Whereas O'Connell's rapport with the people had offered a model for artists to emulate, now the artists were to be heroic exemplars for the politicians: but this was to involve no slavish imitation of external qualities. Yeats sought not to inspire imitation in others, preferring to teach them to become themselves: "we move others not because we have understood or thought about those others, but because all life has the same root".22 He saw that every Irish life was a ruin among whose debris might be discovered what this or that person ought to have been. His plays do not tell onlookers to be like Cuchulain, but to invent themselves: "The greatest art symbolizes not those things that we have observed so much as those things that we have experienced, and when the imaginary saint or lover or hero moves us most deeply, it is the moment when he awakens within us for an instant our own heroism, our own sanctity, our own desire".23
This was exactly the achievement of the 1916 rebels, who staged the Rising as street theatre and were justly celebrated in metaphors of drama by Yeats. All the mirrors for magistrates of ancient England had taught that "to be fit to govern others we must be able to govern ourselves": and the rebels had done just that. During Easter Week's performance, they were enabled both to show feeling and to control it: and so, in the eyes of their audience, both Irish and international, they had literally governed themselves. This ultimately invested them with a power far greater than their power to shock. Yeats had always equated heroism with self-conquest, that ability of great ones under pressure to express some emotions while battening down still others held in reserve. This was the same tragic dignity admired in the rebel leaders by the English officer who presided over their execution. By such example, these leaders and their men urged all Ireland to do likewise, to conquer and so to express selves, to recover the literal meaning of the words sinn féin.
If there was an element of play-acting involved in the Rising, men that is best understood in existential terms. "As soon as man conceives himself free, and determines to use that freedom", wrote Jean-Paul Sartre decades later, "men his work takes on the character of play".24 The rebels' play was staged to gather an Irish audience and challenge an English one. In that sense, the Rising was a continuation of what had begun in the national theatre, which had among its audience "almost everybody who was making opinion in Ireland".25 The early plays of the Abbey Theatre had taught that the conditions of life are open: the theatre can indeed be a place frequented by the "low" as they study alternative possibilities for themselves, including ways in which they might usurp their masters. Though it seemed to conspire with carni-valesque disorder, the playhouse also provided the necessary antidote, for it encouraged a randomly-gathered crowd to sense its growing, cohesive power. Yeats often liked to quote Victor Hugo: "in the theatre a mob becomes a people". Indeed, the theory of tragedy propounded by Yeats – as the moment when casual differences between individuals are put aside for a communal solidarity of feeling – well captures that moment. So it was fitting that the printing press on which the Proclamation of the Republic was done should have been hidden in the Abbey Theatre. Many of the Risings leaders had been initiated in theatrical methods by the Abbey: no previous Irish insurrection had been mounted in such avowedly theatrical terms. One of the first to fall was Seán Connolly, an actor with the company whom Yeats would recall in a late poem:
Come gather round me, players all:
Come praise Nineteen-Sixteen,
Those from the pit and gallery
Or from the painted scene
That fought in the Post Office
Or round the City Hall,
Praise every man that came again,
Praise every man that fell.
From mountain to mountain ride the fierce horsemen.
Who was the first man shot that day?
The player Connolly.
Close to the City Hall he died;
Carriage and voice had he;
He lacked those years that go with skill,
But later might have been
A famous, a brilliant figure
Before the painted scene.
From mountain to mountain ride the fierce horsemen.26
Every man and woman had been assigned a part in life: for Yeats, the question was not whether it was a good or bad one – rather it was whether he or she played it well. The actor could choose to resign the part, or to improvise as best he could in the absence of a clear set of instructions: however creative that improvisation, it would be based on a life-script appropriate to the actor's time and condition. Yeats, like Pearse, believed that each generation was set its own task and that theirs must fulfil a mission to renovate Irish consciousness. This destiny weighed all the more heavily on men and women who were still young when the century turned. To have embarked on life as the twentieth century began must have filled them with a sense of a divinely-ordained task. Pearse's own philosophy of Irish history was cyclical: the 1916 Proclamation noted that six times in the previous three centuries national rights had been asserted in arms. Some generations had surpassed others and carried out their life-task, but a generation which shirked the task would condemn itself to a shameful old age.
This complex of ideas – close enough to those propagated by Ortega Y Gasset in Spain at that period27 – reflected a sharpened notion of generation, which emerged among European intellectuals after the turn of the century. This was partly a result of Freud's influential Oedipai theories, and even more a consequence of the pace of social change which was leaving the old and young no common ground on which to meet. Writers no longer seemed to address society as a whole: instead they fastened onto immediate contemporaries. It would be hard to find a better explanation of the styles of address adopted by Pearse, who repeatedly spoke to and for "this generation", men and women in their twenties and thirties who had been to school in the Gaelic League. Left all but leaderless after the fall of Parnell, that generation had no choice but to father itself. It set out to define a new code, in the knowledge that if it did not achieve freedom, it would at least have provided its basis, and have left to successors a philosophy and a set of actions against which the next generation could define itself. Only if such were not done could the men and women of 1916 be deemed to have failed.
Such a view of history, though often denounced as fatalistic has much in common with the Marxist definition of freedom as the conscious recognition of necessity, and it was dramatized, with his usual brilliance, by Yeats in The Dreaming of the Bones. Here, a rebel soldier escapes from the Post Office in 1916 and flees to the west, where he encounters the ghosts of Diarmuid and Dervorgilla who, it is alleged, brought the Norman occupiers to Ireland. They wish to consummate their illicit love in a kiss. Unfortunately, they cannot until they are forgiven by the soldier, and this is something which (despite the wishes of the audience) he cannot do. They are dead, of course, and he is living: though he might wish to set their troubled spirits free, he must accept his appointed part. There is no freedom but the freedom to weave the cloth of necessity unfolded by the musicians (the real protagonists) at the outset.28
Men may make their own histories, said Marx, but not under the circumstances which they might ideally have chosen: instead, they are confronted with the tradition of dead generations which weighs like a nightmare upon the brain of the living. How this works is interesting: when a crisis becomes absolute and a desperate man is compelled to choose the unknown, his act can never be his alone, for "it takes place in circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past".29 The new act joins itself to the ghostly event: and the actors discover that their stage is filled with the spirits of buried men and dead heroes. These spectral appearances are conjured out of the anxieties which attend all acts of innovation: they offer themselves as known vessels into which the unknown quantities of the future may be poured. For it is a fact that every disruption of routine living for the sake of a new ideal is traumatic: "every definite break with the past at once invites others and increases the strain upon everybody".
30 To allay the fear of the unknown, even the most innovative may have to present it as the restoration of some past glory. As the French businessmen of 1789 portrayed themselves in the role of ancient Romans recovering democratic rights, so Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side to validate his ideal of a welfare state which would, so said the Proclamation, "cherish all the children of the nation equally". In reading out the Proclamation, as he stood before the Ionic pillars of the Post Office, to "a few thin, perfunctory cheers",31 Pearse was knowingly enforcing the classical analogies. He saw that in a traditionalist society, it is vitally necessary to gift-wrap the gospel of the future in the packaging of the past. This Connolly also did when he presented socialism as a return to the Celtic system whereby a chief held land in the common name of all the people. Joyce adopted a similar tactic when he concealed the subversive narrative of Ulysses beneath the cover of one of Europe's oldest stories, The Odyssey.
This is a further justification of the theatricality of the Easter rebellion: alas, it was ill-understood at the time, even by some of its more pragmatically-minded participants. Complaining that the events had "the air of a Greek tragedy", Michael Collins sourly added: "I do not think the Rising week was an appropriate time for the issue of memoranda couched in poetic phrases, nor of actions worked out in a similar fashion".32 Doubtless, as a volunteer, he was unimpressed by the choice of the Post Office as a military centre, since it left soldiers like himself exposed on all sides. As an act of dramatic symbolism, however, it was an inspired choice, since it cut across the main street of the capital city, paralyzing communications and forcing everyone to take notice. The selection of Easter Monday – when most British soldiers were on furlough at Fairyhouse Races – was not just a sound tactic, but another brilliant symbolization, since it reinforced Pearse's idea of the cyclical nature of history. Easter brought renewal, spring-time, new life to a dead landscape: and so it helped to justify and explain all previous abortive uprisings, for it wove them into a wider narrative, a myth of fall, death and glorious redemption.
It has become fashionable to portray the rebels as Catholic militants, because of the use of Easter symbolism. However, this is to read into their texts and actions a sectarianism which emerged only some time later, after the foundation of the Free State. The poetic imagery employed by Pearse and Plunkett was that of a generalized mystical Christianity rather than something specifically Catholic in overtone. In many ways, it took its cue from the Protestant notion of the "life-task" which informed so much of the writing by soldiers of imperial Britain in the Great War. "We cannot but be thankful that we were chosen, and not another generation, to do this work and pay this price"33 was a refrain on the lips of the young volunteers who stood in line at recruiting offices with all the innocence of youths awaiting a great cricket match: and it was also the dominant idea of the Easter rebels. Such an attitude was possible only to a generation which had no firsthand experience of modern warfare with its mass graves.
Though British soldier-poets would soon know the hard realities and write anthems for doomed youth led to slaughter by callous age, the Irish case was different: the rebellion was short, its leaders (apart from de Valera) were shot, and so there was time for them to be glamorized in the long lull before the guerrilla war of independence began. Instead of a fearful revolution linked in the popular mind to a terror that devoured the revolutionary children, the Irish case was invoked by Pearse as an example of children devouring their own mother:
Mise Éire
Sine mé ná an Cailleach Béarra.
Mór mo ghlóire
Is mé do rug Cuchulain cróga.
Mór mo náire,
Mo chlann féin do dhíol a máthair.
Mise Éire
Uaigní mé ná an Cailleach Béarra.
I am Ireland
I am older than the old Woman of Beare.
Great my glory
I that bore Cuchulain the valiant.
Great my shame.
My own children that sold their mother.
I am Ireland.
I am older than the Old Woman of Beare.34
It was the death of the rebels, rather than that of their enemies, which would make a right rose tree, as Yeats retold:
"But where can we draw water",
Said Pearse to Connolly,
"When all the wells are parched away?
O plain as plain can be
There's nothing but our own red blood
Can make a right Rose Tree".35
The imagery here is of the Liberty Tree, more Protestant than Catholic, with its roots in radical millenarian sects; and the notion that republican revolt is simply the political application of Protestant principles found sanction in the demeanour of the rebels. In the face of ecclesiastical condemnation, many simply bypassed the mandatory consultation with their confessors before rising: hence the prolonged sessions within the Post Office during which Pearse, Plunkett and Desmond FitzGerald filled lulls in combat with complex theological justifications of what they had done.36 (The recital of rosaries might also be seen as a way of repudiating those ecclesiastics who said that the rebels were no longer Catholics.) Pearse was a prototype of the revolutionary ascetic who renounces love, family ties and all sensual gratification: and it is this power over himself which gives the ascetic authority over others:
Fornocht a chonac thú,
a áille na háille,
is dhallas mo shúil
ar eagla go stánfainn.
Chualas do cheol,
a bhinne na binne,
is dhúnas mo chluas
ar eagla go gclisfinn.
Bhlaiseas do bhéal,
a mhilse na milse,
is chruas mo chroí
ar eagla mo mhillte.
Dhallas mo shúil,
is mo chluas do dhúnas;
chruas mo chroí
is mo mhian do mhúchas.
Thugas mo chúl
ar an aisling a chumas,
is ar an ród seo romham
m'aghaidh do thugas.
Thugas mo ghnúis
ar an ród seo romham,
ar an ngníomh a chím,
is ar an mbás a gheobhad.
Naked I saw thee,
O beauty of beauty,
And I blinded my eyes
For fear I should fail.
I heard thy music,
O melody of melody,
And I closed my ears
For fear I should falter.
I tasted thy mouth,
O sweetness of sweetness,
And I hardened my heart
And I smothered my desire.
I turned my back
On the vision I had shaped
And to this road before me
I turned my face.
I have turned my face
To this road before me,
To the deed that I see
And the death I shall die.37
In the aisling poems the gallant liberated the captive woman: in this instance, however, the hero-poet turns away from her. Like Plunkett, he will paradoxically liberate her only by dying, to prove his "excess of love" (a phrase Pearse actually used, and which was repeated with an implication of moral accusation against the rebels in "Easter 1916"). Such cold, marmoreal love is all that is possible to an ascetic who holds out to his followers something even better than victory – salvation. Pearse took Irish asceticism out of the monasteries and made it active in the political world: and his followers were repeatedly told that they were the elect, chosen for this redemptive task. The "unprecedented inner loneliness" which assails all who wait for signs of divine election was endured by the rebel leaders in their theological debates.38 Pearse, Plunkett, FitzGerald (and countless others, no doubt) were fast becoming their own priests.
None of this should seem in the least surprising. Modern revolutions have often been carried out by intellectuals who transmute the images and ideas of Christianity into a secular code. Marxism, insofar as
it was a state religion, achieved much: but as a scientific theory of society, it would never have gone far. When Pearse called the people "its own Messiah", he was simply repeating Rousseau's insistence that "the voice of the people is, in fact, the voice of God".39 What made Pearse and his comrades rather different from other modern revolutionaries was that, in their utterances, the religious rhetoric was never occluded or buried, but remained visible and audible on the textual surface.
It will never be fully clear whether the resort to such language by insurrectionists is sincere or tactical: each case must be weighed on its merits. Christian imagery certainly helped to reassure hesitant well-wishers of the morality of the Irish rebels' actions: and, yet again, it allowed the materially-subordinate culture of Ireland to express its conviction of its spiritual superiority to England. Most of all, however, it permitted the rebels to embody the unknown in a language which had a high voltage for most Irish people, especially for the poor. Conservative clericalist intellectuals were not slow to denounce such usage as blasphemous and distressing to ordinary Christians. The lawyer J. J. Horgan bluntly declared that the Rising was a sin and Pearse a heretic.40 Yet what Pearse did was no different from what had been done by men like Yeats and Synge: he moved from faith in "the kingdom of God" to faith in "the kingdom of Ireland", employing the language of the former to launch his crusade for the latter. In effect, he equated patriotism with holiness. The revisionist historian and Jesuit, Francis Shaw, chose the fiftieth anniversary of the Rising to remark that "objectively this equation of the patriot with Christ is in conflict with the whole Christian tradition, and, indeed, with the explicit teaching of Christ".41 It may indeed conflict with orthodox Catholicism: that, however, is not to say that it conflicts with Christianity as such, and many Protestant sects would have perfectly understood Pearse's equation of "the people labouring, scourged, crowned with thorns, agonizing and dying, to rise again immortal and impassable"42 with the mystical body of Christ. If there is any substantive difference between the English revolutionaries of 1640 and the Irish insurgents of 1916, it is merely this: the English relied mainly on the Old Testament for their language, and the Irish on the New.
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