By the end of the 1920s many artists and intellectuals had come to the bleak conclusion that Ireland was no longer an interesting place in which to live: now they left. Stephen MacKenna, the friend of Synge, sometime editor of An Claidheamh Soluis and translator of Plotinus, was one lost in this way; George Russell, collaborator with Yeats, mystic poet and inspirer of the agricultural cooperative movement, was another. But there were dozens: in the notorious opening chapter of his book on Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (1931), Daniel Corkery listed them all, as if their exile and expatriation constituted some kind of dereliction of national duty; yet he was also honest enough to admit that most had gone because they could not earn a living wage by pursuing the life of the mind in Ireland George Russell had doubted "whether a single literary man in Ireland could make the income of an agricultural labourer by royalties on sales of his books among his own countrymen, however famous he may be".2 Until he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923, Yeats had never earned more than £200 a year: on hearing the great news from an editor of The Irish Times, he could not restrain himself from brutally interrupting the long-winded speech of tribute with a question: "How much is it, man, how much is it worth?"3 When he and his wife decided to eat a celebratory meal, they could find nothing better in their larder than sausages.4
All of which is not to say that writers went without honour in the new Ireland. Indeed, some politicians paid writers the ultimate tribute of persecuting them and calling for their heads; other more enlightened leaders simply harnessed the international prestige of artists for good domestic purposes. Thus Yeats soon found himself chairing the committee mandated to redesign the national coinage, a committee which came up with beautiful designs based on Irish animals: the Paudeens who now fumbled in greasy tills did so looking for coins that bore his seal of approval However, the pillar-boxes in which Paudeen posted his letters still bore the insignia of the British monarch under a light coating of green paint and the state apparatus went largely unmodified A few streets and stations were renamed for national heroes, mostly drawn from the safer, more remote past, since current politics had proved so divisive; and the teaching of Irish was made the major activity in the nation's schools.
By then the language had been standardized along the lines demanded by Professor Atkinson, and a new internal imperialism, Gaeilgc Chaighdeá-nach (Standard Irish), sought to erase dialectal differences. Children who failed Irish tests were deemed to have failed their entire state examinations. Whereas in the nineteenth century many had been caned for speaking Irish, many were now punished for not speaking it properly or for not speaking it at all Generations of children came to see it not as a gift but as a threat, and were hardly consoled by the thought that if they wrote their algebraic symbols in Gaelic lettering they could score ten per cent extra marks in the examinations. Families in the Gaeltacht areas who spoke Irish were rewarded with government grants, a policy which provoked Dublin Opinion to describe Ireland as "the land which lost the leprechaun but found the pot of gold".
Irish was taught in schools as a dead language, like Latin, full of complex grammatical rules and irregular verbs. It was taken from its wider cultural context of dances, sports and folk ways. Moreover, the texts written in the period were too patently designed for the classroom, or for what one angry writer called an audience of credulous schoolchildren and pre-con-ciliar nuns.5 The whole burden of language revival was placed on hard-pressed schoolteachers, in the innocent belief that the substitution of Irish for English in the youthful mind would be enough to deanglicize Ireland The ingenious device of national parallelism did not work on this occasion. Meanwhile, the Gaeltacht continued on its drastic social decline, losing 50,000 speakers in the first two decades of the state's existence.
Observing all this from his fastness in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s, James Joyce pronounced himself disappointed. He told Arthur Power, an Irish painter in Paris, that there had actually been more freedom when he was a youth in Ireland, because the English had been in governance then and the people, unfettered by any sense of social responsibility, said what they pleased: now that they were responsible for their own fate, they appeared to have gone all cautious and middle-aged. As one exile after another – from Tom MacGreevy to Arthur Power, from Mary Colum to Samuel Beckett – confirmed the tightness of that diagnosis, Joyce might have been forgiven for concluding that he had made the right option in choosing exile in 1904. Insofar as men and women of his generation were to renovate the Irish consciousness, this was being achieved in the free zones of art rather than in the far-from-free state.
Yet there was perhaps a sense in which the artists, with their acute antennae, had warned of and anticipated the problem of living in a post-heroic age. Yeats in On Baile's Strand had shown how self-defeating a commodity heroism can be, and how absurd it can seem when it has outlived its usefulness. That lesson might have sunk in were it not for the Great War, which devalued the quotidian as the banal and which reasserted the power of the exceptional in human experience. One way in which Irish modernism marked itself off as very different from the European modernism of Joseph Conrad and Thomas Mann was in its respect for the great middle range of human emotion and destiny. Gide spoke for most European modernists when he said "Families, je vous haïes": but Joyce in Ulysses had no compunction about celebrating family values. The ordinary was the proper domain of the artist, he joked, and the extraordinary could safely be left to journalists. So his great book is not only a protest against the militarism of the war and a celebration of the human body which that war did much to humiliate; it is also an attempt to recapture for modern literature the middle range of human experience from artists who felt that no living was possible unless conducted in zones of high ecstasy or utter depravity
A further feature notable in Irish modernism was its rawness, its sense of formal immediacy, its refusal of a knowing self-consciousness. The hero and heroine of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities knowingly re-enact the his and Osiris myth in their own lives, and this is very different from the case of Leopold Bloom, whose re-enactment of the wanderings of Odysseus is quite unconscious. Joyce may wish to indicate that a true heroism is never conscious of itself as such; but this adage may also be applied to the practice of his own art, where there is no illusion of easy control, no cool command of material Rather the situation appears to be one in which the plot has the author well in hand Hence the awesome jaggedness and seeming formlessness of so many masterpieces of Irish modernism, whether Ulysses, the trilogy of Beckett, or Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds. By contrast, the masterworks of European modernism, such as Heart of Darkness, Women in Love or The Magic Mountain appear strangely traditional in form, as if the anxieties of life in the twentieth century have been poured back into the vessels of the nineteenth.
All of which is to say that Wilde was perfectly right when he said that it was the Celt who led in art. Joyce never forgot that challenge. He did not become modern to the extent that he ceased to be Irish; rather he began from the premise that to be Irish was to be modern anyway. Yet he saw his art as a patriotic contribution to "the moral history of my country"; and he believed that he had done more than any politician to liberate Irish consciousness into a profound freedom of form. In this, as in so much else, he was accurate. It was the politicians who, in cleaving to tired, inherited forms, failed to be modern and so ceased being Irish in any meaningful sense.
Fifteen
Writing Ireland, Reading England
In the week of the Easter Rising The Irish Times, then an ascendancy paper (known as The Squireish Mimes among disdainful nationalists) had carried little news of the cataclysmic events passing just a few hundred yards from its office door. Its editorial mind was on higher things. "How many citizens of Dublin have any real knowledge of the works of Shakespeare?", it enquired in its emergency edition of Wednesday 27 April 1916: "Could any better occasion for reading them be afforded than the coincidence of enforced domesticity with the poet's tercentenary?"1
If the explorer Stanley had carried a copy of Shakespeare with him on his civilizing mission into central Africa in earlier decades, the Anglo-Irish ascendancy in its moment of crisis could urge loyal citizens to immerse themselves in the culture which their soldiers were fighting to defend.
There was only one problem with this. Irish young people who studied English literature at the end of the nineteenth or beginning of the twentieth century found themselves reading the story of how they had been banished from their own home. Until the Gaelic League's campaign bore fruit, the Irish language had been banned from schoolrooms, in which children recited at morning assembly:
I thank the goodness and the grace
That on my birth have smiled;
And made me in these Christian days
A happy English child.
Hidden in the classic writings of England, however, lay many subversive potentials, awaiting their moment like unexploded bombs. So the young Irish man and woman could use Shakespeare to explore, and explain, and even perhaps to justify, themselves. For Yeats, the failure of Richard the Second was due not to bumbling ineptitude but to a sensitivity and sophistication in the man far superior to the merely administrative efficiency of Bolingbroke. In his reading, Richard the Second was, with Arnoldian inflections, the story of England despoiling Ireland. His was a Celtic Shakespeare who loved Richard's doomed complexity and despised the usurper's basely political wiles.
Edward Dowden of Trinity College Dublin, as leader of the efficiency-worshipping literary critics of the Victorian age, had heroicized Bolingbroke and belittled Richard: so Yeats proposed to restore to Shakespeare's texts an openness which they had once had, but long since lost under the distortions of an imperial interpretative psychology. "The more I read the worse does the Shakespeare criticism become", he reported after a period of study, "and Dowden is about the climax of it".2 Whereas the Celt was held to be unable to cope with the despotism of fact, the greatness of Shakespeare for Dowden lay in his vivid perception of "the chief facts of the world" and in his acceptance of "the logic of facts". Dowden's playwright was distinguished by his "capacity for perceiving, for enjoying, for reproducing facts, and facts of as great variety as possible".3 In other words, the Trinity don converted Shakespeare into an eminent Victorian, one whose imagination could confront and master the entire material world. Against that backdrop of prevailing orthodoxy, Yeats's re-reading of Shakespeare seemed iconoclastic indeed.
"Professor Dowden", explained Yeats, "lived in Ireland where every-thing has failed, and he meditated frequently upon the perfection of character which had, he thought, made England successful".4 This was a polite way of phrasing the matter, which Yeats put a little differently when he wrote at the start of a new century about the literary revival: "The popular poetry of England celebrates her victories, but the popular poetry of Ireland remembers only defeats and defeated persons".5 Yeats's reinterpretation of Shakespeare's history plays was massively influential; and the reversal which he brought about in criticism had consequences for creative art too. For one thing, it emboldened Yeats himself to write that epic cycle of dramas in which he reimagined the contest between Richard and Bolingbroke as the clash between Cuchulain and Conchobar, "a wise man who was blind from very wisdom, and an empty man that thrust him from his place and saw all that could be seen from very emptiness".6 Yeats's Richard was no peripheral victim, but the centre of meaning, moral and poetic, in Shakespeare's play: if Bolingbroke epitomized the failure of triumph, then Richard embodied the triumph of failure. It was that very paradox which informed the thinking of the 1916 rebels, so it would not be completely fanciful to list Shakespeare among the revolutionary weapons available to the insurgents. The Irish Times had got it wrong again. The attraction of Shakespeare for Yeats lay in the skill with which he tapped popular lore. "Every national movement", he wrote, "as in Elizabethan England, has arisen out of a study of the common people, who preserve national characteristics more than any other class".7
Edward Dowden's desperate attempt to recruit Shakespeare to the ranks of the efficient imperialists was doomed: even if there might be some sanction for the imperial theme in the plays themselves, the very notion of the theatrical was itself the antithesis of the imperial idea. Theatre, it has been shown, allowed a people to play with freedom and so to realize it. Stage plays were "the symbolic opposite of the lasting colony": as far back as 1610, William Crashaw in a sermon given to a group of planters embarking for Virginia, declared that "the enemies of the godly colony were the devil, the pope and the players".8 Three hundred years later, the founders of the Irish National Theatre Society could only have agreed. It was hard, however, for English critics to live with the consequences. Even after Yeats's successful completion of a revolution in Shakespearian studies, there were some muscular minds left in England to complain that "there is something in Richard which calls out the latent homosexuality of critics".9 The Celtic feminine, in its insurrectionary mode, was beginning to bring out the homophobe.
In the summer of 1900, the Chief Examiner of Secondary Schools in Ireland had written a querulous note: "the answering of a number of candidates showed that they had not used the edition of The Tempest prescribed in the programme".10 Was the youthful James Joyce one of the dissidents, bent on producing a more Celtic Shakespeare too? For Joyce, the entire Shakespearian canon was an ongoing narrative of exile and of loss: he even took time off in the middle of Ulysses to set mock-questions for the revised Celtic school's syllabus:
Why is the underplot of King Lear in which Edmund figures lifted out of Sidney's Arcadia and spatchcocked onto a Celtic legend older than history?
And, what was more, he answered them:
Because the theme of the false or the usurping or the adulterous brother or all three in one is to Shakespeare what the poor are not, always with him. The note of banishment, banishment from the heart, banishment from home, sounds uninterruptedly from The Two Gentlemen of Verona onward till Prospero breaks his staff, buries it certain fathoms in the earth and drowns his book.11
Friedrich Engels had complained that the object of British policy was to make the Irish feel like strangers in their own land;12 but he seriously underestimated their capacity to reformulate the culture which had been used as an instrument to "civilize" them.
A rereading of English literature thus began. Newspapers began to complain about the insulting renditions by visiting English actors of Irish parts. Joseph Holloway noted in his diary that "a music-hall knockabout Irishman would appear a lifelike portrait of the genuine article beside the Captain MacMorris as he was presented, in speech, action and appearance".13 Resentment was expressed – and not for the first time – against English texts which misrepresented Irish persons, or which treated them as if they would never be in a position to understand or to challenge such writings. The comedy which Wilde extracted from the spectacle of the upper classes conducting intimate conversations in the presence of servants who are assumed to hear nothing was his exposure of the point of crisis which had been reached. The idea that the lower orders might store and use this information in future attacks on their masters never seems to have greatly exercised the official mind, anymore than English educators expected Irish students of Shakespeare to treat his works like captured weapons which might one day be turned back upon the enemy.
The Irish could use Shakespeare to repudiate those critics who "produced" him in their classrooms and on their syllabi; and, more vitally, they could feed their subversive rereadings back to England. Yeats's insistence that the Abbey Theatre tour London, Oxford and Cambridge with its plays, though criticized by touchy nationalists as a provincials abject plea for metropolitan blessing, was in fact a masterful attempt to unfreeze English theatre from its petrified condition and to restore to classic texts an openness to many interpretations. Previous attempts at such feedback – Charlotte Brooke's Preface to the Reliques of Ancient Irish Poetry in 1789, for example – had proved abortive and were limited, anyway, by the desire of th
e ascendancy class to clear its name. Now, however, for the first time in history, most sections of the Irish population had a mastery of English, and so the traffic could flow in both directions. The Irish, often mocked as brainless lyricists, could practise criticism, in both the essayistic and creative mode, and could set themselves up as the brains (as well as the poets) of the United Kingdom. Wilde, for instance, took a perverse delight in proclaiming that his own republicanism derived from that of Milton, Blake and Shelley; and he was caustic about attempts by literary critics to write such embarrassing details out of their histories. In his Commonplace Book, kept while at Oxford, he wrote: "To Dissenters we owe in England Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim's Progress, Milton: Matthew Arnold is unjust to them because not to conform to what is established is merely a synonym for progress".14
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