Inventing Ireland

by Declan Kiberd

  As a laboratory, of course, Ireland had also known some less pleasant experiments – laissez-faire economics, oscillations from conciliation to coercion, curfews and martial law – for it was a crucible in which Britain not only tested ideas for possible use back home, but also for likely implementation in other colonies. The process was reciprocal. Inevitably, the arriving Irish, in their tens of thousands, occupied and used England as a laboratory in which to solve many of their own domestic problems at a certain useful remove. The career of Parnell, no less than those of Wilde and Shaw, might be read as an instance of the theme.

  The crisis which overtook the aristocracy under the challenge of Parnellism can be understood with reference to a quip of Oscar Wilde: property, he joked, gives people a position in society, but then it proves so expensive to maintain that it prevents them from keeping it up. In some ways, this had been a problem long before Gladstone devised his Land Acts, a problem which was traceable back to 1800. After the Act of Union, Dublin was a "deposed capital"; its season was no longer splendid; many landlords spent more and more time in England; and the self-confidence which had characterized the Anglo-Irish of the eighteenth century began rapidly to wane. One frustrated leader of this enfeebled aristocracy, Standish O'Grady, berated his peers in a pamphlet of 1886: "Christ save us! You read nothing, know nothing!"24 Parnell, assisted by the Land League, was simply delivering the final blows which would complete the fall of feudalism in Ireland. He never overtly endorsed the violence deployed by agrarian insurgents, but he could not help being its beneficiary: in this, too, Parnell remained an enigmatic and ambivalent figure, despite repeated British attempts to discredit him with links to organized crime. In the end, just when Home Rule seemed a real possibility, he was broken by his love for Kitty O'Shea, a woman married to a member of his parliamentary party. Cited as a co-respondent, he was abandoned by Gladstone (whose High Anglican conscience was outraged) and denounced as a public sinner unfit for leadership by the bishops and priests of the Catholic Church. His party split amid terrible rancour and he died in his beloveds arms at Brighton in 1891.

  Parliamentary methods had once again revealed their limitations, and a younger generation of intellectuals turned from politics back to culture and to the teachings of Thomas Davis. The poet Yeats met the ship which bore Parnell's remains back to Dublin; and when the leader was buried at Glasnevin a meteor appeared to fall from the skies. The way was open for a literary movement to fill the political vacuum. Its writers would take Standish O'Grady's versions of the Cuchulain legend, and interpret the hero not as an exemplar for the Anglo-Irish overlords but as a model for those who were about to displace them. Cuchulain provided a symbol of masculinity for Celts, who had been written off as feminine by their masters. A surprising number of militant nationalists accepted that diagnosis and called on the youth of Ireland to purge themselves of their degrading femininity by a disciplined programme of physical-contact sports. The Gaelic Athletic Association had been founded in 1884 to counter such emasculation and to promote the game of camán (hurling) beloved of the young Cuchulain. If the British Empire was won on the playing fields of Rugby and Eton, then on the playing fields of Ireland was being perfected a new generation which might call the permanence of that victory into question.

  IRELAND – ENGLAND'S

  UNCONSCIOUS?

  IRELAND – ENGLAND'S

  UNCONSCIOUS?

  The British professed themselves baffled by the twists and turns of Irish political history. They complained that whenever they seemed close to solving the Irish question, the Irish had a dreadful habit of changing the question – first Catholic emancipation, then the holding of land, then home rule and repeal The manifestation of official bafflement had been a policy which oscillated crazily from coercion to conciliation. This was, in part, a mimicry of the Irish capacity to veer from insurrectionary to constitutional methods, from political excitement to sober cultural self-questioning; but the policy had even deeper psychological roots in the ambivalent feelings of English people about their Celtic "Other". The stereotypical Paddy could be charming or threatening by turns. The vast numbers of Irish immigrants who fetched up in England's cities and towns throughout the nineteenth century found that they were often expected to conform to the stereotype: and some, indeed did so with alacrity. "The Irish are sensible of the character they hold in England and act accordingly to Englishmen", observed the poet John Keats as early as 1818.1 Such tendencies had been in evidence for decades by the time he noted them. Coming from windswept, neolithic communities of the western Irish seaboard to the centres of industrial England, many found it easier to don the mask of the Paddy than reshape a complex urban identity of their own. Acting the buffoon, they often seemed harmless and even lovable characters to the many English workers who might otherwise have deeply resented their willingness to take jobs at very low rates of pay Their English gaffers and fellow-workers would, for the most part, have found the traditional culture and ancient pieties of these immigrants baffling beyond belief. The stereotype had indeed certain short-term advantages. It permitted some form of elementary contact between the immigrant and the native English: but it necessitated only a circumscribed relationship, which the Irish could control and regulate at will An art of fawning duplicity was perfected by many, who acted the fool while making shrewd deals which often took their rivals unawares. The Irish in England were compelled to "read" their host country's codes in their attempt to study its defects, for it was from their defects that the English derived their way of seeing, and not seeing, them.

  Through the centuries from Spenser's View to Arnold's Irish Essays, most English persons who visited Ireland did so as colonial administrators, warmongering soldiers, planters or tourists. Their contacts with the natives were inevitably attenuated. What the real Ireland or Irish were like, few of them could have known. Many experts, indeed, were able to set themselves up without the indignity or inconvenience of first-hand experience, Matthew Arnold being the outstanding example. As so often happens in such cases, Irish Studies were pursued in England under pressure of a political crisis. Just as Charlotte Brooke had published her Reliqucs of Ancient Irish Poetry (1789) as an attempt to introduce the Irish to the English muse, and thus to stave off an impending uprising, so Arnold's call for a chair of Celtic Studies at Oxford and a "Union of Hearts" policy came on the verge of the Fenian rebellion of the 1860s. Handwringing in the wings of revolution has been perhaps the central pastime of experts in Irish Studies.

  By Arnold's day, the image of Ireland as not-England had been well and truly formed Victorian imperialists attributed to the Irish all those emotions and impulses which a harsh mercantile code had led them to suppress in themselves. Thus, if John Bull was industrious and reliable, Paddy was held to be indolent and contrary; if the former was mature and rational, the latter must be unstable and emotional; if the English were adult and manly, the Irish must be childish and feminine. In this fashion, the Irish were to read their fate in that of two other out-groups, women and children; and at the root of many an Englishman's suspicion of the Irish was an unease with the woman or child who lurked within himself. Oscar Wilde's exploration of the inner world of childhood, no less than his flaunted effeminacy, may well have been his sly commentary on these hidden fears. The political implications were clear enough in that age of severely limited suffrage: either as woman or as child, the Irishman was incapable of self-government. Such a notion of the Anglo-Irish relationship was nothing other than a neurosis, as grandly reactive as that which still afflicts those men who define masculinity in purely negative terms as not-feminine, and who fail therefore to construct themselves from within. Victorian imperial theorists were especially prone to these drastic self-repressions, using neighbouring peoples, notably the French in their sexual habits, as equivalent versions of not-England.

  There was, inevitably, a more benign interpretation of these slot-rolling mechanisms, and it was offered by Matthew Arnold as a celebration of the C
eltic personality which, he hoped, might yet save the Philistine English middle-class for poetry and high feeling. "The Celtic genius had sentiment as its main basis", he explained, "with love of beauty, charm and spirituality for its excellence, ineffectualness and self-will for its defect".2 Such a genius flourished in short lyric bursts, but not in "the steady, deep-searching survey".3 Arnold showed remarkably little patience for the steady, deep-searching survey himself, basing most of his ideas on the radical theories of Ernest Renan, who had contended that the Irish, quintessentially Celtic, had worn themselves out taking dreams for realities and were, in consequence, incapable of political progress. Of actual Irish-language texts themselves, which might or might not have borne out his notions, Arnold was almost entirely ignorant.

  This did not prevent his generation of Celticists from asserting that Irish glories were all in the past, a past which invariably turned out on inspection to have been a disguised version of the contemporary British imperial present. So the ancient hero Cuchulain died strapped to a rock, single-handedly defending the gap of the north after a lifetime spent knocking the heads off his rivals' bodies; and as his life ebbed away, a raven alighted and drank his blood. This combination of pagan energy and Christ-like suffering was of just the kind recommended for the production of muscular Christians at Rugby, suggesting that the revivalist Cuchulain was little more than a British public-schoolboy in drag. In a famous poem of the period it was said of the Celts that "they went forth to battle and they always fell"4: the lament is for an heroic distant past and for the sense of failure in every subsequent challenge to empire. These laments, and the allied myth of a golden age, were allowed by the imperialists, and sometimes even encouraged when, as in Shaemas O'Sheel's much-anthologized poem, they were uttered in the occupiers' language.

  Matthew Arnold, like his exemplar Burke, was never an Irish nationalist: indeed in 1886, during the Home Rule crisis he proclaimed himself a staunch critic of Gladstone's proposal, arguing that the "idle and imprudent" Irish could never properly govern themselves.5 Scholars have demonstrated that even when his intention was to praise some positive qualities in the Celt, Arnold never ceded his authority: he was the consummate surveyor, the Celt the consummately surveyed. Those who came after him, and who actually studied Irish persons and places at closer quarters, often sought evidence to bear out his theories. Any recalcitrant complexities had to be converted back into a more familiar terminology in a tyranny of books over facts. And yet it was with the tyranny of facts that Arnold had proclaimed the Celt quite unable to cope!

  Arnoldian ideas won support among bien-pensant English liberals, who agreed that Celtic spirituality and poetry might repair many gaps in the English personality. If the Irish had failed to master pragmatic affairs, that was simply attributable to their superiority in matters of the imagination. "Saving England" became a perennial revivalist theme. It is remarkable, in retrospect, how durable such drinking proved, even among those Irish who fancied that they had exploded it. Many embraced the more insulting clichés of Anglo-Saxonist theory on condition that they could reinterpret each in a more positive light The modern English, seeing themselves as secular, progressive and rational, had deemed the neighbouring islanders to be superstitious, backward and irrational The strategy of the revivalists thus became clear: for bad words substitute good, for superstitious use religious, for backward say traditional, for irrational suggest emotional. The positive aspect of this manoeuvre was that it permitted Irish people to take many images which were rejected by English society, occupy them, reclaim them, and make them their own: but the negative aspect was painfully obvious, in that the process left the English with the power of description and the Irish succumbing to the pictures which they had constructed The danger was that, under the guise of freedom, a racist slur might be sanitized and worn with pride by its very victims; and that the act of national revival might be taken away from a people even as they performed it. Sometimes in their progress the revivalists would seem to reinforce precisely those stereotypes which they had set out to dismantle: nevertheless, this was an inevitable, nationalist phase through which they and their country had to pass en route to liberation.

  The story of the Irish risorgimento begins, perhaps surprisingly, with Oscar Wilde, a man who saw England as a holy place to be conquered by force of intellect and imagination. The problem never fully confronted by the English was that much of their history had happened overseas, and so they could easily deflect attempts to discuss its meaning. Céitinn had told them in uncompromising terms, but in an Irish-language narrative which they could softly ignore. Burke had, in turn, hinted at certain corruptions of empire which might, one day, come home to roost. Wilde, however, was perhaps the first intellectual from Ireland who proceeded to London with the aim of dismantling its imperial mythology from within its own structures. He saw that those who wished to invent Ireland might first have to reinvent England.

  Two

  Oscar Wilde – The Artist as Irishman

  "Was there ever an Irish man of genius who did not get himself turned into an Englishman as fast as he could?" asked Henry Craik in an immortal line;1 and no better illustration could be found than the career of Oscar Wilde, which began with his arrival as a student in Oxford in the autumn of 1874. Having put the Irish Sea between himself and his parents, the young genius proceeded to reconstruct his image through the art of the pose. According to Yeats, Wilde in England "perpetually performed a play which was in all things the opposite of all that he had known in childhood and youth. [He] never put off completely his wonder at opening his eyes every morning on his own beautiful house and in remembering that he had dined yesterday with a Duchess . . ."2

  The home which Wilde had left in Dublin was, on the other hand, "the sort that had fed the imagination of Charles Lever, dirty, untidy and daring",3 and it was presided over by two eccentric parents who seemed to have stepped out of a bad stage-Irish melodrama. Sir William Wilde, although a most eminent surgeon and scholar, was reputed to be the dirtiest man in Dublin. "Why are Sir William's nails so black?" asked the mordant students who assisted at his operations, and the answer was "Because he has scratched himself'.4 The Lord Lieutenant's wife one evening refused the soup at the Wilde home, because she had spotted her host dipping his thumb into the tureen. That same hand, it was alleged, on one notorious occasion administered a whiff of chloroform to a female patient as a prelude to an amorous overture.5 Lady Wilde turned a blind eye to the peccadilloes of her husband, just as he indulged the strident patriotism of his wife, who wrote under the pen-name "Speranza" for nationalist journals. His monumental studies of the antiquities and archaeology of Ireland were matched by her collections of folklore and outpourings of nationalist verse. To her second son, Lady Wilde bequeathed a love of the pose and a theatrical personality.

  From the outset, her attitude to Oscar was ambivalent. She had longed for a girl and so, when the boy-child arrived like an uninvited guest, she was somewhat miffed. Thereafter, this ardent feminist and radical alternately pampered and neglected him. His love for her was melodramatic but genuine, as was his repeated espousal in later writings of her doctrines – especially her belief in a woman's right to work and to engage in political activity. Persistent rumours about his parents' sexual adventurism may, however, have given rise to doubts about his own legitimacy, which would ultimately be put in the mouth of Jack Worthing in The Importance of Being Earnest.

  I said I had lost my parents. It would be nearer the truth to say that my parents seem to have lost me ... I don't actually know who I am by birth ... I was . . . well, I was found.6

  The mild fear of technical illegitimacy concealed in Wilde a far deeper concern to establish his true personal identity. His famous parents were probably too busy to offer the one commodity that is signally lacking in all his plays, that continuous tenderness and intimacy which might have given him a sense of himself.

  The future master of paradox was already wavering between national extremes,
emulating his mother's Irish patriotism in one poem, only to salute Keats as "poet-painter of our English land"7 in the next. Already, he was evolving the doctrine of the androgyny of the integrated personality, which would find immortal expression in the wisecrack that "All women become like their mothers – that is their tragedy. No man does – and that is his".8 The loutish sexism of the first half of the proposition is fully retrieved by the sharp intelligence of the conclusion.

  The sexual uncertainty induced by a neglectful but dominant mother was heightened by the massive disappointment of Wilde's first love for Florence Balcombe, the beautiful daughter of a retired naval officer. Having met her in the summer of 1876, he wrote to a friend: "She is just seventeen with the most perfectly beautiful face I ever saw and not a sixpence of money".9 That he was serious about her is confirmed by the characteristically flippant reference to cash: but she spurned the young dandy for the more Gothic thrills of life with a minor civil servant named Bram Stoker, thereby causing Wilde to fire off a letter in which he vowed to "leave Ireland" and live in England "probably for good".10 Here was yet another nightmare from the Irish past to be suppressed by a famous career in England. Wilde easily cut the cord which bound him to the land of his parents, for Sir William died while he was at Oxford. The loss of one parent was a misfortune, but the loss of two might indicate carelessness, so Wilde installed his mother in proximity to himself in London after his graduation, but at a chaste distance from his own quarters. He announced to startled guests at their weekly soirées that mother and son had formed a society for the suppression of virtue. It was only later that they saw what he meant.