In this series of talks, in which we are, as it were, interrogating the works and days of a past generation and thinking inevitably of their relevance to our own times, we shall be confronted under various guises with the workings of considerable minorities which were more positive, more sanguine, bolder and more ardent in temperament than any sizeable group which has so far revealed itself in our own generation. The Gaelic League was on the whole the happiest and fairest expression of the mind of such a minority.
The period we are considering was one of combat and preparation for combat, and there is no cause for surprise that many of its manifestations should have had a very different temper from that of the founders of the Gaelic League. Sometimes there may be no particular cause to regret this. The industrial clash between Jim Larkin and William Martin Murphy—to present it in personal terms—produced by its very bitterness and by the fright and shock which it gave to middle-class public opinion a different and, we are likely to think, a better relation between capital and labour. It may have been better, from Murphy’s point of view if not from Larkin’s, that the shock should have been administered in 1913 rather than in, shall we say, 1917 or 1922. But there was another kind of bitterness, partly political, partly social, partly what is loosely called religious, which was no doubt equally explicable but certainly more ominous. This was the bitterness behind the propaganda for what was known as Irish Ireland. It was, I think, that master of invective and above all of slogans, D. P. Moran of The Leader, who first made nationalist Ireland think of itself as Irish Ireland. In Moran’s language, which is often still heard, if you were not an Irish Irelander you were either a West Briton, if of Anglo-Irish descent, or a shoneen if of Gaelic ancestry. If you were a shoneen then you possessed “a slave mind.” If you were a West Briton you were probably also a “sourface,” a term used by Moran with curious religious and racial implications. This polemic was extremely effective, for Moran was a brilliant journalist with a keen sense of the ridiculous and Viceregal Dublin kept him well supplied with targets. But a price has to be paid for all polemics and Irish Ireland never accurately reckoned the cost of its attitudes. We cannot afford, said Parnell, to give up a single Irishman. Moran and his friends, including many Sinn Feiners and even an increasing number of Gaelic Leaguers, acted as if they could afford to lose a million Irishmen—if those Irishmen did not conform to their idea of what an Irishman ought to be. For many Irish Irelanders—though not, I like to think, for so intelligent a man as Moran himself—Horace Plunkett was a West Briton; Lady Gregory a sourface; Tom Kettle, perhaps, a shoneen. Irish Ireland in its narrower manifestations felt rich enough to lose such men and women; we may feel that there was something wrong with its accountancy. When Moran and his friends talked of West Britons they had in mind, I imagine, some archetype of a dentist’s wife who collected crests, ate kedgeree for breakfast and displayed on her mantelpiece a portrait of the Dear Queen. This was of course, like many of the views of Irish Ireland, a Dublin-centred view. Dublin Castle was the seat of British rule. Britain’s friends in Ireland, therefore, were Castle hangers-on. It was easy to forget that the particular West Britons with whom the final reckoning would be were the industrial workers of Belfast who collected no crests, ate no kedgeree, hung on to no Castle. Irish Ireland wrote and talked as if it assumed that the battle would be over once Dublin with its garrison of dentists’ wives had surrendered. Belfast would bluster a little but would toe the line: was it not a provincial city? So that one could already, even before the victory, use a tone which implied that in the new Ireland the minority had better keep a civil tongue in its head. This assumption and this tone may have had something to do with the shape which modern Ireland eventually took.
It would however be unfair to Moran and his friends, and also historically misleading, to leave out of account the general tone of the Irish upper classes: a tone of sovereign contempt for what they regarded as “The new Nationalist Ireland.” Here again a certain amount of misunderstanding was at work. As a class—although there were many exceptions—the Ascendancy and especially its urban fringes, our symbolic dentists’ wives, knew little or nothing of Irish history. They even lacked the concept of Irish history as a separate entity. As colonists have always done, and do to this day, they regarded the native tendency to revolt as something essentially modern, artificial and stirred up by foreigners—in this case by “the American money” which had floated the Land League and its successors. They saw the incipient revolt, also, as a social rather than a national phenomenon: the attempted self-inflation of people who were all very well if they kept in their own place. The true inflections of this Ascendancy arrogance remain for us in certain dialogues of the Somerville and Ross novels; we can hear a coarser, louder echo of the same tone if we turn to the Unionist Press of the time, the Dublin Daily Express, for example, or in a more good-humoured key, the Dublin Evening Mail. And it was of course in the main the coarser and cruder echo which reached the ears of contemporary Nationalists. It was an old complaint. Ni h-é an bochtanas is measa dhúinn, a poet of the previous century had written, ach an tarcuisne leanann é. But now contempt could be answered in very effective English; all the more easily because Nationalist Ireland genuinely could not understand what the Ascendancy had to be arrogant about. To the Ascendancy itself, thinking in global terms, its contribution to the Empire in generals, admirals and pro-consuls seemed a sufficient answer. But to the Nationalists, thinking solely in Irish terms, it seemed with equal reason that the record of the Ascendancy was one of conceited incompetence and shortsighted selfishness, and that its only monuments were of that stony and trunkless kind bequeathed by Ozymandias, King of Kings. For both sides contempt was a costly indulgence; the cost to the Ascendancy is obvious, the cost to the Nationalists and to Ireland is only now beginning to be assessed. Dublin and rural Ireland, the early Sinn Feiners, the Leader group, the theoreticians of the G.A.A., were too apt to forget that there existed in Ireland another kind of colonist besides the Ascendancy and that these other colonists had built and meant to hold a very non-Ozymandian monument in the shape of Ireland’s only modern city. They forgot, as we sometimes forget today, that men like Pirrie, in building up heavy industry in Belfast, were doing as much as anyone to shape modern Ireland. More, indeed, if we stress the modern. Ulstermen have argued that the really modern part of Ireland is confined to the Lagan Valley.
That of course raises the question: does Ireland as a whole need or want the kind of modernity that prevails in the Lagan Valley? This question was potentially present, though not expressed in those words, in the period we are considering. It cuts across the ordinary political, religious and social divisions in some curious and perhaps revealing ways. Very roughly we can say that a Lagan Valley solution, in the sense of industrialization and dense population, attracted or repelled people, somewhat as follows: the tendency of Sinn Fein was in favour of it, so was that of Progressive Unionism; William Martin Murphy favoured it, so did Larkin and Connolly; the Gaelic League was against it in feeling if not in theory; the Irish-Irelanders who read The Leader were supposed to be militantly for it; the G.A.A., which never caught on in the cities, was against it by nature, as also were most of the Ascendancy. And finally, most explicitly and consciously against it was the remarkable reactionary movement known as the Irish Literary Revival. I do not use the word reactionary in a hostile sense; reaction is often a healthy thing and may well have been so here. As Yeats wrote:
John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory thought
All that we did, all that we said or sang
Must come from contact with the soil, from that
Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong.
We three alone in modern times had brought
Everything down to that sole test again
Dream of the noble and the beggarman.
The revivalists sought in Ireland the kind of dignity and the kind of health that the industrialized world, the modern world, had lost; the Ireland they loved ha
d an enormous West Coast and no Northeast corner. They belonged with variations of emphasis to the Ascendancy and their thought for good and ill was in the perspective of the Ascendancy, the rural-to-universal perspective. A Griffith or a Moran or a Murphy thought of what Ireland lacked, which as they saw it was industry. A Yeats or a Synge thought of what industrialized Europe lacked, which was contact with the soil. Their message—they certainly had one—was formally destined for Ireland but its ultimate addressees were, one feels, the cultivated European public: “See what can be done here, with this storehouse of legends, in contact with this soil and with this unspoiled people,” they seemed to say. And much was done; a great theatre was founded, great plays and poems were written, the memories of great lives were left. But as for the effect of the message, literally understood, upon the first Abbey audiences, those guinea pigs of archaism, that is not so clear. We can hardly be surprised if the poor creatures occasionally, maddened by confusing signals, turned and bit the fingers of the demonstrator.
Confusion is the condition in which history exists, as distinct from the way in which we try to tidy it up afterwards. The ideas which we have separated as those of the Gaelic Leaguer, the Literary Revivalist, the Sinn Feiner and so on were often and perhaps usually found together, in different forms of association, in the same people. One could believe simultaneously that Ireland had peculiar virtues springing from its rural way of life and also that it ought to be industrialized. Or one could in Ulster pride oneself on one’s loyalty to Britain and the King and also on one’s readiness in certain circumstances to revolt against His Majesty’s Government. The confusion of the time was rich and explosive. And it was the man of action rather than the man of prudence who flourished in it. The caution of an Archbishop Walsh, the constructiveness of a Horace Plunkett, the moderation and inclusive view of a John Redmond, came to seem irrelevant or even tarnished virtues. Through the mouths of Carson and of Pearse all Ireland heard ancestral voices prophesying war. Different ancestors and a different war.
This is not the place to discuss the merits of what was shaped; our view of these, whatever it may be, cannot but be present to our minds—much as certain serious historians deplore the fact—when we are trying to look at the shaping process. But one point it is necessary to make, and that is that modern Ireland did not take the shape that any of its shapers desired. It was not only Redmond that was defeated. The union of Great Britain and Ireland, the cause for which alone Carson had struggled, was wrecked, and Carson was left with a despised fragment in his hands. The Republic of All Ireland for which the precursors, Stephens and Devoy, toiled and suffered, and for which Clarke, Pearse and Connolly died, has not emerged. These facts must prevent us from looking at the men and events of the time from one point of view only, as some have done—the point of view of “those who turned out to be right.” Nobody turned out to be right as far as the politics were concerned.
Yeats building his theatre, Pirrie building his ships, Plunkett and AE building their co-operatives, Murphy his business, Larkin his Union: these turned out to be right but were also prisoners, in their thought as in their activities, of the ambiguous historical process. So are we; and the thought should remind us that “Modern Ireland” is not, and cannot be, finally “shaped” and that therefore we cannot be too sure of who its “shapers” at a given time really were. From the standpoint of ten or twenty years hence the “true precursors” who are seen to have flourished in the 1900s may be quite different people. It follows that our best rule in choosing subjects is not to be guided solely by the canon of success—acknowledged posthumous influence—but to look at those who had in fact an influence on their contemporaries.
IRISHNESS
Irish Strategy, 1014–1945: The campaigns and actions of Brian Boru, Owen Roe O’Neill, Marshal Browne, Commodore Barry, Wellington, Admiral Browne, General Sheridan, Field Marshals Alexander and Montgomery, and many others.
Such a compilation would in some ways be less odd than a collection of Irish verse in the English language which includes, as does the new Oxford Book, poems by Goldsmith and Sheridan, Emily Brontë, Edward Fitzgerald and Oscar Wilde, Louis Mac-Neice and Cecil Day Lewis. For the language of war is an international one, possessing at least no essentially non-Irish characteristic, whereas in the case of these poets, not only their language but their culture is English—the language and culture which ousted the Irish language and culture. There exist, therefore, difficulties about an Oxford Book of Irish Verse* which do not arise for the other Oxford Books, of French or Russian or Portuguese Verse. Many Irish people are by now thoroughly tired of these difficulties and the recriminations which flow from them: they hold that it would be better for Irish writers to get on with their writing, in whatever language they choose, rather than argue interminably about what Irish writing is; whatever it is, there is less and less of it. It may be because Mr. Donagh MacDonagh, very understandably, shares this point of view that he is rather summary in his treatment of the difficulty. He states in his introduction: “A question that will be asked is: What constitutes an Irish poet? In its simplest form the answer is easy, but there are exceptions. By our definition a poet may be Irish in three ways: by birth, by descent, by adoption.” Birth? The Duke of Wellington—who would no doubt be represented in this anthology if he had written verse—dealt adequately with this criterion in his celebrated remark about not necessarily being a horse if you were born in a stable. Descent? This can lead, as it does here, to the absurdity that a family, originating in England or Scotland and returning to its native country after a few generations in the northeast of Ireland, is to be treated as having become indelibly “Irish.” Adoption? A very exceptional case. Swift was perhaps “adopted,” much against his will, by Ireland; one or two other poets “adopted” Ireland, but she turned out badly for them.
In practice, the inadequacy of these criteria shows itself in a certain incoherence in the anthology. Nahum Tate’s “While Shepherds Watched,” Wolfe’s “Burial of Sir John Moore,” and a piece of the Rubaiyat have no serious reason for being in the same volume with Callanan’s “The Convict of Clonmel,” Ferguson’s “Dear Dark Head” and Fanny Parnell’s “After Death,” nor is there anything relevant in common between Mr. Cecil Day Lewis’s “Do Not Expect Again a Phoenix Hour” and Mr. Patrick Kavanagh’s “Shancoduff.” The total effect, for anyone who reads right through the anthology, is rather like listening to a Radio Éireann program from abroad: faint but distinctive accents continually interrupted by snatches of a program from a nearby and more powerful station. Such, it might be argued, is the nature of Irish life; yet surely one of the functions of an anthology of Irish verse ought to be to pick up the Irish accents with a minimum of interference.
How can this be done? “To demand a recognizably Irish voice as a rigid test of Irish poetry,” says Mr. MacDonagh, “would be absurd, and would exclude many fine poets.” One could reply that the editor of a book of Irish verse must exclude many fine poets—Homer and Dante, for example—and that one of the troubles here is that the editors have not excluded enough fine poets. Yet Mr. MacDonagh’s wariness about the “recognizably Irish voice” is in itself respectable: there are sirens with that voice, whitened bones of bards have been found in alehouses. The problem is: avoiding “national rhythm,” the “descent into the ancient blood” and popular concepts of genetically transmitted theology, can we form an idea of Irishness which will be adequate, at least, to permit the making of a reasonably homogeneous anthology, in English?
The thing can be done, I believe, if we adopt a historical rather than a geographical point of view. Irishness is not primarily a question of birth or blood or language: it is the condition of being involved in the Irish situation, and usually of being mauled by it. On that definition Swift is more Irish than Goldsmith or Sheridan, although by the usual tests they are Irish and he is pure English. The Irishness of Moore is in part a reflection, in part a nostalgia, in part a schism: a spiritual involvement of wistfulness
and guilt, less painful probably than the physical and administrative involvement of Dublin’s English Dean. Mangan and Ferguson injected Gaelic poetry into English, and with it toxins of the Irish past, ultimately fatal to that English political settlement of Ireland which seemed so sure a thing a hundred years ago. The movement of Yeats and Lady Gregory was in the same tradition; it was not deliberately political, but Irish life, mauling it and them, made it Irish in a sense which they had not chosen, the sense of political nationalism. Today, political nationalism has ceased to sing—its elegy is here in Denis Devlin’s sad and noble “Tomb of Michael Collins.” The Ireland in which contemporary writers are involved—or from which they disengage themselves—is very different from the Ireland of literary tradition. The writers are mostly individualists who would curse at the mention of Irishness, or indeed of almost anything else. Yet what they have in common, whether they care to assess it or not, is still their involvement in a country of which one of them, Mr. Patrick Kavanagh, has vividly illuminated an important part. The rest remains to be discovered by others.
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