Taylor, John F.

Life
?1850-1902 [occas. pseud. ‘Ridgeway’]; barrister, QC (and KC in the new reign); acted as Dublin correspondent to the Manchester Guardian; his speech of 24 Oct 1901 quoted (or misquoted) in Joyce’s Ulysses [7.793]; discussed in Yeats’s Autobiography, where he features as an rhetorician and enemy of spiritualism, an opponent in the matter of the Irish national Theatre with Gavan Duffy; wrote a life of Owen Roe O’Neill for the New Irish Library in 1896; d. Dec. 1902. PI

Criticism
Dominic Daly, The Young Douglas Hyde, 1974, J. F. Taylor, ‘The Parliaments of Ireland’, lecture to Young Ireland society at York St., c.1884. [202]

Notes
W. P. Ryan, The Irish Literary Revival (1894), J. F. Taylor, QC, the Dublin correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, has been prominent now and then in councils of the Society, but is regarded as a strong but independent personality, and will deal with the stronger personality of Owen Roe O’Neill for the New Irish Library. [153]

W. B. Yeats: ‘John Taylor while we was speaking seemd more than any man’s equal because he did not seem a man, being pure rage, and rage within our minds was raught [i.e., wrought] to passion equal with his own, not by hatred as with lesser men, but by self-recognition. No maxim, no principle clung to the memory, all was passion and that noble. But he had no personality; speech over one say again ill-fitting clothes, a wrinkled umbrella, a stiff ungainly body, and heard his rancorous voice speaking its scorn of this man or that. No great career was possible forhm; no party would accept him, no government lift him to great position; he was too notorious for a temper that carried him to the edge of insanity.’ (Early draft version of passage in Autobiographies; cited in Curtis Bradford, Yeats at Work, S. Illinois UP, 1965, p.358.) Note that Yeats makes numerous references to his exceptional power as an orator, called by Yeats Rí-fhear, ‘a king among kings.’ [86]

Frank Tuohy, Yeats (1976), ‘Yeats troubled by his contact with J. F. Taylor, the lawyer and ‘obscure, great orator’; ‘I braved Taylor again and again, as one might a savage animal as a test of courage, but always found him worse than my expectation’; ‘coarse red hair, his gaunt ungainly body, his stiff movements as a Dutch doll, his badly rolled shabby umbrella’; counterbalanced by ‘a passion for all moral and physical splendour [and] a heart that every pretty woman set on fire’; showed Yeats how great might be the effect of verse spoken by a man almost rhythm drunk, at some moment of intensity, the apex of long-mounting thought’; ‘his science or his Catholic theology I could never discover which, would become enraged by my supernaturalism’; threw up his head like an angry horse’ at Yeats’s assertions about ghosts. (Tuohy, pp.42-43); note also, ‘the quarrel with Gavan Duffy and J. F. Taylor (p.91).

Justin McCarthy, ed., Irish Literature (Washington: University of America 1904); gives extract from Life of Owen Roe O’Neill; ‘The Irish School of Oratory’, pp.vii-xxviii; also, an excerpt from his life of Owen Roe O’Neill [New Irish Library series] (1896); called an intense and rhetorical advocacy of the ‘Catholic Celt’; Edmund Spenser and Blennerhasset are written down as ‘two evangelists of robbery and murder’.

Douglas Hyde notes ‘a lecture, the best I have ever heard’ from J. F. Taylor (20 Nov. 1886)