Taylor, John Francis

by Patrick Maume

Taylor, John Francis (1853–1902), lawyer, orator and man of letters, was born 13 February 1853, third son of John Taylor, farmer, of Riverstown, Co. Sligo, and his wife Maria (née Feely). His father died soon after Taylor's birth, and his mother supported herself and her young children by keeping a small shop in Castlerea, Co. Roscommon. (The rumour, recorded by Taylor's rival William Butler Yeats (qv), that Taylor was the illegitimate son of a prominent Dublin barrister, can be dismissed as a piece of mythmaking intended to explain his eloquence.) Taylor was probably an IRB member as an adolescent (he privately described Patrick Neville Fitzgerald (qv) as 'my Fenian chief long ago' (10 November 1894, NLI MS 43,312/14), and although he left the brotherhood on deciding that there was no realistic prospect of a successful insurrection, he retained a strong emotional attraction to separatism for the rest of his life.

Early career The young Taylor came to Dublin to work as a commercial clerk, but soon turned to literature and journalism (in the 1880s he became a leader-writer on the Freeman's Journal). He occasionally wrote under the pseudonym 'Ridgeway', which may be a reference to William Ridgeway (qv), the reporter who recorded Emmet's (qv) speech from the dock or, more probably, the battle of Ridgeway (2 June 1866), where Fenian raiders into Canada defeated Canadian militiamen.

While supporting himself as a 'grinder' (coaching students for examination in 'literary subjects'), Taylor became involved in the capital's subculture of political and religious literary societies, where he developed his abilities as a lecturer and orator in the classical Irish tradition. He joined the Dublin Total Abstinence League in 1873; in 1879, when arrested by a policeman whose conduct he criticised and charged with being drunk and disorderly, Taylor produced several witnesses (including Thomas Wallace Russell (qv)) to prove that he had just left a meeting of the league, and was not only acquitted but secured an official inquiry leading to the policeman's dismissal. In later life Taylor continued to support such bodies as the St Nicholas of Myra Catholic Total Abstinence Association and the Sacred Thirst Branch of the League of the Cross. He also took a leading role in a movement to limit the working hours of Dublin drapers' apprentices.

Taylor studied law part-time from 1879, was called to the bar in Michaelmas term 1882, and built up a practice on the Connaught circuit and in Dublin. He was called to the English bar in 1890, took an honours degree (with gold medal and senior moderatorship) at TCD in 1892, and became a QC on 1 July 1893. Although Taylor's rivals made sardonic reference to his defence of 'country criminals whose case seemed hopeless; Taylor's boys as their neighbours called them or they called themselves' (Yeats, Autobiographies, 214), he was quite successful in his practice but insecure about how long it would last (and lost money in incautious investments). In 1885 he briefly served as crown prosecutor for King's County, which was later cited against him when he criticised nationalist politicians (though he was defended by Michael Davitt (qv) and John O'Leary (qv)). Although he detested the 1894–5 Liberal government, he entertained the hope that it might make him a law officer, and while privately hoping that he would live to see the British empire sink in apocalyptic disaster, in the 1890s he gave serious consideration to moving to the potentially more lucrative English bar, hoping success there might improve his chances of marriage.

Political involvement; Liberalism and Carlyleanism Taylor held strong nationalist views but was too angry and individualistic to fit in with any political party. He greatly admired Isaac Butt (qv) as 'the greatest Irishman since Burke', and lamented that he had been driven to his death by unscrupulous politicians (notably John Dillon (qv), his particular bête noire). In 1881 Taylor was a member of the M. P. Boyton branch of the Land League (based in Aungier Street, Dublin), but he thought Irish nationalism had been narrowed and degraded by relying on agrarian populism. He regarded Charles Stewart Parnell (qv) as an autocrat and a demagogue and did not hesitate to say so in print; his initial reaction to the Parnell split was relief that the dictatorship had broken down and freedom of speech was once again possible. He later grew more sympathetic to Parnell on the grounds that though a ruthless and unscrupulous liar he was at least a Caesar-like genius whereas his opponents were self-righteous incompetents and hypocritical moralisers; this was complicated by his personal friendship with Timothy Healy (qv) based on the camaraderie of the bar and on mutual contempt for Dillon and William O'Brien (qv).

In the mid 1880s Taylor gravitated to the subculture of Dublin Liberal intellectuals such as Charles Hubert Oldham (qv) who supported home rule without submitting to Parnellite discipline. He wrote for the Dublin University Review and joined the Contemporary Club (both with Oldham as driving force), and became Dublin correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. He denounced the Dublin Castle bureaucracy and the coercion policies of Arthur James Balfour (qv) but was also highly critical of nationalist politicians such as William O'Brien whose weekly United Ireland in turn excoriated Taylor's claim to represent a high-souled patriotism superior to agrarian demagoguery. Taylor joined the National Liberal and Reform clubs (in London), admired Gladstone's charismatic leadership, and appears to have had a genuine admiration for aspects of the British Liberal tradition of Locke and Mill. Liberalism in practice was another matter; Taylor was acutely aware of the cynicism with which many leading Liberals took up Gladstonian home rule in 1886, and privately expressed boundless contempt for most members of the 1892–5 Liberal government, dismissing John Morley (qv) as 'the Ghost' and Lord Rosebery as 'the Mahatma', making vast meaningless pronouncements to appease the gullible.

Taylor's theoretical liberalism was balanced by the countervailing influence of Thomas Carlyle, partly mediated through John Mitchel (qv). The Carlylean vision of a world dominated by conventional insincerities, needing periodic regeneration by heroic figures who could pierce the shams around them and who were opposed by envious mediocrities, appealed to Taylor (as to other Mitchelites) because of the obvious difference between profession and practice on all sides of Irish politics and because it fitted his own self-image as a frustrated hero. Like Carlyle, Taylor developed a cult of manliness to compensate for his own frustrations and volatility; in Taylor's case this was expressed in admiration for the heroic didacticism of Young Ireland and for the clear-cut classicism of the eighteenth century in opposition to the 'digressions' of Gothic architecture and the introspection of artistic romanticism.

Carlyleanism underlay Taylor's admiration for charismatic heroes such as Butt, Parnell and Gladstone, even while he saw their feet of clay; hence, while moving in Liberal circles, he was simultaneously one of the principal associates of the old Fenian John O'Leary. Taylor's bar earnings subsidised some of the nationalist literary societies patronised by O'Leary, and addressed by Taylor himself. Despite their lifelong mutual respect for each other's high principles and literary talents (Taylor actively welcomed O'Leary's stringent criticisms of his own writings), Taylor was also deeply aware of O'Leary's crankiness and impracticality; he privately described O'Leary's reminiscences as even more tiresome in print than they had been in manuscript.

W. B. Yeats and the Irish literary revival The Contemporary Club brought Taylor into contact with W. B. Yeats, and they developed an instant mutual dislike, later compounded by rivalry for O'Leary's affections. In Reveries over childhood and youth (1914), Yeats presents Taylor as the defining opponent of his early career (possibly a literary oversimplification with Taylor representing several similar opponents). Yeats recalls fierce arguments at the Contemporary Club where Taylor's ability to think on his feet while Yeats became confused with emotion taught the young poet the need for the orator to become detached. In a two-edged compliment, Yeats credited Taylor's heroic recitations of the intrinsically mediocre poems of Thomas Davis (qv) with awakening him to the potential of dramatic verse in performance.

Taylor was scornful of Yeats's occultism, and waged literary vendettas against his writings and those of his literary associates in book reviews for the Freeman's Journal and the Manchester Guardian. He accused Yeats of promoting 'the delusion that obscurity is an acceptable substitute for strenuous thought and sound judgment' (Freeman's Journal, 1 February 1889), while Yeats, though later recalling Taylor as perhaps the greatest orator he had ever heard, saw him as combining catholic puritanism and doctrinaire utilitarianism in a manner characteristic of upwardly mobile lower-middle-class products of the catholic education system, which presented religion and nationality as apologetics rather than direct mystical experience. (Taylor's closest associates were unsure how deep his catholicism actually went; he possessed a strong vein of scepticism and anti-clericalism combined with tribal resentment at respectable protestant condescension.)

Taylor's and Yeats's rivalry came to a head in 1892–3 when the National Literary Society (with its London affiliate the Irish Literary Society), founded in 1892 under the chairmanship of Sir Charles Gavan Duffy (qv), proposed to publish a book series, the New Library of Ireland, to be promoted through a network of local societies affiliated to the NLS. Yeats thought the series should promote the work of new Irish litterateurs such as himself, while Duffy favoured didactic literature on the Young Ireland model (such as Thomas Davis's The Patriot parliament of 1689 and the novels of Edward Melville Lynch on rural economy). Taylor was Duffy's most outspoken supporter; at committee meetings and in public journalism he accused Yeats of heading a mutually promoting clique of obscurantist literary 'freaks' and praised Duffy as a man of 'large and varied experience' who wished only to serve Ireland. In private Taylor was critical of Duffy's shortcomings in running the business side of the library and thought him excessively trusting towards English statesmen.

In 1896 Taylor published Owen Roe O'Neill in the New Library of Ireland. This forceful account of the seventeenth-century confederate military leader (see Owen Roe O'Neill (qv)) as Carlylean hero betrayed by lesser men is also an expression of anger and frustration at the political impasse of 1890s Ireland, with Rory O'More (qv) (d. 1655) as a Parnell or Butt figure – a parliamentary statesman driven to despair by British intransigence, and the Ormondist politicians of Kilkenny – intriguing against Owen and engaging in futile negotiations with the utterly untrustworthy Charles I – a thinly veiled replica of the Irish parliamentary party's factional disputes and trust in the Liberal alliance. (This parallel is explicit in Taylor's correspondence with Alice Stopford Green (qv).) Although Taylor claims that one of the mistakes of Kilkenny was the creation of a catholic confederation instead of a national union, he defends both Owen Roe's alliance with Rinuccini (qv) and his late negotiations with the Cromwellians on the grounds that nuncio and lord protector both stood for something concrete, while Ormondist royalism was always delusional: 'while [Ireland's] oppressors have been men of iron, such English rulers as professed themselves her friends have been mostly men of lath; cheats, quacks, and cowards' (p. 236). While writing the book, Taylor was informing Green that government by the unionists, 'the behemoth of chaos', or the Devil himself would be preferable to the continued blundering of Rosebery and Morley. His personal friendship with Edward Carson (qv) appears to reflect this preference for a strong and straightforward enemy over an opportunistic and temporising ally. Owen Roe implicitly predicts a revival of Irish separatism if a sufficiently heroic leader can be found. In his last years Taylor increasingly predicted that the British empire was becoming decadent (prominent among the symptoms was the absurd British vogue for Yeats) and would soon end in a colossal smash, which he hoped might be precipitated by the Franco–Russian alliance. (He reported enthusiastically for the Freeman on the official visit of Tsar Nicholas II to France in October 1896.)

In 1899 Taylor attended the dinner held to celebrate the first plays staged by the Irish Literary Theatre, where he delivered an impromptu excoriation of George Moore (qv) after the novelist suggested in an after-dinner speech that the new land agitation started in the west of Ireland by William O'Brien should be abandoned lest it interfere with the development of the literary movement. Although Taylor regarded O'Brien's United Irish League as 'the most worthless pack of blackguards in the country' (March 1899, NLI MS 43,312/21), he took umbrage at Moore's pretensions and responded that O'Brien had lost his soul in the mistaken belief that he was serving his country, whereas Moore had frittered away his soul in cosmopolitan Parisian debauches – which Taylor evoked in some detail, before praising the Irish race for remaining true to its native ideals, in contrast to Moore. Moore's version of this incident is in Hail and farewell (i, 134–5); he dismisses Taylor's exaltation of the peasantry and suggests that he could have replied, had he felt it worth the trouble, that 'in the last analysis, everything depends upon the poet … it is for Ireland to admire us, not for us to admire Ireland'.

'Tables of the law' speech and attitude to Jews In the same year Taylor wrote a series of articles for the Daily Express (Dublin) on the Dreyfus case in which he compared the Irish and the Jews as small peoples who had maintained their own national and religious identities against the promises and threats of empire. This parallel underlies the speech for which he is best remembered, an impromptu reply at a meeting of the TCD law students' debating society (24 October 1901) to a talk by Gerald Fitzgibbon (qv) disparaging the revival of the Irish language as encouraging provincial backwardness at the expense of the wide opportunities offered by imperial Britain. Taylor suggested that an Egyptian high priest might similarly have advised the youthful Moses to abandon obscure Hebrew tribalism for the grandeurs of Egypt, and had Moses submitted to that arrogant injunction 'he would never have spoken with the Eternal amid lightnings on Sinai's mountaintop nor ever have come down … bearing in his arms the tables of the law, graven in the language of the outlaw' (Joyce, Ulysses (Gabler edition (1984), 117). After Taylor's death an anonymous correspondent to the Manchester Guardian (14 November 1902) recalled the speech as proof of its author's genius. James Joyce (qv), who admired Taylor's oratory and was probably present at the event, gives a version of this speech in chapter 7 ('Aeolus') of Ulysses, where its recollection by a journalist momentarily reduces his word-mongering colleagues to respectful silence; Joyce later made an audio recording of the passage. In a 1914 memoir, Yeats, who did not hear the speech himself, mentions an acquaintance reciting it to another man 'as I might some Elizabethan lyric that is in my very bones' (Autobiographies, 96). The image of a small nation defying a mighty empire was given added force by the contemporaneous South African war (1899–1902) in which Taylor was fiercely supportive of Boer (Afrikaner) resistance to overwhelming British military power.

It is ironic that Taylor is often seen as a philo-semite on account of this speech, for he was a committed anti-Dreyfusard who believed Britain and Germany were using the Dreyfus case to weaken France by undermining the army. In letters to Alice Stopford Green he mockingly identified himself with 'the dense ignorance of papists who think that France is not a province of Judea' (10 February 1899, NLI MS 43,312/21), declared that there was strong circumstantial evidence against Dreyfus which the French courts were quite correct in taking into account, and contrasted Bismarck's selective quotation of the Ems telegram to trigger the Franco–Prussian War and British official use of the forgeries of Richard Pigott (qv) against Parnell with the holy horror now expressed by British and Germans at the use of forged evidence against Dreyfus.

Personal life Yeats recalled that while rough and quarrelsome with most men (the exception being O'Leary, to whom he was gentle and deferential) Taylor was quiet and courteous with women. He regarded Taylor as sexually frustrated because although women were attracted by his genius they were repelled by his lumpish appearance and ungainly manners. Taylor's rivalry with Yeats was exacerbated by shared infatuation with Maud Gonne (qv), who employed Taylor in 1896 to defend (free of charge) an American IRB man going under the name of 'Ivory' and accused of involvement in an assassination plot; Taylor secured his release by highlighting the involvement of a government agent provocateur. Taylor also represented Gonne in a 1900 libel suit against the unionist journalist Ramsey Colles, and in 1913 Gonne would describe Patrick Pearse (qv) as the only orator she had heard who could have equalled Taylor; but Taylor's relations with Gonne never went beyond political collaboration with a touch of flirtation.

Taylor privately recalled that he had loved a woman who died in 1885; thereafter he was alone until the early 1890s when he developed a close friendship with the historian and salonnière Alice Stopford Green. On 10 January 1894 he proposed marriage to Green and believed she had accepted him; a brief period of ecstasy was ended in February when Green made clear he had misunderstood her. They maintained an intimate friendship, however, in which Taylor drew on Green for emotional support in his frequent bouts of depression and continued for some years to hope (apparently with a certain amount of encouragement) that she would marry him; for a period they exchanged letters every day. From 1896 their relations cooled because Taylor resented Green's friendships with other men, but they continued to discuss political and literary matters; she respected his personal integrity and he strongly influenced her developing anti-imperialism and Irish nationalism.

Taylor died in Dublin on 7 November 1902 after a long illness in which he was nursed by Green. His obituaries reflected his conflicted personality; while the Irish Times and the Manchester Guardian emphasised his Liberalism and home rule views, Arthur Griffith (qv) claimed him as a separatist, revealing that Taylor in his last years had published in Griffith's United Irishman anonymous attacks on John Redmond (qv) and T. W. Rolleston (qv) for attaching themselves to the British empire without regard for the atrocities it committed against oppressed peoples worldwide, and in conversation with Griffith had passionately predicted the empire's doom. Above all, his obituarists emphasised how his dogged individualism kept him from fully realising his talents and made him something of an outcast amid the political divides of post-Parnellian Dublin. Perhaps it is fitting that Taylor is best remembered through the writings of Joyce, for his life and career encapsulate the social and sexual frustrations, political tensions and despair, economic precariousness, and the contrast between lofty ideals and bitter cynicism which encapsulate Joycean Dublin.

Taylor's letters to Green are in NLI MS 43,312/1–26. The NGI has an 1885 pencil sketch of Taylor by John Butler Yeats (qv).