A bitter election was fought on the issue in June 1922, with 58 pro-Treatyites returned, 36 against, 17 for Labour, and 17 representing other groups including farmers. A civil war of unparalleled bitterness then ensued in which brother fought brother and men who had recently been comrades against a foreign enemy now killed and executed former friends. Michael Collins died as he had predicted by an assassin's bullet, but not before he had laid the basis for a national army By then Arthur Griffith was also dead from exhaustion and ill-health. The republican "die-hards" held out until May 1923, but were comprehensively defeated. Many escaped to the United States, where a remarkable number rapidly achieved great success in business: others, under their leader Eamon de Valera, bided their time at home, while the new Cumann na nGaedheal government wielded power.
The British, for their part, were quite convinced that Lloyd George, the "Welsh Wizard", had solved the Irish question: but this was not so. A six-county state had left the unionists with precisely what they had sought to avoid: a home-rule parliament in Belfast. They had taken just six counties in the shrewd belief that this was as much as they could reasonably hope to hold for a permanent, built-in Protestant majority. The result was a one-party state, structured upon religious apartheid in the words of one of its leaders "a Protestant parliament and a Protestant state".7 The freedom purchased by Griffith and Collins, though they might have been forgiven for not fully foreseeing the consequences, had been bought at the expense of the northern nationalist minority. Lloyd George, far from solving the Irish question, hadn't even managed to change it.8
Eleven
Uprising
One summer Sunday, late in the nineteenth century, the poet and mystic George Russell stood on the esplanade at Bray and preached about the return of ancient Irish heroes. As it happened, among his auditors was that Standish James O'Grady whose History of Ireland: Heroic Period (1878-80) had made the exploits of Cuchulain available in English to a national readership. His object had been to provide in the ancient heroes exemplars who might reanimate the declining Anglo-Irish aristocracy. "I desire", he wrote in his preface, "to make this heroic period once again a portion of the imagination of the country, and its chief characters as familiar in the minds of our people as they once were".1 Watching Russell share this explosive information with a more downmarket audience of weekend holidaymakers, O'Grady felt a pang of dismay and foreboding: but there was nothing he could do to recall the genie back to the bottle.
It did not take him long to sense what would happen when Cuchulain was appropriated as a role-model by the clerks and schoolmasters massed before him. "We have now a literary movement, it is not very important", he declared: "it will be followed by a political movement, that will not be very important; then must come a military movement, that will be important indeed".2 O'Grady was but the first among many writers to witness with amazement what might happen when images and ideas crafted with care in the study took fire in someone else's head, and did so with an intensity which could express itself only in direct action. Years later, W. B. Yeats would ask "Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?"3 The conditions for theorizing a revolution were indeed no different from those for starting one. After it was over, Russell would gravely but proudly admit the link between the idea and the action: "What was in Patrick Pearse's soul when he fought in Easter Week but an imagination, and the chief imagination which inspired him was that of a hero who stood against a host ... I who knew how deep was Pearse's love for the Cuchulain whom O'Grady discovered or invented, remembered after Easter Week that he had been solitary against a great host in imagination with Cuchulain, long before circumstance permitted him to stand for his nation with so few companions against so great a power".4 And in lines from a late poem, Yeats asked a ringing question:
When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side,
What stalked through the Post Office? What intellect,
What calculation, number, measurement replied?5
– and the answer was in due time: India, Egypt, Nigeria, and so on.
The rebels did indeed set headlines for men and women in those far-flung places: and the Soviet revolutionary V. I. Lenin had predicted as much when he wrote in 1914 that a blow against the British Empire in Ireland was of "a hundred times more significance than a blow of equal weight in Asia or in Africa".6 English socialists were inclined to the rather patronizing belief that freedom could only be won by the colonies after they had gained power in the mother country. It never struck them that the fastest advances towards modernization might come from the periphery. But in 1916, along with the Irish insurrection, came attempts at rebellion in French Annam and the German Cameroons. The Irish were, if anything, ahead of their time, as Lenin later remarked: "The misfortune of the Irish is that they rose prematurely, when the European revolt of the proletariat had not yet matured". The world-historical events which might thereby have ensued have been spelled out by Conor Cruise O'Brien: had the rebels waited until 1918, when the country was united against the threat of conscription, a Rising then with mass support would have called forth a British reign of terror, with the inevitable consequence of mutinies by Irish troops on the western front. By then, as a matter of fact, mass mutiny had taken Russia right out of the war, and the morale of both British and French armies was very low: so it would at least have been a possibility that the European ruling order might have collapsed.7 James Connolly had foretold that "a pin in the hands of a child could pierce the heart of a giant". In the event, though the European order remained intact, the global order of British imperialism did not: those members of the British cabinet who saw the long-term implications for places like India and Egypt had their fears confirmed.
With hindsight, it is easy to see the 1916 rebels as an early instance of a decolonizing élite, and to advance the now-familiar analysis of economic frustrations and curtailed career opportunities which made the colony a factory of grievances. Modern educational reforms had produced a cadre of native intellectuals, not all of whom, by any means, could be drawn into the work of empire: but they also threw up new kinds of official, half-ashamed of the force by which they ruled. These self-doubts were sometimes visible to their more astute and restive subjects, and this had the effect of encouraging rather than mollifying rebels, who won more and more influential converts like Roger Casement and Erskine Childers over from the imperial side.8 On Easter Monday 1916, when the rebels struck, the highest-ranking British officer on duty was an adjutant and the routine guards at the General Post Office had rifles but no ammunition.
Critics of the "irrarionalism" of the 1916 leaders point to the relative prosperity of Ireland during the years of the Great War, when high food prices caused large sections of the economy to boom. This is to forget, however, that revolution more often comes not in the darkest days of oppression so much as at a time when people have the luxury of being able to stand back a moment from their own condition and make a shrewd assessment of it. The leaders of the Easter Rebellion were many of them well-to-do: it would be hard to assign a strictly economic motive to the involvement of a headmaster such as Pearse, a university don like MacDonagh, or a son of Count Plunkett. Nonetheless, the ordinary Dubliners who marched behind them had known the consequences of dire recession in a city of chronic unemployment, and for them the high food prices were yet another outrage. The grievances of many rebels were economic and, as always, such men and women were glad to find leaders who could give them a spiritual and moral explanation. The frustrations of all the fighters were cultural: they wanted a land in which Gaelic traditions would be fully honoured. On that point, also, George Russell was an astute guide: just a year after the Rising, he accounted for its significance to still-baffled officials. Empires, he complained, destroy native culture, achieving "the substitution therefore of a culture which has its value mainly for the people who created it, but is as alien to our race as the mood of the scientist is to the artist or poet".9
Despite his cheerful pragmatism
as a shaper of the agricultural cooperative movement, Russell could never cast the Rising in simply economistic terms: to him it was exactly the reverse, a plea for spirit as against dull matter, for imagination against empiricism (which to him seemed but a synonym for imperialism). The energy of life was its desire for expression: but the forms proffered by England, however well-intended, just did not fit. There is remarkably little anti-English sentiment in the writings of the Easter rebels for all that. Many of them revered particular English poets – Pearse admired and even imitated Wordsworth; MacDonagh wrote a fine thesis on Thomas Campion and devoted his very last class at University College Dublin to the virtues of Jane Austen, before marching out to prepare for insurrection; and Joseph Plunkett learned much from Francis Thompson. What they rejected was not England but the British imperial system, which denied expressive freedom to its colonial subjects. It was for this reason that Yeats said that "no Irish voice has been lifted up in praise of that Imperialism which is ... but a more painted and flaunting materialism; because Ireland has taken sides for ever with the poor in spirit who shall inherit the earth".10
The 1916 leaders have often been accused of glorifying violence but, apart from one notorious speech by Pearse, they must have been the gentlest revolutionaries in modern history. They rose in the conviction that further involvement by Irish people in the Great War would lead to far more bloodshed than their Rising, which they hoped would take Ireland out of the war altogether. The British saw their action as treachery and shot its leaders as casually as they shot daily deserters on the western front. It took George Bernard Shaw to remind them that they should, under international law, have treated the men as prisoners-of-war: "An Irishman resorting to arms to achieve the independence of his country is doing only what Englishmen will do if it be their misfortune to be invaded and conquered by the Germans".11 By the time he had written that, sixteen men were executed: and Yeats captured the new mood.
O but we talked at large before
The sixteen men were shot,
But who can talk of give and take,
What should be and what not
While those dead men are loitering there
To stir the boiling pot?
You say that we should still the land
Till Germany's overcome;
But who is there to argue that
Now Pearse is deaf and dumb?
And is their logic to outweigh
MacDonagh's bony thumb?12
To the British this Rising among a people who had not even experienced compulsory conscription seemed utterly inexplicable. To those Irish writers who sought to account for it in artistic terms, it appeared at first to be indescribable in any available language. This was initially a problem for the rebels themselves: how to express the unknown in terms of the known? MacDonagh and Plunkett's studies of mystic authors and poets take on an extra significance in this light, as if both men were hoping to find in the mystic's texts a solution to the technical problem. Indeed, MacDonagh wrote in The Irish Review of the challenge confronting "the mystic who has to express in terms of sense and wit the things of God that are made known to him in no language".13 The rebels, likewise, sought a dream of which they could not directly speak: they could only speak of having sought it. The invention that was the Irish Republic was initially visible only to those who were the agents of freedom glimpsed as an abstract vision before it could be realized in history. In his poem "The Fool", Pearse contemplated a point from which all outlines of the republic would become visible:
O wise men, riddle me this: what if the dream come true?
What if the dream come true? and if millions unborn shall dwell
In the house that I shaped in my heart, the noble house of my thought?14
From that vantage-point, many texts by Wilde, Shaw, Yeats, Synge and dozens of others might be seen to have represented, years earlier, a complex of ideas which found their fullest expression in the Rising of 1916. Yeats was the first knowingly to divine that connection when he told the young George Russell "absorb Ireland and her tragedy and you will be the poet of the people, perhaps the poet of a new insurrection".15 Ironically, in the event, Yeats himself filled the role which he had reserved for his friend. His play Cathleen ní Houlihan (1902) cast the beautiful nationalist Maud Gonne in the part of a withered hag who would only walk again like a radiant young queen if young men were willing to kill and die for her. To the republican insurrectionist P. S. O'Hegarty, the drama became at once "a sort of sacrament", to the rebel Countess Markievicz "a kind of gospel".16 The Rising, when it came, was therefore seen by many as a foredoomed classical tragedy, whose denouement was both inevitable and unpredictable, prophesied and yet surprising. Though it remained mysterious to many, the event was long in the gestation.
Year one of the revolutionists' calendar was 1893, because it marked the foundation of the Gaelic League. Even more striking than this, however, was the aura of the 1890s which clung to the characters caught up in the crisis, for many had been impressionable adolescents in the aesthetic decade. The rebels, Wilde-like, opted to invest their genius in their life and only their talent in their work, for they offered their lives to the public as works of art. Seeing themselves as martyrs for beauty, they aestheticized their sacrifice. Most of all, they followed the gospel which asserted "the triumph of failure", the notion that whoever lost his life would save it. This idea underlies Thomas Mac-Donagh's play When the Dawn is Come and Pearse's The Singer, whose hero says:
One man can free a people as one man redeemed the world. I will take no pike. I will go into battle with bare hands. I will stand up before the Gall as Christ hung naked before men on a tree.17
Equally, Joseph Plunkett's poem "The Little Black Rose Shall be Red at Last" reworks the bardic image of Ireland as róisín dubh (dark róisín) into a nineties-ish mode:
Because we share our sorrows and our joys
And all your dear and intimate thoughts are mine
We shall not fear the trumpets and the noise
Of battle, for we know our dreams divine,
And when my heart is pillowed on your heart
And ebb and flowing of their passionate flood
Shall beat in concord love through every part
Of brain and body – when at last the blood
O'er leaps the final barrier to find
Only one source whereon to spend its strength,
And we two lovers, long but one in mind
And soul, are made one flesh at length;
Praise God, if mis my blood fulfils the doom
When you, dark rose, shall redden into bloom.18
Here the Gaelic conceit of a ruler married to the land, whose relation is mediated by the poet, is replaced by the image of a poet whose body bleeds into the earth. This sexual congress will restore new life even though he dies, like the victim of a fertility rite, in the act. In his devotion to the Romantic Image which at once discloses and withholds its meanings, Plunkett provided yet another example of the age's penchant for the half-said thing, the symbol radiant with partially-articulated possibility.
The challenge of using the known to hint at the unknowable would eventually strike Yeats, the most articulate of all the poets of the nineties, as the artistic problem posed by revolution. It is the question broached in his play The Resurrection: "What if there is always something that lies outside knowledge, outside order? What if at the moment when knowledge and order seem complete that something appears?"19 That question, or a version of it, is embedded in many of Yeats's most visionary poems and plays: he is at his bravest and most vulnerable whenever he seeks to welcome the "rough beast" of the unknowable future, without recourse to the props of the past for help or support.
The Easter rebels are sometimes depicted as martyrs to a text like Cathleen ní Houlihan, but rather than reduce the living to a dead textuality, Yeats at his most daring asserts the power of texts to come to life. As a poet, he invents an ideal Ireland in his imagination, falls deep
ly in love with its form and proceeds to breathe it, Pygmalion-like, into being. It is hard, even now, to do full justice to the audacity of that enterprise.
The odds against it were massive. Karl Marx had complained of the lamentable tendency of persons on the brink of some innovation to reduce history to costume drama by modelling themselves on some ancient Roman or Greek analogy, with the result that ghosts invariably appeared and stole their revolution. This was the mistake of all previous uprisings: to have presented themselves as revivals, so that the gesture of revolt could not be seen as such. Oscar Wildes theatre, as has been seen, had suggested that the self was plastic and that it could show a people how to refuse their assigned place and instead assume a better one. Its ultimate lesson, however, was that the imitation of any model, no matter how exalted, was slavery: the real challenge was to create a new, unprecedented self. One historian of culture has stated the problem very well:
Rebellions in moeurs, in manners broadly conceived, fail because they are insufficiently radical in terms of culture. It is still the creation of a believable personality which is the object of a cultural revolt, and, as such, the revolt is still enchained to the bourgeois culture it seeks to overturn.20
The adoption of a pose was one step: what the second was might soon become more clear. The first stage demanded the violation of propricties and the wearing of exotic clothes, but the second would move beyond that reactive affectation to an account of how a renovated consciousness might live. Such freedom had no precedent, except perhaps in the Thermidorean first years of revolutionary France, where the streets "were to be places without masks" and where "liberty was no longer expressed concretely in uniforms: now there appeared an idea of liberty in dress which would give the body free movement". In the century after Thermidor, that barely-glimpsed freedom had been lost, but the experimental theatre of the 1890s, led by Wilde and Yeats, "created an expression for the body that went beyond the terms of deviance and conformity" and which contrasted utterly with the restrictive costume of the streets. "People turned toward the theatre to solve the problematics of the street", writes Richard Sennett, "to find images of spontaneity".21 Ordinary people, having lost belief in their own expressive powers, turned to artists and actors to do what they could not, and to teach them accordingly how to repossess their own emotions.
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