As Kevin Egan sings some of The boys of Kilkenny to
Stephen, he takes his hand: "Weak wasting hand on mine." The
touch, and the song's mention
of exilic longing, make Stephen think of another song
that contains both elements: "He takes me, Napper Tandy, by
the hand." The allusion is to The Wearing of the Green,
a street ballad commemorating the uprising of the 1790s.
General James Napper Tandy was one of the founders of the United Irishmen, a group
of pan-denominational (but predominantly Protestant) activists
centered in Dublin and Belfast, who were inspired by the
French Revolution in 1789 and the publication of Thomas
Paine's The Rights of Man in 1791. The group
originally sought parliamentary reform of the existing
political system but, confronted with British repression, it
drifted toward republicanism, and in 1795 it made common cause
with the secret Catholic agrarian organization called the Defenders. In the same year
Tandy fled to the United States, and in 1798 he moved to Paris
to join Theobald Wolfe Tone and others who were plotting an
uprising assisted by a French invasion force. In September
1798 he captained a French corvette filled with troops and
arms to Donegal, where he unsuccessfully sought to foment
rebellion.
The song, which Gifford notes was "formalized" in the late
19th century by the Irish-American actor and writer Dion
Boucicault, appears to present Tandy at some point during the
three years of his exile. The second stanza of the ballad
begins, "I met with Napper Tandy, and he took me by
the hand, / And he said, 'How's dear old
Ireland, and how does she stand?'" (In Circe Old
Gummy Granny echoes the second of these lines: "You met with poor old Ireland and how
does she stand?") The answer is that Ireland is faring
very poorly: "She's the most distressful country that ever yet
was seen; / They're hanging men and women there for wearing of
the green." The United Irishmen had adopted green as their
color, and citizens were wearing green ribbons or items of
clothing (or sometimes, the song suggests, shamrocks) to
demonstrate their support. The British authorities responded
with typical brutality, declaring the wearing of green an act
of sedition punishable by death.
Thornton notes that in the lecture titled "Ireland, Island of
Saints and Sages," delivered in Trieste in 1907, Joyce
mentions Tandy as one of the "heroes of the modern movement."
Stephen's thoughts seem to cohere with that assessment. He
imagines Kevin Egan, an insurrectionist living in exile in
Paris, as an avatar of another insurrectionist living in Paris
a century earlier. In this drama, Stephen plays the role of
the visitor from Ireland whom Tandy asks for news of his
native land. But of course Stephen too (like Joyce) thinks of
himself as an exile determined to improve Ireland from abroad,
so the gleam reflected from Tandy may burnish his aura as
well.
