnell and Mrs. O'Shea had lived for a decade at Eltham, happily and without interruption except for his seven months in Kilmainham jail in 1881-82. Mrs. O'Shea had thought often of divorce but she was prevented by another fatal family complication, her millionaire aunt, Mrs. Wood, an opinionated old lady who deplored scandal. She subsidized Captain and Mrs. O'Shea on separate allowances, and with good behavior both of them had great expectations from her estate, which God willing would soon be their own, for she was already eighty-eight when Mrs. O'Shea and Parnell first met in 1880. Captain and Mrs. O'Shea each hated the other, but neither one cared to sever their connection while old Mrs. Wood was still alive. A general untidiness of sexual relations resulted. Mrs. O'Shea, with three children already, gave birth to three more while she was living with Parnell; and O'Shea claimed that he had excellent reason to suppose they were his own. Meanwhile, so it was charged, he was carrying on his own adulterous affair with Mrs. O'Shea's sister. Yet as early as 1881 he had challenged Parnell to a duel after discovering his luggage in a closet at Eltham. (Parnell's unromantic response was: What did you do with my luggage?) O'Shea knew at the time of the Kilmainham negotiations in 1882 that Parnell was living with Mrs. O'Shea at Eltham, though what construction he put on the information is unclear. Historians are unable to discern the precise points of alternation between the deceived and the compliant, extortionist husband, but all are agreed that his role virtually throughout was that of a parasite and adventurer. A few months after Pigott's suicide, Captain O'Shea brought suit for divorce against his wife, naming Parnell as corespondent. The Parnellite historian Henry Harrison, Yeats's friend, carried on research for many years hoping to prove that Chamberlain was, once again, the clever brain behind this last blow against Parnell. His contention undoubtedly has "intrinsic probability." The Unionists had long pondered on the possible political yield from Pamell's love affair. O'Shea thoroughly understood that the divorce action had political significance. As brazen as Pigott himself, he delivered a prompt demand upon Balfour for services rendered by the divorce proceeding. But another motivation was also sufficient to have set him off For, just at the time of Pigott's suicide, old Mrs. Wood died at age ninety-seven. O'Shea's living allowance immediately stopped; worse yet, he got nothing in her will. Penniless, chagrined by the collapse of his hopes for revenge from the forged letters, brooding even over the old Parnell Tribute of 1883 which he somehow felt had rightly belonged to him, he had many grievances besides the one on which his divorce suit rested, and no further restraints. He was ready "to hit back a stunner." The divorce trial did not follow for almost a year. During all this time there was little public reaction. Parnell gave the Irish party his assurance that all was well, that the divorce suit would amount to nothing, that "if this case is ever fully gone into, a matter which is exceedingly doubtful, you may rest assured that it will be shown that the dishonor and discredit have not been upon my side."8 His confidence seems to have been based in part on his feeling that his own behavior had been honorable; and in part on an understanding that all O'Shea wanted was money, and that twenty-five thousand pounds from Mrs. Wood's estate would pacify him. If he really was relying on O'Shea's cupidity, he had not allowed for the unlucky chance that the old lady's will was going to be legally contested. Mrs. O'Shea could not get her hands on the money needed to buy O'Shea off, and the defendants realized before the trial that O'Shea would come into court fighting. Parnell's reaction was, so be it. He wanted a quick divorce so that he could marry Mrs. O'Shea and legitimize his children. Hence he decided on his own impulse that the suit must not be contested. But a slip-up occurred in legal tactics. Mrs. O'Shea entered counterallegations against O'Shea without preparing to follow them up. This technical blunder allowed O'Shea to take the witness stand and disport himself with an eye to the newspaper headlines through two days of uninhibited commentary on his enemy, depicted to the court in the role of the treacherous friend who skulked in the background under the aliases of "Mr. Fox" and "Mr. Preston," seduced his wife, and wrecked his happy home. It allowed him to introduce into evidence a fatal letter from Parnell to Mrs. O'Shea in which Tim Healy was referred to as a "chimney sweep." It allowed him to bring in for collaborating witness Mrs. Caroline Pethers, a one-time cook of Mrs. O'Shea's who testified that Captain O'Shea's unannounced homecoming had "three or four times" routed Parnell out of the family living room and forced him to flee by a knotted rope fire escape. After a few minutes, she testified, he would then present himself as a casual social caller at the front door. This strange story of defenestration was not subjected to cross-examination and it sounded believable to the judge. O'Shea got his decree and the custody of somebody else's children; and the judge pronounced Parnell to be one "who takes advantage of the hospitality offered him by the husband in order to debauch his wife." V Who does not know of the "thunderclap" -- Gladstone's metaphor-that burst from the divorce decree? Dublin lived on melodrama, but it had never heard the like of the storm that moved down on Ireland out of London, where the Freeman's Journal sent a whole corps of reporters to transmit every precious word, up to twenty-four columns in a single day. Yeats said later: "I cannot . . . look upon Captain O'Shea as merely amusing. I am not sufficiently unselfish. He has endangered the future of Irish dramatic literature by making melodrama too easy. . . ." It will be remembered that the health of Gladstone's party after 1886 was not robust. It had already split once over Home Rule, which had cost it the control of the Commons and the defection of most of its young leaders. It still derived strength from Gladstone's incomparable personal grandeur. But he was over the threshold of his eightieth year, and so solitary in distinction inside his party that he could be said to be without either lieutenants or heirs. His political base lay among the Wesleyans of the industrial English towns; and it was there that the outcry against Parnell's sexual unconventioniality first swelled, led by a violent London revivalist preacher named Hugh Hughes. The divorce decree was handed down on a Monday and by the next Saturday a convention of the Liberal party in Sheffield was in full cry after Parnell's resignation. On Sunday Gladstone showed signs of great perturbation over the threat of a second Liberal party split. On Monday he took the decisive step of writing a letter to John Morley stating that in view of the displeasure of the "Nonconformist conscience" of the north, Parnell's continuance at the head of the Irish party would "render my retention of the leadership of the Liberal party, based as it has been mainly upon the presentation of the Irish cause, almost a nullity." Justin M'Carthy was then called in, shown the letter, and asked to communicate its message to Parnell and the party. He was briefed by Gladstone: ". . . he told me very sadly that his [Parnell's] remaining in the leadership now means the loss of the next elections and the putting off of Home Rule until the time when he [Gladstone] will no longer be able to bear a hand in the great struggle to which he has devoted the later years of his life." The letter gave the Irish party the harsh alternative either to drop Parnell or say farewell to Home Rule. If one understands that Gladstone was an English statesman and not an Irish patriot, one can hardly conceive of his behaving otherwise. In Ireland, meanwhile, all was quiescence and solidarity. The moral issue, though now thoroughly exposed, was passed over as being a mere insignificance. The clergy and the bishops maintained silence. Dublin's first formal expression on the crisis came on the day after the divorce decree, as the National League put itself on record unanimously in Parnell's support. The Freeman's Journal followed suit with a message proclaiming in somewhat overwrought diction that all was well. A cable came in from America to express support for Parnell, signed by a money-raising expeditionary force, including O'Brien, Dillon, and T. P. Gill.** Davitt was the first to crack the solid Irish front. He was one of the few who had worried about O'Shea's attack; and he alone had faced up to Parnell to ask whether there were political dangers in his domestic quarrel with O'Shea. Parnell had changed the conversation: "Before we talk on that subject, there is a matter I want to speak to you about. I don't approve of your labor organization in the South of Ireland; it will lead to mischief and can do no good. . . . What is trades-unionism but a landlordism of labor? I would not tolerate, if I were at the head of a government, such bodies as trades-unions. They are opposed to individual liberty and should be kept down, as Bismarck keeps them under in Germany." On that other painful subject, Davitt misunderstood him to say that he was not living with Mrs. O'Shea. When the divorce decree proved otherwise, he published in his newspaper Labor World his opinion that Parnell should step down from leadership, should "efface himself for a brief period," not for violation of the seventh commandment, but simply in order not to "disintegrate the forces behind the Home Rule cause in Britain." The day after Davitt's attack a mass meeting in Leinster Hall, Dublin, declared its loyalty. Healy crossed in a winter storm to speak at the meeting. He berated Davitt for deserting Parnell. He was reminded, he said, of Charles II's comment to his brother James: "No, no, Jamie, no one will kill me to make you king." It was his opinion that if the Irish people "were so frivolous and light hearted" as to desert Mr. Parnell over the pretext of "this wretched and unfortunate [divorce] case," sensationalized by the hysteria of "Wesleyan chapels," then "the Irish nation would be my nation no more." In a storm at sea, he said, "you are requested not to speak to the man at the wheel." On Tuesday of the second week, in preparation for the opening of Parliament the following day, the Irish party met in a caucus and unanimously re-elected Parnell chairman. To this meeting Justin M'Carthy brought Gladstone's ultimatum. Being one who disliked scenes, he neglected to mention it to the assembled members. He did, however, inform Parnell about Gladstone's stipulation and asked him whether he planned to resign. Parnell said no; he would "stand by his guns." As soon as Gladstone learned that the Irish party had failed to meet his demand, he handed the Morley letter to the newspapers for the morning editions of Wednesday, November 25, 1890. With its publication "the Split," usually spelled in Irish history with the portentous capital letter, became a fact. By midday an anti-Parnell faction had crystallized around John Barry, the same man who had first beckoned Parnell into Irish leadership. He accused Parnell of trickery and asked him to convoke a new meeting of the party. Parnell refused. Barry then circulated a petition call and got enough signatures to summon the party back into session the next day, the meeting to take place in an empty caucus room in the parliament building, Committee Room Fifteen. VI Barry, it will be remembered, belonged to the Bantry band. In addition to him, the band was composed of two Sullivan brothers, T. D. and Donal (A. M. Sullivan had died several years before the Split); their two Healy nephews, Tim and Maurice; and another county Cork relation, William Martin Murphy, who was later to win Dublin notoriety during the years just before the First World War as the employers' strong man who locked out and broke Jim Larkin's dockers' union and inspired Yeats's most celebrated lampoon, "September 1913." The natural leader of the band by the test of capability was Tim Healy. Unembarrassed by his declarations of loyalty in Leinster Hall the week before, he now took command of the Sullivan wing of the Irish party with full determination to destroy Parnell, to "drive him into the grave or into the lunatic asylum," as tradition quotes him. All the Irish party needed now, he said, was "the tomahawk and the sweeping-brush." The quick turnabout was made in such pain that weeping was a daily occurrence in Committee Room Fifteen. But reasoning contra Parnell was compelling, not only to Healy and Barry but to many other members not warm in their affection for the Bantry band. The Irish party, it was noted, had maximized its strength by 1886. It would never have many more than eighty-six members, or many fewer either. This achievement was admittedly owing to Parnell's guidance, a cue for tears. But with party strength now firmly established on a plateau, Parnell was no longer indispensable. The indispensable man now was Ireland's English benefactor, for the party could never prevail at Westminster except as the protégé of Gladstone and the Liberal party. Therefore, if one must choose, one must choose Gladstone. When Gladstone said that Parnell must go, then go he must. Parnell thought otherwise, and came out fighting. He seized the initiative first off. He sent the newspapers an extraordinary document, a manifesto "To the People of Ireland," aiming to smash the Liberal alliance forever and to cut all connections with Gladstone, now suddenly transformed into an "arch coercionist" and "unrivalled sophist." The manifesto charged Gladstone with "wirepulling" to "sap and destroy" the "independence of the Irish party" by assuming the right to veto its decisions. Parnell added a detailed account of his secret negotiations at Hawarden; the sum of it was that Gladstone was ready to surrender to the Unionists and landlords in drafting the new Home Rule bill. This astonishing manifesto was directed simultaneously to the extremes on both the left and right. In emotional appeal, the language was boldly Fenian. But at the same time it seemed addressed to Salisbury, and in effect proposed that the Tories buy a continuation in office at the Irish price. This interpretation, if true, implies an eclipse of Parnell's astuteness, for the Tories made no attempt to disguise their happy expectation that the divorce scandal had smashed Gladstone and opened their road to glory. Though a scion of the ancient Cecil family's "spreading laurel tree," Salisbury could not restrain his pleasure in another gentleman's embarrassment, and he offered the public a variant upon the fire-escape story as told by Mrs. Pethers, not a member of his social class. Having "recovered in the divorce court what they had lost in the Special Commission," the Tories were almost certainly confident enough of their final victory against Home Rule to refuse any further transaction with Parnell, and even to welcome a short respite from office in order to allow Gladstone scope to work out his own destruction. But one is uncertain, and Cecil Rhodes's curious friendship with Parnell in the late 1880s suggests that some sort of scheme for an accommodation between Home Rule and overseas imperialism may not have been as farfetched as it seems. The instantaneous effect of the manifesto was catastrophic for Parnell. His whimsical recasting of Gladstone's Irish role from Grand Old Man into "grand old spider" alienated most of the Plan of Campaign agrarians. They were already angry over his lofty indifference to the Plan of Campaign. And they thought that if Gladstone was really as evil as Parnell now reported, they should have been told so as soon as he first learned of it at Hawarden, not a year later. Thus O'Brien and Dillon, who might have stood between the Sullivans and the Parnellites and rescued the situation from total disintegration, were drawn into Healy's orbit, taking with them the party's balance of power. The unrestrained language of the manifesto made retreat unthinkable. Nobody was left in any doubt about Parnell's contempt for Davitt's naive suggestion that he could trustfully "efface himself for a brief period" and then come back as though nothing had ever happened. He intended to stay put, even if it meant the "postponement," as his euphemism put it, of Home Rule. To this sporting resolve Parnell's later fame owes an extra measure of bounteousness. It was Emmet's and O'Donovan Rossa's performance all over again. Even Healy was forced to admire: The deposed leader was a magnificent fighter where his own concerns were at stake, and after the split he was suddenly stirred up to a display of energy which, if it had been exerted earlier, must have brought down the Tory Government. Even in the evil dispute which the divorce case produced, his combative qualities won the admiration of the Celtic temperament. In truth, he came so gallantly to the charge
This was written years afterward, when Healy could afford to be big about it all. At the time, the Sullivans were thrown into unrestrained wrath. Healy said that the Parnellites were "appealing to the hillside men." T. D. Sullivan said, "The `anti-Parnellites' saw at a glance what this meant -it was civil war in Ireland in the near future." To this chronic Sullivanite fear of revolution was added an acute chagrin. Parnell had spoken about "the Promised Land." It was close enough to reach out and touch, and the Sullivans had come a long way. They were sons of a Bantry house painter, yet three of them had already gone to Westminster and one to the Mansion House as well. Sullivan sons would be Q.C.'s. Nephew Healy had risen from a railway clerk to great wealth, acquired out of land-court retainer fees.*** Why might they not all envision themselves as lord chancellors, ministers, prime ministers? And Parnell talked of postponement yet. Their fury in contemplating the wreck of their ambitions was well conveyed by J. F. X. O'Brien, the same man we once saw standing long ago in the Cork courthouse dock to hear death sentence passed: "For myself, this is the most anxious moment of my political life of over forty years. Twenty-three years ago I stood face to face with Judge Keogh in the dock at Cork. I can tell you that on that occasion my pulse was not stirred in the slightest. I cannot say that now. This is the most wretched moment of my life, for I see shattered by you, who brought us to a splendid position, all the hopes of Ireland." The formal session in Committee Room Fifteen convened on Monday, December 1,1890, just two weeks after the divorce decree. It was prepared to decapitate Parnell with one clean blow. Easier said that done. "Mr. Fox" was not inexperienced in the parliamentary arts. As chairman of the session he simply ruled all hostile motions out of order, so that the moralistic recriminations on sex and sin rehearsed and ready to be flung in his face had no context in which to issue. He then took over. He assigned a loyal follower to introduce a motion that the deliberations be transferred from Westminster to Dublin, where advanced nationalists could challenge Healy's representativeness, watch over his shoulder, and perhaps join in the debate. It took two days in Committee Room Fifteen for the session to vote down the motion to go to Dublin, 44 to 29. Parnell's ingenuity in politicalizing the issue next produced an arresting query: Suppose you drive me from my post, he asked, what assurance have you that Gladstone will stand by Home Rule? Nobody could answer the question, and Parnell pursued it. After all, he said, "you are dealing with a man who is an unrivalled sophist." With amiable irony he offered the observation that Joyce somewhat oversolemnly seized upon for the elaboration of his favorite theme in Irish history: "Don't sell me for nothing. If you get my value you may change [exchange] me tomorrow. . . . And if I surrender to him, if I give up my position to him-if you throw me to him, I say, gentlemen, that it is your bounden duty to see that you secure value for the sacrifice." And so a delegation led by Sexton went forth to ask Gladstone what assurance he might care to offer as a token of his good faith and veracity. Naturally they got no answer to such a singular inquiry. But in this way three more days passed; the debates had now lasted five days. On the sixth and last day, the Sullivans attempted once more to introduce a motion to depose Parnell, and once more he refused to recognize the motion. With that, forty-five members led by M'Carthy got up and left the room, walked down the corridor to another room, and caucused as the anti-Parnellite party. Parnell had fifteen members left with him. The Split was now institutional. VII It was understood on both sides that the last appeal would be made back to the Irish people. Healy offered a metaphor to clarify the issue: "We are the representatives of the people. Place an iron bar in a coil and electrize that coil and the iron bar becomes magnetic. This party was that electric action. There [pointing to Parnell] stood the iron bar. The electricity is gone and the magnetism with it, when our support had passed away." Parnell challenged Healy's claim by saying it remained to be seen who had the electricity. And Healy declared, "The knives are out." So far the debate for and against Parnell had been held to real political issues, which were not obscure. William O'Brien stated the anti-Parnellite position in the plainest language: "That issue is whether it is humanly possible to win the general election [in England] under Mr. Parnell's leadership."21 Parnell's position, put with equal clarity in the manifesto "To the People of Ireland" was: "Ireland considers the independence of her party as her only safeguard within the constitution, and above and beyond all other considerations whatsoever." Strictly on these issues, judged by common sense, Parnell did not stand on strong ground. His phrase "beyond all other considerations whatsoever" clearly meant that Ireland could be well lost for love, a highly controversial point. One imagines that on that issue he must have lost in any high-level campaign. As it turned out, it was a low-level campaign that was actually fought. In the closing hours of the debate in Committee Room Fifteen, after the knives came out, Healy gave notice that when he got back to Ireland, he was not going to pay much attention to Parnell's instructions that the members "keep their mouths sealed" about his private life. Ireland could look forward to hearing a good deal about "the stench of the divorce court" in the battles that lay ahead. Listening to the daily mounting pitch of Healy's vituperation in Committee Room Fifteen, Parnell at last interrupted to tax him with ingratitude: "Mr. Healy has been trained in this warfare. Who trained him? Who saw his genius? Who telegraphed to him from America to come to him?" Healy's "poisoned tongue" was a spectacle all its own, setting a standard for skill in wounding that his enemies could never match. In memory of this trait, Irish history has set him in a special niche to which few admirers come. "Tiger Tim" he had been in the land war. After the Split he was "Healy the Hound." His savagery was a gift of personality, but it was also representative. As soon as Healy took the field, the contest speedily degenerated into a vendetta, pitiless on both sides. The Parnellites might never be able to rival him in scurrility, but they could try. The pain arising out of wrecked ambition was not all confined to the Sullivan side. In the Joyce family, for example, the Split meant catastrophe on the bread-and-butter level. Richard Ellmann has noted that "for John Joyce the fall of Parnell, closely synchronized with a fall in his own fortunes, was the dividing line between the stale present and the good old days." Yeats described John Joyce as essentially a minor Parnellite canvasser. That was not much of a career, living like the characters in "Ivy Day in the Committee Room." But Parnell's ascendancy beckoned to "the Promised Land" and seemed certain to arrest his downward drift, hopeless otherwise, from the petty rentier with property in Cork and a son in Clongowes Wood to the rummy cadge of later life. He had "been among the first to greet the rising star of Parnell," said Stanislaus Joyce. He backed the favorite, staking everything. Soon the Chief was to be Ireland's prime minister; then all the English placemen would be sent home and the patriots would be summoned to staff the posts of Irish government. Unfortunately, there was this sound of "shattered glass and toppling masonry." VIII Among those appalled by the Parnell-O'Shea thunderclap was William Walsh, archbishop of Dublin. His considered thought was that the Church would do well to do nothing. He proposed to "stand by"; and for several days he held to his heroic caution against intense counterpressures. Again, Davitt was the first to speak out publicly, when Labor World chided the Church for its silence on the "moral issue" and for leaving to the "sturdy dissenters of Great Britain" the task of guarding the sanctity of the marriage tie. Unknown to Davitt, Manning was already busy. From the start the Sassenach cardinal was well abreast of the "sturdy dissenter," the Reverend Hugh Hughes. He had gone instantly into action with a personal message to Gladstone advising him to do what he in fact did do, that is, to demand Parnell's resignation. Next, representing himself as spokesman for the pope, he took up Davitt's bullying tone toward Archbishop Walsh. Before the first week of the crisis had passed, he sent to Dublin one of the most piquant of all the unguarded comments elicited by the heated atmosphere of the passing days. He told Walsh: ". . . if ten years ago the bishops and priests had spoken and acted together, the movement would not have fallen into the hands of laymen. There is now both in Ireland and in Rome the opportunity of your regaining the lead and direction." The Irish bishops fell into step with Manning. Archbishop Croke of Cashel, Davitt's friend the "Land League archbishop," wrote a letter that, were he not a great dignitary of the Church, might be thought vengeful:
After dragging his feet for a week, Walsh finally convoked a council of the Irish bishops to take a position on the crisis. On the Wednesday following the day when Parnell lost the test vote in Committee Room Fifteen, he wired their decision to his courier William Martin Murphy, one of the Bantry band: "Important you and members should know bishops issue unqualified pronouncement. Mr. Parnell unfit for leadership, first of all on moral grounds, social and personal discredit as result of divorce court proceedings, also in view of inevitable disruption, with defeat at elections, wreck of Home-Rule hopes and sacrifice of tenants' interests." True to the political animal instinctive in every Irishman, he counseled Murphy on the urgency for "more and yet more local organization" to counter the Parnellites at the parish level. It is unclear whether the sexual or the political outrage was the more obnoxious, but in any case, the clergy were in the thick of it from then on. And thus it was that the same prelate whose testimony to the special commission destroyed Pigott is fixed in literature by Simon Dedalus' "Billy the Lip" and the pasquinade of Joyce's "Gas from a Burner." In the end Parnell retained the loyalty of two priests, the same magic number who had stood by Smith O'Brien in 1846, Gavan Duffy in 1852, and James Stephens in 1865. IX Their stark transaction in Committee Room Fifteen completed, the parliamentary belligerents set out for North Kilkenny, where a by-election was to be fought out on December 22, 1890. Dublin was always the strongest Parnellite base, and now the city welcomed the troubled Chief with cheering crowds and brass bands. His first task was to recapture United Ireland from the enemy. When William O'Brien passed over to the anti-Parnellites, he cabled from New York to Matthias Bodkin, the editor, instructing him to switch the paper's line. Parnell marched directly from the railroad station into Lower Abbey Street to storm the editorial offices, ejecting the incumbents and installing his own men while the police looked on. The raiders disposed of Bodkin's resistance easily: "Matty, will you walk out or would you like to be thrown out?" That evening, while the Parnellites were all off cheering the Chief at a mass meeting in the Rotunda, Healy led a stealthy expedition against the undefended newspaper office and reconquered it. Early next morning, on the way from the hotel back to the station to take the train for Kilkenny, Parnell's traveling party detoured past the United Ireland office and once more overwhelmed the enemy after forcing the doors with crowbars.**** Originally, North Kilkenny was to have one candidate running unopposed. He had been endorsed by Parnell just before the Split, but now he suddenly denounced Parnell. A new Parnellite candidate was then brought forward and entered in the poll, and the battle was on-Parnell on one side, Healy and Davitt on the other, backed by seventy Irish M.P.'s who had converged on Kilkenny. They stated and restated the true issues earnestly; but the Kilkenny by-election is best remembered far the magnificence of its red herrings. Physical violence, not unknown in Irish elections, was advanced as an argument by both sides, and all three field generals were to report in as minor casualties. Somebody hit Davitt (a one-armed man, as the reader will remember) on the side of the head with a stick. Healy arrived in Dublin on the same boat train with Parnell and was shoved about at Westland Row by the crowd of welcoming Parnellites; and later on in Cork he was struck across the face, his front teeth and his glasses broken by the blow. A fragment of glass entered one eyeball but was removed without causing permanent damage. Pallid and cadaverous and looking, as Barry O'Brien thought, "like a dying man," Parnell was hit in the eye with a rock at Castlecomer and showered with some kind of white dust, whether flour or stone or quicklime was disputed; but in any case the injury was irritating rather than serious. The most striking novelty in the North Kilkenny campaign was Healy's deadly utilization of the O'Shea case. To him we owe the currency of Mrs. O'Shea's sporting name of "Kitty," now used the world around in forgetfulness of its original connotation (carefully observed by Joyce) of a prostitute. Once Healy spoke of her as "a convicted British prostitute," an excess anticipating Joyce's Skin-the-Goat: "That bitch, that English whore, did for him. . . . She put the first nail in his coffin." Healy used the Eltham fire escape for an ornament in every speech. One day the stenographer picked up this oratorical effect: Parnell, he said, had made a new law, "and the law he had made was that whilst they had his name upon their lips, there was one name that they must not mention at all, and that was the name of a precious personage who was more dear to Mr. Parnell than Ireland itself." And from the crowd came the antiphonal response, "Kitty O'Shea!" As Yeats's friend Katharine Tynan said darkly, when an Irish peasant is coarse, he is truly coarse. The hosting of the clergy for election duty at North Kilkenny was less novel, yet it had been a long while since their exuberance in a task had been so tonic. It was as though they felt with Cardinal Manning some need to make up for lost time. Court evidence on the by-elections, reinforced by hearsay and legend, repeated the details familiar to those Irishmen who remembered the past field campaigns-the withholding of sacraments, incitement to riot, scurrility, and in one case (one only) a threat to turn an unrepentant Parnellite into a goat. In New York, John Devoy got word on the state of affairs from J. J. O'Kelly, through whom he usually communicated with Parnell: "The priests have smashed the movement." Barry O'Brien, who was at Parnell's side throughout the Kilkenny campaign, drew the same conclusion: ". . . the priests, and the priests alone, influenced and dominated the electors of North Kilkenny." Two historians, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington and Emile Strauss, have sensed a note of poetic justice here, since it was Parnell who had recruited the clergy into the movement, though naturally for other purposes than this one. A Fenian in Kilkenny told Barry O'Brien what O'Leary once told Yeats "The only power in Ireland that can stand up to Parnell is the Church, and the only power that can stand up to the Church is Fenianism." His back against the wall, Parnell called out to Fenianism for help. He found an enthusiastic response. John Devoy had already cabled during the opening phase of the divorce crisis: "If Parnell yields to English clamor will destroy American movement. No other man or men can keep it together. Retirement means chaos, leaving Ireland at mercy of English whims and Irish cranks." This support was expected of an old ally like Devoy. But Rossa had fought Parnell with dynamite throughout the eighties, and now he too came around to his support. James Stephens, settled peacefully in Dublin again and believed harmless, wrote the newspapers supporting Parnell immediately after the publication of the manifesto "To the People of Ireland." The three Fenian fragments thus reunited for the first time to defend Parnell against the multitude of his enemies. John O'Leary was more deliberate. With fifteen years in Paris behind him, he never could grasp the "moral issue" at all, and he told Katharine Tynan, "Good God in Heaven, you can't depose a man for gallantry." Of the unwisdom of Parnell's politics, he remained confident. But when the clergy moved into Kilkenny, he declared himself: "The question is where are we going, and not whom are we following; and if Mr. Parnell were dead tomorrow, I and men like me, who are above and before all things Irish nationalists, should never dream of following the party of clerical intimidation and compromise with England. We go with Mr. Parnell as long as he goes and, insofar as he goes, for Irish freedom." Davitt, like Healy, blasted Parnell for "appealing in his desperation to the hillside men and the Fenian sentiment of the country to face the might of England in the field." The curiosity in Davitt's charge was that it borrowed the Chief's own often-repeated words. An element of opportunism undoubtedly stood among Parnell's motives for his sudden Fenian turn. There was even more opportunism in a later appeal, an "impudent attempt" the Times called it, to win English labor support with left-wing rhetoric, and Davitt found it amusing that the man who admired Bismarck's repression of trade-unionism in 1890 was plagiarizing the Labor World's socialism in 1891. It is tempting to overstate the cynicism in Parnell's new position. In point of fact, his pledge in the Kilkenny campaign holds well up enough under scrutiny. He was, he said, a constitutionalist, just as he had always been. He still believed that the potential energy in moral force must be used to exhaustion. But suppose that were done, he asked, and it were then discovered to be a futility? At that point, but not before, he would cease to be an Irish constitutionalist while remaining an Irish nationalist:
These were words that the "advanced men" of Irish nationalism wanted to hear, and for them they forgave him everything. Kilkenny was not Dublin, and Parnell could not find enough Fenians there to rescue him. His candidate lost by about two to one. He then announced himself ready for a compromise with the party majority and entered into negotiations at Boulogne toward "effacing himself" and turning the chairmanship over to William O'Brien. But a dispute arose over who would then hold the actual power, and the negotiations collapsed. In the early spring of 1891 the battle moved into Sligo. He got an old-time welcome at Ballina, but Sligo town was so hostile that he kept away. His candidate lost again. In July 1891 a by-election at Carlow went almost three to one for the anti-Parnellite. The Freeman's Journal deserted him, and J. J. O'Kelly, his closest confidant, gave up the struggle. Now certain of victory, the opposition became more insolent. Parnell came into the House one day to find that a junior Irish member had appropriated his seat, and he had to find a place on the Liberal benches. In June 1891 the Sullivans' newspaper, the National Press, published under the headline "Stop Thief!" a sensational charge that Parnell had embezzled great sums from "the Paris funds," the Land League war chest, to support his licentious love life. The author was either Healy or T. D. Sullivan's brother Donal, known as "the silent Sullivan," famed for never making a speech or missing a division in a lifetime spent in the House of Commons. It said: "If Mr. Parnell debauched Mrs. O'Shea, one of the commandments delivered to us by Moses called this `adultery.' If he appropriated the moneys left in trust with him-and we are prepared to prove that he did-the same old fashioned law-giver called that `theft.' In midsummer, when the divorce decree became final, he married Mrs. O'Shea. To the clergy this action only added the sin of polygamy to the sin of adultery, and the bishop of Raphoe denounced the marriage as a "climax of brazen horrors." As his political position deteriorated, Parnell responded with more tortured effort. To a reporter from the Freeman's Journal who asked him what message he had for the Irish people he replied, "Tell them I will fight to the end." Before 1890 he often let a year or more pass without visiting Ireland. Though ailing, he now went across every weekend to give two, sometimes three, even four speeches before setting out again on the long and wearing journey back to Brighton, where the couple had moved after leaving Eltham. "I am weary," he wrote his mother, "weary unto death." His wife noticed that he looked increasingly exhausted as the autumn came on and became alarmed at the deepening of "tired gray shadows" about the lines of his face. She consulted their London physician about her fears for him, but she could not persuade him to go for an examination. At the end of September 1891 he set out for his regular stint of weekend speech-making. Arriving in Dublin, he suffered a severe attack of rheumatism in the left arm. His Dublin doctor advised him to cancel his speaking appointments and to stay in Dublin for rest. He disregarded the advice and appeared on schedule in the village of Cleggs, county Roscommon, on Sunday, standing bareheaded in a driving rain, his arm in a sling to ease the pain. He had difficulty articulating his words. Back in Dublin he felt better, and he spent the first half of the week working on the problems of financing a new daily newspaper, made necessary by the defection of the Freeman's Journal . On Wednesday he was ill again with pain and fever, and the doctor tried to persuade him not to travel home, again without success. Between trains in London he took a Turkish bath to relieve his pains. When he reached home at Brighton on Thursday he had a severe chill and was slightly confused in his mind. Next morning he could not walk; in a couple of days he could scarcely move an arm or a finger without unbearable pain. Saturday evening his mind wandered, turning to tales of the famine he had heard as a boy in Wicklow. Monday night his fever mounted out of control. He was last heard trying to say scmething about "the Conservative party"; then he fell unconscious. Shortly after midnight he died, on October 6, 1891, at age forty-five. X The attending physician assigned the cause of death to "rheumatic fever with hyperpyrexis," or excessive bodily temperature, and "failure of the heart's action." Another physician mentioned fatigue from overwork as a contributing cause. Because of the high fever, the tissues began to decompose very rapidly. No death mask could be made, and the body was hurriedly sealed up in a lead coffin. A couple of the young Parnellite Irish members went to Brighton and persuaded Mrs. Parnell to allow the body to be sent for burial to Dublin, famous for funerals. She did not accompany the body; and in the end, although she twice stood ready for the call to become the grand hostess at the Viceregal Lodge, she died without ever having set foot in Ireland. The reader will require no argument to be persuaded that for creative imagination in organizing a political funeral, the Fenians were without a peer. At Parnell's death their opportunity was particularly choice, since the normal struggle for the corpse did not occur. Out of delicacy the agrarians and the Sullivans had been forced to step back from their chief mourners' post at the national obsequies. The IRB came out of hiding and took charge. There was a seeming incongruity in the Fenians' new hero. Physical force and moral force were reasonably distinct entities, and in the ordinary use of language Parnell must be thought to belong in the second category rather than the first. But O'Leary looked upon Parnell's ideological agility in 1891 as amends for the heresies that had separated them in 1879. Whether he overestimated Parnell's deathbed Fenianism was a matter of opinion. By default the other claimants permitted him to appropriate Parnell's name and fame, momentarily disvalued and free-floating, and to pronounce its true meaning to be -- physical force. Those fifteen years of parliamentarianism, what were they but an irrelevance, a husk to be discarded leaving the clean grain, Parnell the Fenian martyr? United Ireland editorialized on the day of the funeral:
The count of mourners who marched in the procession to the Glasnevin grave was estimated at from 100,000 to 150,000, depending on the political bias of the witness. In the procession, walking abreast and just behind the lord mayor's carriage, were James Stephens and John O'Leary, each conspicuous in his seditious badge, the Fenian's wide-awake hat. As Yeats told us more than once, O'Leary's philosophy was the old Persian, to pull the bow and speak the truth. In his honest opinion, there was never any funeral to outtop Terence Bellow MacManus', though next to it, he conceded, came Leon Gambetta's and Parnell's in a dead heat. "The Politics of Irish Literature" © Copyright 1973 Malcolm Brown * A generation later, Yeats's play The Dreaming of the Bones made atonement for this singular response to the Pigott frame-up. The Easter Week executions had freed Maud Gonne from her estranged husband, John MacBride; and Yeats, after a decent interval for mourning, set forth in 1917 for her home in Normandy to propose marriage. The play gave expression to his last self-conscious nationalist effort and contains his last and loveliest Celtic-twilight lyric; it thus seems clearly a courtship gift. It is built around the Judas theme, but in neither the "poor Pigott" nor the Joycean mode. Joyce's proposition was that anybody who stood by Ireland would be betrayed; Yeats's, that anybody who betrayed Ireland would not be forgiven in seven hundred years. For good intentions the play wins the biscuit, as Lynch once said; and the strain of his effort (which included some imaginary atrocities) exudes from the text. Yeats sustained his interest by trying out two new poetical inventions. One was the "dreaming back" of the past, the unwinding of the bobbin, a vehicle that so precisely fit his theme that he understandably believed this the best of his Noh plays. The other innovation was the Spenglerian apocalypse, the parting cry of the "catheaded bird" and the herald of dawn by the "red bird of March": "Up with the neck and clap the wing, Red cock, and crow 1" Since Irish mythology deciphers the "cat-head" as the Demos (Cairbre Cat-Head being, as I have said, the Irish Spartacus), this innovation runs counter to the play's theme: Pearse and Connolly did not barricade themselves in the General Post Office in order to crush a slave rebellion. The contradiction generates an artificial enigma; see my comment on "The Second Coming," pp. 170-71. ** Gill is a key figure in Moore's Hail and Farewell, a farcical bureaucrat with an Henri Quatre beard. *** In Ulysses Healy is no longer the "cowardly little scoundrel" of Committee Room Fifteen, but a vaguely grand financier, a trustee for the Trinity College endowments. **** The commotion attracted a crowd of curious Dubliners, and as told in the "Eumaeus" chapter of Ulysses, one among them is Mr. Bloom. He witnesses the uncrowned king truly uncrowned as his silk hat is knocked off in the scuffle. Mr. Bloom rescues it and returns it, giving occasion for the Chief to utter "with perfect aplomb" the deathless words, "Thank you, sir."
© Copyright 1973 - 2008 by Bruce Brown Astonisher and Astonisher.com BF Communications Inc. Website by Running Dog |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
