But the young Yeats was profoundly impressed, on hearing Hyde's songs sung by haymakers in Connacht fields who were quite unaware that their author was passing: in such a moment, Yeats saw the return of a learned art to people's craft. Hyde truly had the capacity to make Ireland once again interesting to the Irish. Fired by his example, Yeats hoped for "a way of life in which the common man has some share in imaginative art. That this is the decisive element in the attempt to revive the Irish language I am quite certain".12 He dreamed of a literary form so pure that it had not been indentured to any cause, whether of nation or of art, a form so fitted to a people's expressive ensemble that it would seem but an aspect of daily life.
Yeats wrote: "In Ireland, where the Gaelic tongue is still spoken, and to some little extent where it is not, the people live according to a tradition of life that existed before commercialism, and the vulgarity founded upon it; and we who would keep the Gaelic tongue and Gaelic memories and Gaelic habits of mind would keep them, as I think, that we may some day spread a tradition of life that makes neither great wealth nor great poverty, that makes the arts a natural expression of life, that permits even common men to understand good art and high thinking, and to have the fine manners these things can give". He went on:
Almost everyone in Ireland, on the other hand, who comes from what are called the educated and wealthy classes ... seeks ... to establish a tradition of life, perfected and in part discovered by the English-speaking peoples, that has made great wealth and great poverty, that would make the arts impossible were it not for the sacrifice of a few who spend their lives in the bitterest of protest. . .13
This line of approach impressed many readers in England, too, who saw in it an interesting development of Matthew Arnold's critique of the specialist barbarism of the commercially-minded middle class. In seeking to express Ireland, these writers also hoped to challenge the culture of commercial exploitation in England: rather than have the Irish imitate the worst of English ways, they hoped to bring around a time when the English could emulate the finest Irish customs.
The invention of their idea of Ireland by Hyde and his friends happened, it should be noted, at the same time as English leaders were redesigning the image of England, in the decades between the 1880s and the Great War. These were the years when Queen Victoria, recovering from the republican challenge of Dilke and from her own grief after bereavement, restored a dimension of public pageantry to the monarchy, with much ancient costumery, archaic carriages and historical symbolism. Her 1887 jubilee proved so successful that it was repeated ten years later in 1897, and this prompted Irish nationalists in the following year, under the guidance of Maud Gonne, W. B. Years and James Connolly, to mount a similar counter-commemoration of the rebellion of 1798. Yeats said in March of 1898: "This year the Irish people will not celebrate, as England did last year, the establishment of an empire that has been built on the rapine of the world".14 The new mania in England for erecting statues to historic figures was also emulated by the Irish, who began at once to collect funds for a massive monument to Wolfe Tone (as if a state which still did not exist were already rehearsing its consolidation by ceremonial recollections of the revolutionary struggle). Both the jubilee-cult and the statuary were relatively new phenomena, and mocked for their sentimentality by the young James Joyce in Dubliners, but it is easy to understand the function which they served.
The world was changing more in those thirty years than it had since the death of Christ. All over Europe leaders sought to reassure peoples, gone giddy from the speed of the changes, with images of stability. Part of the modernization process was the emergence of nation-states, which often arose out of the collapse of the old ways of life and so were badly in need of legitimation: this was afforded by the deliberate invention of traditions, which allowed leaders to ransack the past for a serviceable narrative.15 In this way, by recourse to a few chosen symbols and simple ideas, random peoples could be transformed into Italians or Irish, and explain themselves by a highly-edited version of their history. Gaelic Ireland had retained few institutions or records after 1601 to act as a brake on these tendencies: all that remained were the notations of poets and the memories of the people. These played a far greater part in Hyde's remodelled Ireland than they did in many of the other emerging European countries. His lecture, rather cumbersomely tided "The Necessity for Deanglicizing Ireland", was delivered to the Irish Literary Society in November 1892, and it led, within a year, to the foundation of the Gaelic League, a movement for the preservation of Irish. The fall of Parnell, and subsequent split in the Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster, may have left a number of unionists and landlords feeling free to express a cultural (as distinct from political) nationalism. If so, there was a real shrewdness in Hyde's strategy. He launched his appeal for Gaelic civilization as one coming from a man who could still feel the landlordly hankerings of a disappointed imperialist:
... It is the curious certainty that come what may Ireland will continue to resist English rule, even though it should be for their good, which prevents many of our nation from becoming unionists on the spot ... It is just because there appears no earthly chance of their becoming good members of Empire that I argue that they should not remain in the anomalous position they are in, but since they absolutely refuse to become the one thing, that they become the other; cultivate what they have rejected, and build up an Irish nation on Irish lines.16
That subterranean pull back to all things English as touchstones of excellence is ironic in a text headed "deanglicization", but Hyde knew what he was about. He wanted to found Irish pride on something more positive and lasting than mere hatted of England. Yeats agreed: "I had dreamed of enlarging Irish hatred, till we had come to hate with a passion of patriotism what Morris and Ruskin hated".17 The reactive patriotism which saw Ireland as not-England would have to give way to an identity which was self-constructed and existentially apt. Those peoples who had constructed themselves from within, the French for instance, never accused their bad citizens of being "unFrench": but throughout the nineteenth century delinquents were often called "un-Irish", because Irish nationalism too often defined itself by what it was against.
The Gaelic League might properly be seen as a response to the failure of a political attempt by nationalist leaders to shock English opinion by showing up the discrepancy between English order at home and misrule on the neighbouring island. The Irish resolved instead to instil in their people a self-belief which might in time lead to social and cultural prosperity. In its early years, the League received encouragement from the more enlightened colonial administrators like Augustine Birrell, who hoped that it might help to solve problems which the authorities had found intractable.
As a movement, the League was opposed to the antiquarianism of previous groups like the Gaelic Union, only six of whose members could speak Irish properly: it was, in fact, modern in its view of tradition as a yet-to-be-completed agenda, and in its insistence on combining ancient custom and contemporary method.
Some cynics accused Hyde of confusing Anglicization with modernization. Joyce's Stephen Hero, noting the willingness of the Catholic clergy to support the League, said that the priests hoped to find in Irish a bulwark against modern ideas, keeping "the wolves of unbelief" at bay and the people frozen in a past of "implicit faith".18 This was a rather sour response from a Joyce whose experience of the League had been fatally narrowed by his attendance at the Irish classes of Patrick Pearse. (Pearse in his youthful days found it impossible to praise Irish without virulent denunciations of English, an approach much less ecumenical than Hyde's.) In the 1892 lecture, Hyde feared that people, ceasing to be Irish without becoming English, were falling into the vacuum between two admirable civilizations, as one nullified the other. His disgust was not caused by a baffling modernity or a difficult hybridity, so much as by the anomalous English element in every self-defeating document of Irish nationalism. He pointed to "the illogical position of men who drop their own language to
speak English, of men who translate their euphonious Irish names into English monosyllables, of men who read English books and know nothing about Gaelic literature, nevertheless protesting as a matter of sentiment that they hate the country which at every hand's turn they rush to imitate".19
This was a subtle probing of Irish psychology: patriotic Anglophobia it attributed not to a troublesome difference with England so much as an abject similarity, leading like poles to repel one another with scientific predictability. Anglophobia seemed most extreme in those areas of maximum deference to English ways, while in the Gaeltacht itself physical-force nationalism made little headway. Hyde was merciless on the mentality which "continues to apparently hate the English, and at the same time continues to imitate them". Since people absolutely refused to become English, he concluded, they might as well resolve to be Irish.
This analysis had many salutary effects. Most important, it was the signal for a rebirth of cultural and literary criticism. Before the end of the decade, D. P. Moran could remark that "much the perpetual flow of ridicule and largely unreasonable denunciation of England was turned from its course and directed back – where it was badly wanted – upon Irishmen themselves".20 Moran went on: "From the great error that nationality is politics, a sea of corruption has sprung. Ireland was practically left unsubjected to wholesome native criticism, without which any collection of humanity will corrupt ... To find fault with your countryman was to play into the hands of England and act the traitor". For most of the previous century, a kind of national narcissism had pervaded debates: ever since O'Connell had told his followers that they were the finest peasantry in the world, even constructive criticism had been treated as sacrilege. Such a high-minded allergy to critique has' been found in the early phases of most movements for cultural resistance – but this sentimentality had to be transcended. D. P. Moran suggested that an Ireland content to continue as a not-England would be indescribably boring: "Will a few soldiers dressed in green, and a republic, absolutely foreign to the genius of the Irish people, the humiliation of England, a hundred thousand English corpses with Irish bullets or pikes through them, satisfy the instinct within us that says 'Thou shalt be Irish'?"21 It was Irish strength, rather than English weakness, which would count in the end.
What shocked Hyde about contemporary England was the apparent ease with which its people had endured the loss of so many of their traditions for the sake of material advancement. For English folk traditions he had, like Yeats, much respect and tenderness. When he spoke of "this awful idea of complete Anglicization", the phrase, if taken literally, could only offend unionists: if it were taken as a reference to the pollution and greyness of an environment despoiled by unplanned industrialism, it might win many over. Hyde insisted that the English would not finally be to blame if the Irish decided to abort their own traditions: "what the battleaxe of the Dane, the sword of the Norman, the wile of the Saxon were unable to perform, we have accomplished ourselves".22 This was true in the sense that Irish declined in the nineteenth century only when large numbers of the people opted to learn English, as a prelude to emigration or to a more prosperous life at home. The tally-stick, later to be cited by chauvinist historians as a weapon of British cultural terror, had actually been devised for the schoolroom by Irish people themselves, as Sir William Wilde (father of Oscar) observed with dismay in a Galway schoolhouse of the mid-century:
The man called the child to him, said nothing, but drawing form from its dress a little stick, commonly called a scoreen or tally, which was suspended by a string round the neck, put an additional notch in it with his pen-knife. Upon our enquiring into the cause of their proceeding, we were told that it was done to prevent the child speaking Irish; for every time he attempted to do so a new nick was put in his tally, and, when these amounted to a certain number, summary punishment was inflicted on him by the schoolmaster.23
Hyde sensed that a purely economic or political freedom would be hollow, if the country was by the time of its attainment "despoiled of the bricks of nationality". The listless condition of dozens of post-colonies in the twentieth century was astutely anticipated by Hyde: "just at the moment when the Celtic race is presumably about to largely recover possession of its own country, it finds itself deprived and stript of its Celtic characteristics, cut off from its past, yet scarcely in touch with its present".24 Equally familiar in the emergent states of Africa and Asia would be accounts of how young men and women were found to blush with shame when overheard speaking their own language. As would happen in some of these societies too, many children were not even aware of the existence in their culture of two languages: in the Connacht known to Hyde, parents often spoke Irish only to children who answered in English only, and when Hyde asked some children "Nach labhrann tú Gaeilge?" (Don't you speak Irish?), the answer was "And isn't it Irish that I'm speaking?" This domestic situation was repeated in Gaeltacht classrooms where schoolteachers spoke only English to children who spoke only Irish: Hyde wondered if there was any other country in the world where schoolteachers taught children who could not understand them, and children learned from instructors whose language they could not really follow.25 There were many indeed.
His holistic method led Hyde to emphasize the intimate link between clothing and language. As Yeats could bewail the ways in which Irish sentiment looked ungainly in English garb, so Hyde regretted that men of the midland counties had grown "too proud" to wear homespun tweeds. The analysis anticipated by decades the strictures of Antonio Gramsci and John Berger on the crumpled, ill-fitting suits worn in photographs by peasants and labourers early this century: their vigorous actions simply spoiled the suits which were quite inappropriate to the lives they led, being designed for the sedentary administrators of the ruling class, but the suits signalled their acceptance of being "always, and recognizably to the classes above them, second-rate, clumsy, uncouth, defensive".26
The rhetorical guile of Hyde has been insufficiently recognized: the deanglicization lecture which began with an appeal to unionist-imperialists could nonetheless be brought to a climax with the Fenian trope of a call for a house-to-house visitation, "something – though with a very different purpose – analogous to the procedure that James Stephens adopted throughout Ireland when he found her like a corpse on a dissecting table".27 Though he might steal some of these Phoenix fires and might use "west-Britonizing" as a term of jocular abuse, Hyde was no narrow-gauge nationalist: for he encouraged the "use of Anglo-Irish literature instead of English books, especially instead of English periodicals. We must set our face firmly against penny dreadfuls, shilling shockers, and, still more, the garbage of vulgar weeklies like Bow Bells and the Police Intelligence". This diagnosis has more in common with the future strictures of F. R. Leavis or, for that matter, Theodor Adorno, than might at first seem the case. The alleged anti-modern element in Irish revivalism, of which revisionist historians have made so much, turns out on inspection to be a prophetic critique of mass-culture and of the vulgarization of popular taste. The Gaelic League, acting on Hyde's precepts, became in effect one of the earliest examples of a Workers' Education Movement, at a time of limited opportunity for many. It was also, in some respects, a precursor of the movement for multiculturalism which, in later decades, would seek to revise and expand syllabi, with the introduction of subaltern cultures and oral literatures. In other respects, of course, its leaders were dismissive of many popular publications and magazines which current exponents of Cultural Studies find worthy of attention.
There were only six books in print in Irish at the founding of the League in 1893, and most Irish speakers in the countryside were still illiterate. Yet much was achieved very rapidly: in one year alone, according to Yeats, the League sold 50,000 textbooks.28 Thousands registered in language classes, and, in a decade which saw Fabian cyclists and suffragists take to the countryside for summer schools, the League was an interesting Irish version of the phenomenon. A civil rights agitation was mounted. Letters and parcels were addresse
d in Irish, much to the confusion of the postal authorities; and when a Donegal trader was prosecuted for inscribing his name in Irish on his wagon, he was defended in court by the young Patrick Pearse (his only appearance as a barrister, in what he called the ignoblest of professions).
Questions were raised in the House of Commons about such issues, but the crucial controversy arose in 1899, when evidence was taken by the Committee of Intermediate Education on whether or not it should ratify Irish as a valid school subject. The professors of Trinity College Dublin had taken fright at the Leagues success and warned Dublin Castle that it was a movement infiltrated by "separatists". Now they made a massive effort to remove Irish altogether from the secondary school system. John Pentland Mahaffy, a former tutor of Oscar Wilde and a Professor of Ancient History at Trinity, told the committee that, although it was sometimes useful to a man fishing for salmon or shooting game, it would be an unconscionable waste of time to teach it in schools, since it was "almost impossible to get hold of a text in Irish which is not religious or that is not silly or indecent".29 Quite reasonably, Hyde asked how Mahaffy, a man ignorant of the Irish language, could make such sweeping claims: and he adduced evidence from a range of Celtic scholars to establish the value and scope of ancient Irish literature. Citations came from Windisch in Leipzig, Zimmer in Greifswald, Stern in Berlin, Meyer in Liverpool, Pedersen in Copenhagen, Dottin in Rennes; and York Powell of Oxford, a historian, wrote of the advantages to children of bilingualism. At this point in the controversy, Mahaffy revealed the source of his claims: Robert Atkinson, the Professor of Old Irish at Trinity who – in a remarkable anticipation of the line taken by prosecuting counsel in the 1960 trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover – declared that many Irish-language texts were unfit to have in the house alongside his daughters: if perused, they might cause a shock from which the young ladies might not recover for the rest of their lives.
Inventing Ireland Page 18