Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd

Mahaffy: A biography of an Anglo-Irishman by W. B. Stanford; R. B. McDowellReview by: F. S. L. LyonsIrish Historical Studies, Vol. 17, No. 68 (Sep., 1971), pp. 589-593Published by: Irish Historical Studies Publications LtdStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30005315 .

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REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 589 But Professor Curtis deserves quite another framework of reference

and evaluation. No honest student of nineteenth-century Britain or Ireland would deny-however difficult he might find it to define-the substance and power of the phenomena under inquiry. No honest historian of any period would reject irrational and subconscious forces as factors of explanation, if only he could speak of them with certainty. In my view-the author himself might well disagree-Professor Curtis's essay should be adjudged, not as supplying a new answer to the question of the Question, but as supplying new tools of investigation (his division of the British arguments on home rule into those of anglo-saxonism and those of the environmentalists, for example, is very useful), new insights (his relation of class to racial prejudice, for example, is most revealing) and new hypotheses. Developed and refined, such labours as these may eventually add a new dimension to our subject. The imprecision and vain claims of some practitioners of the social sciences should never blind us to what these disciplines, as such, may have to offer.

Not only the text but also the comparatively extensive notes in Professor Curtis's little book will reward study. It is, however, strange that his select bibliography should omit such a relevant and penetrating work as G. F. A. Best's 'Popular protestantism in Victorian Britain'.

OLIVER MACDONAGH

MAHAFFY: A BIOGRAPHY OF AN ANGLO-IRISHMAN. By W. B. Stanford and R. B. McDowell. Pp xiv, 281. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. I971. 93.oo.

No Trinity man-unless he be an unregenerate steamboater-can approach this book 'from bias free of every kind', or rather, he can do so only in a Gilbertian sense.' To have walked those hallowed squares any time this half-century is to have grown up under the shadow of Mahaffy. And to have grown up under the shadow of Mahaffy is to have grasped, however dimly, that just beyond the horizon of memory a golden age lay waiting to be explored. To many neophytes that golden age may have seemed too good to be true and thrusting modernity- never more thrusting in Trinity than at this moment-has always tended to see an over-idealised past as no more than a cumbersome mythology barring the way to 'progress '. Certainly, it is true that the sentimental view of old Trinity is like the sentimental view of old Dublin. Squalor is transmuted by nostalgia and men pity the plumage but forget the dying bird. Yet plumage and bird, myth and reality, are parts of a single whole, and he who would understand Ireland, even Anglo-Ireland, can ignore neither the history of the ancient University of Dublin nor the biography of one of its most resplendent sons.

1For the uninitiated, the term ' steamboater' refers to those external students who in earlier days were allowed to keep their terms and take their degrees by examination only. Coming frequently from England they presented themselves in the Examination Hall straight from the mail-boat; hence 'steamboater'.

K

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590 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES

John Pentland Mahaffy was born in 1839 and died in 1919. He lived therefore through a period when the reputation of Trinity as a place of learning was raised to great heights by a band of brilliant scholars of whom he himself was perhaps the best-known, though not, as his biographers would probably concede, the most illustrious. Mahaffy stood out from the ruck-and it is possible to speak without absurdity of a ruck of brilliance in Mahaffy's Trinity-partly by virtue of his knowledge of European languages and literature, partly through his extraordinarily productive industry (seldom a passport to popularity in academic circles) and partly, as he did not fail to make clear, because he had the entre'e to a range and variety of high society far beyond the ambitions or capabilities of his colleagues.

It is perhaps a little unfair that it is the last of these characteristics which has formed the most enduring element in his legend. Mahaffy has come down to us as a clever, vain, arrogant man and as an inveterate and sometimes brutal snob. To redress the balance has naturally been a major task for his biographers and let it be said without qualification that they have largely succeeded in that task. They are, indeed, excep- tionally well qualified to do so. Both Trinity men to the marrow, both authorities of great distinction in their separate fields of classics and of history, both men of wide reading and shrewd judgment, both men with a flair for nuance and for style-they have combined to produce a book which is a delight to read and which, while obviously of special interest to 'sons of the house', may well be a source of enjoyment even to those who find it more difficult to pass through Front Gate than through the eye of a needle.

In their rehabilitation of Mahaffy the man, the authors have been at pains to show his kindness to those in need, especially the young. This no doubt needs to be said (though one would have welcomed more numerous examples of it), but the accusations of arrogance and snobbery have still to be met. The latter is of relatively minor significance and it is probably sufficient to rely, as this book does, upon Mahaffy's own trenchant defence in The art of conversation where he distinguished between the toady and the independent-minded individual who mixed in society on his own terms. Toadyism, he considered, was 'a term which expresses the vicious relations of socially inferior and superior', whereas 'the man or woman that succeeds among social superiors is not the timid or modest person, afraid to contradict, and ever ready to assent to what is said, but rather the free and independent intellect that suggests subjects, makes bold criticisms, and in fact introduces a bright and free tone into a company which is perhaps somewhat dull from its grandeur or even its extreme respectability'. All accounts agree that Mahaffy fully lived up to his own precepts. True, the result may more often have been monologue than conversation, but that is not unusual in Dublin, where the most famous talkers have always preferred to silence an opponent with any verbal weapon from a bludgeon to a stiletto rather than listen to what he in his turn might have wished to say.

A more important strand in Mahaffy's psychology than his compulsive conversation was his over-assertiveness and this in turn was probably the

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REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 591

expression of the frustration which was the common lot of Junior Fellows under the gerontocracy of provost and seven Senior Fellows that governed the college during the nineteenth century. Calculating the age of the board and speculating upon which Senior Fellow would next slip the painter and glide Lethe-wards was a constant occupation of those who stood high in the succession. In this Mahaffy was no exception, though it comes as something of a shock to find that his calculations began while he was still an undergraduate. His academic frustrations were legitimate, for he was not only a scholar whose achievements seemed to be recog- nised everywhere except at home (and in Cambridge, the habitat of his unrelenting critic, Richard Jebb), but was also a sincere advocate of internal reforms which were repeatedly emasculated or rejected outright by the old guard of the board. No wonder that as late as the end of the century, when he himself stood on the threshold of co-option, he published an article revealing that the combined age of the board ' amounted to half a millenium'. No wonder either that when a kindly but misguided printer altered the figure to 'a quarter of a million', his senior colleagues found his protestations of innocence singularly uncon- vincing. True, Mahaffy did eventually-in 1914-secure the provostship but it was then, as he mournfully observed, 'ten years too late'. In 190o4, when his ambition had been to succeed Provost Salmon, the prize had gone instead to Anthony Traill, and although A. J. Balfour, the prime minister responsible for the final decision, had pondered long and hard before making his choice, it is plain that the factor which influenced him most was Mahaffy's intense unpopularity with a number of his senior colleagues. This, no doubt, was partly due to his espousal of an abortive plan for a 'merger' of Trinity with a new University of Dublin to which several institutions might belong-then, as now, most Trinity men were vehement in defence of their own college's independence-but it is hard to avoid the suspicion that those inside Trinity who opposed his elevation were not entirely motivated by the public good. Too many of them had smarted too often under his epigrams for their judgment to have been wholly unclouded by the human desire to return malice for malice.

Mahaffy's trouble was not just that he was too clever by half, but that he was too well aware of being too clever by half. Unhappily also, the fact that he was an ordained clergyman seems to have caused him no little inconvenience, extending at one period to an accusation from the board that he was guilty of heresy. The charge was not pressed home (it is a minor tragedy that the correspondence it pro- voked has been lost), but Mahaffy was suspended for a time from preaching in the college chapel. This may in fact have been a blessing in disguise, for Mahaffy performed much less brilliantly in the pulpit than at the dinner-table, but his colleague, R. Y. Tyrrell (to whom some of the best remarks in the book are attributed) thought otherwise, com- plaining bitterly that in the absence of Mahaffy's sermons he was now beset by insomnia during chapel services. It is only fair to add, however, that the authors have mustered sufficient evidence to connect Mahaffy fairly firmly to the Christian religion, while making it clear that to

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592 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES

the end of his days he retained an eighteenth-century distaste for ' enthusiasm '.

Although much of this biography is rightly concerned with the quirks and quiddities of Mahaffy as an eccentric individual coming to full flower in an eccentric institution, two aspects of his public career deserve and receive special treatment, though one is more thoroughly dealt with here than the other. The first of them concerns his standing as a scholar, which means primarily his standing as an ancient historian, though, like several of his Trinity contemporaries, Mahaffy was something of a polymath. One presumes this part of the book to have been the preserve of Professor Stanford who brings to it all the learning and the fair but firm judgment we should have expected. Perhaps pietas may have tempted him to indulge occasionally in special pleading, but he does make out a strong case for Mahaffy's originality, which showed itself equally in his pioneering work on the social and economic history of the Greek world and in his incursions into the field of papyrology. Indeed, it may even be that, of all his books (there were over thirty), the first two volumes of the Flinders Petrie papyrology may be the ones that come nearest to the ideal of scholarship which he professed but which, in his inmost heart, he must have realised he did not consistently achieve. Professor Stanford, with admirably even-handed justice, points to the flaws in the great man's monument. He wrote too much too rapidly; he was prone to error that was usually careless and sometimes crass; worst of all, he had an abominably unhistorical habit of dragging modern analogies into studies of earlier times, so that the surprised reader of a work on Hellenic civilisation might find himself confronted with homilies on the virtues of imperialism or the follies of nationalism.

Here we trench upon the second aspect of Mahaffy's career which has a more than merely personal significance. For if it was the fashion in some circles before the first world war to regard Trinity as 'anti- national ', part at least of the blame for this has to be laid at Mahaffy's door, a fact which seems insufficiently appreciated in this biography. His publicly expressed contempt for the Irish language-more precisely, for the efforts of the Gaelic League to revive it--and his ban upon the 'man called Pearse' speaking in Trinity in 1914 have rebounded so often and so damagingly upon his alma mater that it is tempting to apply to Mahaffy Tim Healy's description of Parnell--'a brilliant disaster'.

Yet, as his biographers show, Mahaffy's position, like that of most Anglo-Irishmen, was much more complicated than his and Trinity's enemies would allow. Even to say of him, as D. P. Moran of The Leader said of the Young Irelanders, that 'his country was Anglo-Ireland, but he called it in perfect good faith Ireland', is to do him some injustice. Mahaffy felt himself a part of Ireland, he lived there all his life, he spoke with an Irish accent, and towards the end of his career he proclaimed himself a home ruler of the school of Lord Midleton and those other southern Irish unionists who vainly tried to salvage from the Irish convention of 1917-18 a form of self-government more ambitious than the Gladstonian version but still far short of independence. It was no accident, however, that Mahaffy's most constructive extra-mural activities

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REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 593 were exactly those in which the Anglo-Irish were most deeply involved -the creation of an Irish theatre, the campaign for the Lane pictures and the foundation of the Georgian Society. These, with the possible exception of the theatre (which he soon dropped), were not the projects most likely to endear him to nationalist critics, but that worried him not at all. On the contrary, like so many of his blood and background, he found no difficulty in combining an enduring affection for the country of his birth with an easy citizenship of a wider world. Perhaps it was as well that he died when he did.

A word should perhaps be said in conclusion about the presentation of this volume. It is such a happy exercise in joint authorship that nowhere does it give any appearance of a scissors-and-paste technique. It is not, indeed, a strictly chronological record, since Mahaffy was so many-sided a man that his biographers have chosen rather to present each facet of him in turn-a difficult literary device which they have carried out with considerable success. They have put us further in their debt by a good index and an excellent bibliography of Mahaffy's own writings, though these desirable appendages are offset to a degree by the oddity of the footnotes. This is not only due to the decision to place them at the end of the book (an unusual fall from grace for these particular publishers), but also to the curiously truncated and sometimes almost sibylline way in which they are cited. No doubt they would have escaped Mahaffy's censure (there is in fact a Mahaffyan lapse when on page 145 and in the second note to chapter eight on page 249 there are conflicting references to the same quotation), but a Bury or a Tyrrell might, one feels, have winced. Such minutiae however, though the meat and drink on which Mahaffy's rivals throve, need not be allowed to obscure the grace and propriety of the memorial here erected to him. Justice has been seen to be done.

F. S. L. LYONS

EAMON DE VALERA. By the earl of Longford and Thomas P. O'Neill. Pp xxiii, 499. Dublin : Gill and Macmillan. 1970. 14.00.

THIS important book supersedes all previous biographies of President de Valera. Its basis in Mr de Valera's papers and recollections, which have been made freely available to the authors, gives it an authoritativeness that no previous biography could have. The book is strictly a 'life', and not a 'life and times': the authors provide the minimum of background required to make the story intelligible. This was a reasonable decision: to have provided more background would have made a long book longer still. It does not detract from its value.

The tone of the biography may be described as one of temperate partisanship. The authors obviously admire Mr de Valera, and take his side in all the many controversies in which he has been involved. But though they agree with him on all points of principle, they are not blind to errors of tactics; and they are also prepared to concede the good faith of those whom he opposed. Perhaps the only person to whom they are

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