Most great teachers have something of the actor about them, but James Walton was seldom like that. Shy when others were ebullient, he exuded a quieter kind of authority in his 26 years of service to the English Department at TCD between 1957 and 1983. His reticence in company belied a powerful intellect and an audacious imagination.
He was born in Armagh in December 1918 into a brilliant family. His brother Ernest would win a Nobel Prize in the sciences, but James (though always a keen mathematician) opted for the more literary arts. He took excellent degrees at Trinity in 1941 in both modern literature and history. The combination was prophetic. Almost all of his subsequent writings - whether on E. M. Forster, Swift or Shakespeare - displayed a strong understanding of the material conditions and historical backgrounds out of which the works of art came.
It must have been a high adventure for such a young man to find himself installed as professor of English at the University of Mysore, India, between 1947 and 1949, the very years of India's transition to independence. In the next decade, he would range farther still, as a lecturer at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, where his ideas challenged colleagues and students alike. But it was, in the end, to Ireland and to Trinity that he devoted the greater part of his life. There he completed his major study of the First Folio of Shakespeare and there also he set up one of the earliest, most visionary courses in Anglo-Irish literature.
His essays showed an imaginative daring tempered only by a sound scholarly scruple. He was not only one of the leading Shakespearean textualists of his era, but also a provocative interpreter of the tragedies (for instance, his analyses of the ghosts in Macbeth and Hamlet have been hugely influential and will be of lasting value). He was helped in his scholarship by an awesome memory and also by his own desire for ever-increasing knowledge. In his middle years, he taught himself both Greek and Irish so that he might know their literary classics in the original.
To students, James Walton was the least intimidating of professors, a kindly and compassionate head of department. In tutorials he proved himself to be that rarest kind of Irishman, a considerate and alert listener. Sometimes, he amazed students by remembering what they had said, months earlier, in a classroom discussion. If he thought an essay was good, he gave unstinting praise.
At times in the classroom he would sigh softly, as if oppressed by the burdens of office and the pain of the world. A moment later, however, his eyes would brighten at some passing remark and he would move with awkward enthusiasm to his bookshelf for some apt and matching quotation.
Invariably, he padded into the lecture-hall carrying a massive bag (perhaps it was this that prompted a generation of affectionate students to dub him Paddington Bear). His lectures were fully scripted in longhand and, if they survive, would make marvellous reading. His delivery was meditative, but there was always a glint of possible mischief behind his platform decorum. He liked to insert unexpected one-liners ("Thackeray was a lesser Trollope") into lectures. He would often pretend to be surprised at the guffaws which ensued, but the laughing eyes behind his spectacles gave the game away. Perhaps he acted, just a little.
A radical social vision was the link between his various interests. He encouraged students to treat Wolfe Tone's Autobiography as a work of high literature. He himself was a keen reader of the books of George Thomson, the left-wing classicist who wrote equally well of Aeschylus, the Blaskets and Mao's China. Once James Walton got to know a person, his shyness left him and there might be no limit to the conversation. Many former tutees called back, years after graduation, to renew such exchanges.
Nowadays, it is a rare thing for a scholar to have an unpublished thought, but James Walton was one of those gentlemen who knew far, far more than he ever committed to print. However, he shared that knowledge selflessly with colleagues and students; and what he published is all of lasting significance. He was a worthy fellow of Trinity and (in the best sense of the word) a patriot.
His wife, Else, was his loving and steadfast companion for over 50 years. To her and to their children, Bernard, Kristine, Rosemary, Helen and Fintan, we offer heartfelt condolences. They will miss him acutely; but he lives on in them, in his grandchildren, his students and his writings. They, after all, are the signals which he sent so hopefully into the uncertain future.
D.K.