Inventing Ireland

by Declan Kiberd

  The real weaknesses of Hyde's position were to be found elsewhere: in his blithe assumption that a movement as opposed to mainstream unionism as the Gaelic League could somehow be non-political. Just as the League was weakened by its reluctance to examine the economic realities which underlay cultural policies (including the materialist motivations of some of its fair-weather enthusiasts), it was also blinded by a failure to examine the political assumptions of the movement. It was captured, as James Hannay so acutely predicted, not by the parliamentarians but by Sinn Féin, whose leaders took up the running after Dundalk. Cultural nationalism was soon supplanted by a more openly political movement, which in turn issued in the militarism of Easter 1916. Like many who partook in that uprising, Michael Collins had no doubt as to its intellectual sources: "we only succeeded after we had begun to get back our Irish ways; after we had made a serious effort to speak our own language; after we had striven again to govern ourselves".50 It was not, however, the Easter Rising which put paid to the League's major influence and power. Rather, it was the unexamined contradictions in its programme which prevented it from gaining more unionist adherents and from keeping the militant nationalists at arm's length before the Rising. Later still, it would become redundant in the judgement of many because of the apparent embrace of its programme by the founders of the Free State. Nonetheless, of Hyde it could justly be said that he rescued the Irish element from absorption and made it, for a brilliant generation from 1893 to 1921, conscious of itself.

  Nine

  Nationality or Cosmopolitanism?

  Even before the League held its founding meeting, Yeats had deflected the challenge which it posed to creative writers. Though many in decades to come would scoff at the patent contradiction of an Irish National Theatre staging plays in the English language, Yeats had solved that problem to his own satisfaction as far back as 1892:

  Is there then no hope for the de-Anglicizing of our people? Can we not build a national tradition, a national literature which shall be none the less Irish in spirit from being English in language?1

  He answered that it could be done "by translating and retelling in English, which shall have an indefinable Irish quality of rhythm and style, all that is best in the ancient literature". Though the success of the League in the following decade would cause many English-speaking writers to learn Irish, and some to flirt with the idea of writing in it, the die was cast. Hyde was himself unwittingly to provide a spectacular example of the shape which events were taking: in his most successful collection, Abhráin Ghrá Chúige Chonnacht: Love Songs of Connacht, published in his annus mirabilis of 1893, he printed the Irish text on one side of the page and his own translation into Hiberno-English dialect on the other. It soon became clear, however, that the main appeal of this book to Yeats and his young contemporaries lay in Hyde's own translations, and especially in those translations written in prose rather than verse. The very success of the book caused the defeat of its initial purpose, for, along with popularizing Irish literature, it made the creation of a national literature in English seem all the more feasible.

  Hyde's position was ambiguous from the start: in one sense, he was the leader of the movement to save Irish, but in another, he was a founder of the Anglo-Irish literary revival. Subsequent literary history was to emphasize the cruelty of the paradox: it was desperately unfortunate for him that his campaign to save Irish should have coincided with the emergence of a group of Irishmen destined to write masterpieces in English. The fact that, without the Gaelic substratum, few of them would have written so richly and some might not even have emerged, simply underlines the accuracy of Yeats's initial reading of the situation. George Moore might call for "a return to the language ... a mysterious inheritance in which resides the soul of the Irish people";2 he might even threaten to disinherit his nephews if they failed to learn the native tongue; but when his own Irish teacher called at the appointed hour to his house in Ely Place, he had the butler tell him he was out.

  The old canard that "the Gael must be the element that absorbs" was never seriously entertained by the writers: indeed, those who actually wrote in Irish were often more open to foreign (especially continental) influences than some who worked in English. It must be remembered that when D. P. Moran coined that polemical aphorism (in The Philosophy of Irish Ireland in 1905), it was at a time when the prestige of the Gael was still being restored after centuries of denial and when Irish speakers did not even enjoy the rights to education in their own language. Anyway, the declaration came with a notable qualification: it was prefaced by the more telling observation that "no one wants to fall out with Davis's comprehensive idea of the Irish people as a composite race drawn from various sources".3 The real debate of the revivalist generation was about whether the literature it created should be national or cosmopolitan in tone.

  At the outset, the options were not polarized in that rather simplified way. In 1893, Stopford Brooke said that a poetry which was national would "be able to become not only Irish, but also alive to the interests and passions of universal humanity".4 The debate really took fire in 1899 with the publication of exchanges between John Eglinton, W. B. Yeats, George Russell and William Larminie in the Dublin Daily Express, a pro-union paper. Eglinton, a man of northern Protestant background and a humanist by inclination, questioned whether the use of Celtic heroic figures by dramatists could eventuate in anything more than belles lettres. He contended that Cuchulain or Deirdre would refuse to be translated out of their old environment into the world of modern sympathies, and such a use of "a subject outside experience" could produce only a mere exercise rather than "a strong interest in life itself".5 Yeats countered with the claim that art is not an Amoldian criticism of life so much as the sacred revelation of a hidden life. At this point, George Russell intervened with a characteristically ecumenical attempt to reconcile the national and the individual idea: the nation as a formation existed to enhance the expressive potential of the person, rather than the person existing as a mere illustration of some prior national essence. He offered a shrewd distinction between shallow cosmopolitanism and national individualism:

  . . . there is little to distinguish the work of the best English writers or artists from that of their continental contemporaries ... If nationality is to justify itself in the face of all this, it must be because the country which preserves its individuality does so with the profound conviction that its peculiar ideal is nobler than that which the metropolitan spirit suggests.6

  Russell acutely foresaw how mass communications would homogenize the whole of Europe into a dreary imitative provincialism. The imperial European powers had carved up Africa at the Congress of Berlin and he was not impressed by the results: "Empires do not permit the intensive cultivation of human life . . . they destroy the richness and variety of existence by the extinction of personal and unique gifts".7 Epic archetypes, on the other hand, would offset this abjection, awakening each person to the heroism latent in the self: "it was this idea which led Whitman to 'exploit' himself as the typical American".8 In all of his writings, Russell – most unusually, for the time – equated the cosmopolitan with the imperial.

  In a rudimentary sense, the controversy established Yeats as the upholder of nationalism, Eglinton as the defender of cosmopolitanism, and Russell as the seeker of some vaguely-defined middle ground. But this is to underplay the interesting points of contact in their thought: all were agreed on the advisability of using the English language. Though Yeats pursued a diplomatic alliance with the Gaelic League, Russell complained of its "boyscoutish propaganda" and Eglinton contended that a "thought movement" rather than a "language movement" could provide a surer basis for a true Irish identity.9 Eglinton misunderstood deanglicization when he argued that "there was something lacking in a mental and spiritual attitude so uncompromisingly negative".10 Though he did not know Irish, he inferred with a strange confidence that as a language it lacked analytic power and "had never been to school". Fearing the division of Ireland int
o two armed camps, like the Jews and the Samaritans, he reminded the League that "it was among the lost sheep of the house of Israel – amongst those who had lost the use of the Hebrew tongue – that the Jewish Messiah appeared".11 He denied that the word Irish accurately designated the language which "is no longer the language of Irish nationality" and "never was so"; and he wickedly but effectively questioned the revivalist use of the peasant for ulterior political purposes by those who "are for the most part ignorant of the old man personally". He was, however, notably vague in his definition of what his more ecumenical nationality might be constituted, preferring to ask that writers work from a "human" rather than an "Irish" standpoint.

  Eglinton had not only an independent stance but a lively way of adopting it. Like many self-declared humanists and secularists, he was more concerned with the future than the past, and quite convinced that while most virtues are individual, most vices are national. He feared that a successful restoration of the Irish language would cut people off from the rest of Europe, condemning them to speak always in an Irish rather than a human capacity (and he had no scruple about presenting these as opposed concepts). Unable or unwilling to concede the modern element in the Gaelic League, he mockingly inverted Hyde's slogan and programme: "Literature must be free as the elements; if that is to be cosmopolitan, it must be cosmopolitan . . . and I should like to see the day of what might be called . . . the de-Davisization of Irish national literature, that is to say, the getting rid of the notion mat in Ireland a writer is to think first and foremost of interpreting the nationality of his country, and not simply of the burden he is to deliver".12 Eglinton badly underestimated the European dimension of Gaelic culture, past as well as present: after all, the dánta grá (love poems) were resolutely in the amour courtois tradition, and the revival in Irish-language writing led by Pearse had urged its followers to make contact with the Gaelic past and also "with the mind of contemporary Europe". Moreover, Eglinton seemed to have forgotten Mazzini's dictum that every people is bound to constitute itself a nation before it can occupy itself with the question of humanity, but that it does this in order to be free to move on to that question.

  There are, nonetheless, wonderful moments in the writings of Eglinton when he exudes a real impatience with the nationalist process, an impatience which comes, as it were, from one who has moved on to better dungs and is impatient for companions to catch up and keep company with him on his journey. His strictures on the need of art to speak for the people of the present seem admirable: he was quite convinced that Yeats "lived back" in a nostalgic land of his imagination, a place unchastened by the real Ireland all around the living poet. This led Eglinton to mount a devastating, and wonderfully dialectical, critique of what he saw as the major contradiction of the Irish revival: "All the great literatures have seemed in retrospect to have risen like emanations from the life of a whole people, which has shared in a general exaltation: and this was not the case in Ireland. How could a literature movement be in any sense national when the interest of the whole nation lay in extirpating the conditions which produced it?"13 Yet, somewhere along the line of his argument, Eglinton aborted the incipient dialectic: he failed to note that element in Irish nationalism which willed its own supersession by a humanism not unlike his, and he failed to recognize the genuine achievements of nationalism, albeit in sometimes outmoded forms.

  That blind spot may have been caused by his refusal to adopt the Yeatsian strategy and to separate himself from his own class and background. He saw himself as opposed to those dogmatic patriots who were too ready to extinguish self in the service of a cause, but for all practical purposes this amounted to no more than the traditional Protestant aversion to the more demonstrative type of Catholic. If his understanding of the intricacies of Irish Ireland was limited, his grasp of the cultural effects of colonialism was non-existent. Many readers of the United Irishman of 1902 must have smiled at the simplicity of his analysis of the history of "The Island of Saints":

  Ireland will have to make up its mind that it is no longer the old Gaelic nation of the fifth or twelfth, or even of the eighteenth century, but one which has been in the making ever since these islands were drawn into the community of nations by the Normans.14

  There is no recognition there of the European scope of Irish monasticism or of the commerce of scholars over many centuries: however, the marvellous euphemism for the Norman invasion tells all – what others might see as cultural conquest, Eglinton welcomes as a happy cosmopolitanism. A similar use of the word by Lord Cromer allowed him to describe Egypt as a land whose future lay not in narrow nationalism but in a more "cosmopolitan" mingling of identities, grounded not on race but on "the respect men have always accorded to superior talents and unselfish conduct".15

  It was such thinking with allowed Eglinton to salute Edward Dow-den (whom Yeats had judged the quintessential provincial) as the possessor of a cosmopolitan mind of the first rank, "probably the first point touched by anything new in the world of ideas outside Ireland".16 Dowden, for his part, made no bones about the link between the imperial idea and literacy cosmopolitanism. Long before African critics complained that "cosmopolitanism" was actually a code-word for the values of imperial Europe, he breezily conceded the point: "The direction of such work as I have done in literature has been (to give it a grand name) imperial or cosmopolitan, and though I think a literature ought to be rooted in the soil, I don't think a conscious effort to promote a provincial spirit tends in that direction".17 The idea that the revival might be a revolt against imitative provincialism completely escaped Dowden, though it had been signalled by Thomas Davis in the refrain of his most famous song:

  And Ireland, long a province, be

  A nation once again.

  Even less did it strike Dowden or Eglinton that this revolt was also a protest against the provincialization of England by the forces of industrial society. The leaders of that protest saw provincialism as taking one of two forms: the first and more obvious being found in people who looked to some faraway centre for approved patterns of cultural significance, the second and more insidious being found in those who were so smugly self-assured that they had lost all curiosity about any other forms of life beyond their own. The Irish in the previous century had suffered from the former provincialism, as had many parts of England; but it was the modern English who, even more than the nationalist Irish, were now suffering from the latter kind. While the former existed only as a comparison with a remote model, the latter refused any comparison at all. Neither Dowden nor Eglinton could concede what stared artists like Yeats and Joyce in the face: that England itself had grown smugly provincial in its imperial phase, because its citizens had lost the capacity to conceive of how they appeared in the eyes of others. They were psychologically driven to conquer largely because they had no sense of their own presence.

  The English decline into the first form of deference had been diagnosed by George Eliot in the novel Middlemarch (1871–2), whose subtitle was "A study of provincial life". In it, the Middlemarchers all choose to define themselves in the distorting mirror of other people's opinions and this is the cause of their undoing: "Even Milton, looking for his portrait in a spoon, must submit to have the facial angle of a bumpkin".18 By the new century, the decline into imperial smugness had fed massively off the earlier insecurity, but the underlying problem of provincialism remained to be documented by D. H. Lawrence: in Women in Love he shows lovers leaving home because "in England you can't let go",19 only for them to find that England is a state of mind which they bring with them wherever they travel. It was hardly a coincidence that, as English culture lapsed into this provincialism of spirit, Irish artists rediscovered their long-suppressed yearnings for the wider world. The moment might even be dated to 1892, when the Examiner of Plays in the Lord Chamberlain's office refused a licence for the performance of Salomé, a play in French by Oscar Wilde. The Examiner, E. F. Smyth Pigott, was called by Shaw "a walking compendium of vulgar, insular prejudice".2
0 Wilde, for his part, responded with the assertion that Paris was now the true home of personal freedom. Salome' was published there in 1893 and performed in the city three years later.

  From this point onwards, Irish thinkers turned to Europe, and beyond, as they had done so often in previous centuries, for ideas and audiences. The debate in Joyce's story "The Dead" is about whether the Irish person of the future will holiday for recreation on the Aran Islands or on continental Europe. All of a sudden, England was a bore: which was what George Moore meant by his famous telegram announcing that the centre of gravity in the literary world had shifted from London to Dublin. Certainly, the axis which had once run from Dublin to London now ran from Dublin to Paris instead.

  Little of this seems to have borne in upon Dowden or Eglinton. As the years passed and the evidence mounted, Yeats made it perfectly clear that his Irish revival was a revolt against a provincialism of mind which can sometimes inhere in imitative nationalism, sometimes in complacent imperialism, but which always seeks to reproduce itself in facsimile wherever it is found. After the Playboy riots, Yeats discovered that, in order to protect his movement, he had to fight as hard against nationalist provincialism as he had once fought against the closed minds of Trinity College:

  Many are beginning to recognize the right of the individual mind to see the world in its own way, to cherish the thoughts which separate men from one another... instead of those thoughts that had made one man like another if they could, and have but succeeded in setting up hysteria and insincerity in place of confidence and self-possession.21

  The Gaelic obscurantist, the anti-intellectual priest, and the propagandist politician were all as inimical to the revivalist ideal as were the empire men or the shallow cosmopolitans. Yeats had believed that the language movement and the thought movement could be reconciled; though remaining open to influences from Europe, Asia and beyond, he based his doctrines on the conviction mat there is no great literature without nationality and no nationality without literature.