It was for this reason that Father Shakespeare was reinvented across the developing world; and in Ireland he became, through the good offices of Ernest Renan, a Celt. The Hamlet evoked in Joyce's Ulysses is a variant of the type, "the beautiful ineffectual dreamer who comes to grief against hard facts"; and sly jokes are made in the book about "Patsy Caliban, our American cousin",34 hinting at the overlap between the Irish and the New World. In thus laying violent hands on Shakespeare, Wilde, Yeats, Joyce and many others offered the act of reading as a rehearsal for or version of revolution.
What most attracted them to the later Shakespeare was his blend of strange fairytale magic and rich social documentation. Both strands appeared to have been separated in the art of Britain, yet the artists of the emerging nations sought to reconcile them once again. Wilde attributed the growing dislike of the imagination of the romantics to "the rage of Caliban not seeing his face in a glass",35 and in saying so, he spoke for all peoples who felt that they had been edited out of their masters' narrative. He was just as probing in his explanation of the dislike of the new realist modes among colonized peoples: "the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass".
That mirror signalized for Irish authors a realist aesthetic which merely allowed for reproductions of an environment which they felt obliged to challenge. Wilde, in Intentions, had questioned the notion of art as a mirror held up to nature, complaining that it would "reduce genius to the condition of a cracked looking-glass".36 Joyce elaborated the diagnosis in the opening pages of Ulysses, in which "the cracked looking-glass of a servant" becomes "a symbol of Irish art",37 a representation, that is to say, of those realist writers who have only captured the surface effects of life under occupation. He concurred with Wilde's view that art was not just a matter of surface but also of symbol, attaining greatness in moments when the real took on the contours of the magical.
The Irish writers sought, therefore, to reconnect realism and romanticism in a single moment, whether in Joyce's symbolic epiphanies, Synge's fusion of reality and joy, Lady Gregory's theatre with a "base of realism and an apex of beauty", or Lennox Robinson's mixture of "poetry of speech" with "humdrum fact".38 Those stubborn, recalcitrant facts, popularly held to defeat the Celt, were now to be assimilated, but at no cost to the imagination, which could raise them to a higher power. An might indeed hold a mirror up to nature, but Shakespeare's later plays had gone further and endorsed art as a natural phenomenon:
This is an art
Which does mend Nature, change it rather, but
The an itself is nature.39
If an was indeed man's nature, then there need be no antagonism between them. Wilde went even further, however, insisting that though nature had good intentions, it was not always able to carry them out: and this was where the artist came in, to improve on the natural.40 Thus was born – or, more truly, reborn – that writing which now goes by the name of Magic Realism.
Rereading England, the artists learned to rewrite Ireland, and so enabled an Irish Renaissance. In its critical thinking, it was largely a product of artists rather than academics. Compared with movements such as Marxism or feminism, nationalism has been generally deficient in theoretical criticism and, in this rather confined area, the Irish have contributed even less than, say, the Indians or the Caribbean peoples. The radical criticism of Shakespeare composed by Irish minds in the period was often skilfully concealed within works of an, as if a more oven practice might bring down immeasurable wrath. Yeats was in no doubt as to the villain of the piece: the system of education for annual examination, which left thirsty minds parched, crammed full of "facts" but denied "imagination". Dowden worshipped intellect but repressed emotion in his criticism: and Yeats eventually counted himself lucky to have escaped a spell at Trinity College, Dublin. Trinity men, sniffed Shaw (another non-attender), were all alike, by which he meant all wrong: and Wilde, in his most famous play, wrote a not-very-disguised essay on the failures of modern education.
In his Autobiographies, Yeats gave much attention to the system of education under which he had suffered, reporting his contention that it managed to strengthen the will only by weakening the impulses: "Intermediate examinations, which I had always refused, meant money for pupil and for teacher, and that alone".41 Patrick Pearse called the Board of Intermediate Education a gloomy limbo:
The teacher who seeks to give his pupils a wider horizon in literature does so at his peril. He will, no doubt, benefit his pupils, but he will infallibly reduce his results fees ... "Stick to your programme" is the "strange device" on the banner of the Irish Intermediate system; and the programme bulks so large that there is no room for education.42
It was a familiar tale of gradgrindcry, told a thousand times in later autobiographies from many different international settings.
The school attended by C. L. R. James in Trinidad geared all its rhythms to the annual examination administered by a white official, who awarded extra pay and promotion to those teachers whose students did best. Cricket and Shakespeare (both of them to be illuminated by James's brilliant writing) were designed "to prove to the colonizer that civilizing had been a successful mission; and to the colonized that civilization was by no means the monopoly of the mother country but a larger game that anybody could play".43 That, at any rate, was the pious hope. Another West Indian, George Lamming, found the actuality more acrid:
. . . books, in that particular conception of literature, were not written by natives ... So the examinations which would determine that Trinidadians future in the Civil Service, imposed Shakespeare, and Wordsworth, and Jane Austen, and George Eliot, and the whole tabernacle of dead names, now come alive at the worlds greatest summit of literary expression.44
A third West Indian, V. S. Naipaul, has recalled with wry irony his desperate attempt to translate Dickens's London into Caribbean terms, setting his faces in local streets, seeing his drizzles as tropical monsoons, and never feeling quite convinced by the strained set of equations.
An Irish youth, of course, found such transactions a little easier, if only because of similarities between the Irish and English climate, topography and physiognomy: but strain there was, nonetheless. Patrick Pearse's critique of The Murder Machine (his phrase for the colonial system of education) is relevant here. He was appalled at the unfreedom of teachers and students, all compelled, despite differences of region, class and personal psychology, to study the same rigid syllabus, calculated to produce a type.
To the children of the free were taught all noble and goodly things, which would tend to make them strong, proud and valiant; from the children of slaves, all such dangerous knowledge was hidden . . . And so in Ireland. Our education system was designed by our masters in order to make us smooth and willing slaves. It has succeeded; succeeded so well that we no longer realize that we are slaves. Some of us even think our chains ornamental . . .45
Pearse was surprised that, for the most part, only low-calibre minds were attracted into the teaching profession, whose members were, he sourly noted, paid less than the colonial police. Nevertheless, these teachers operated as a sort of thought-police on behalf of a system geared to the manufacture of things rather than the growth of persons. Such an indictment anticipated by decades George Lamming's account of the emergent West Indian middle class, which read only those books on examination syllabi and which saw education as "something to have, but not to use".46 It was the philistinism of these new managerial élites, even more than intellectual repression by the authorities, which would drive so many writers of emerging nation-states into exile.
A free child, said Pearse, would not become a replica of his mass-produced teacher, but would rather achieve his innermost self: the state existed to fulfil the child rather than the child to fulfil the state. Praising Maria Montessori's methods, Pearse saw these as a contrast to those favoured by the Intermediate Board. It offered not education but schooling, under an institution which liked to think of itself as a government, while in reality it was no mo
re than a police administration.
... There is no education system in Ireland ... Education should inspire; this education is meant to tame. Education should harden; this education is meant to enervate. The English are too wise a people to educate the Irish, in any worthy sense. As well expect them to arm us.47
This anticipates Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism which laments "a parody of education, me hasty manufacture of a few thousand subordinate functionaries, 'boys', artisans, office clerks, and interpreters necessary for the smooth operation of business".48 Pearse's analogy between learning and ammunition may have been prompted by his memory of how Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest had said that a true education would lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square; or maybe he was thinking of the claim that every Gaelic League speech was like a bullet fired against an enemy who failed to disarm his antagonist.49
Pearse's remedy was interesting: more, not less, English literature, as an instrument of liberation. What was lacking at present, he contended, was a respect for ideas in their own right, a love of beauty, a spiritual inspiration. Yeats agreed. Visiting the United States in 1903, he made his own comparisons between "the great mill called examinations" and the liberal education offered by an independent republic. At Bryn Mawr college for women, an instructor told him: "We prepare our girls to live their lives, but in England they are making them all teachers".50 Wilde had already complained that in England those who could did, and those who couldn't taught: an inability to learn appeared to be the main qualification for a career in teaching, or, as he quipped, "in examinations the foolish ask questions which the wise cannot answer."51
"The work of the first Minister for Education in a free Ireland will be a work of creation", wrote Pearse, "for into a dead mass he will have to breathe the breath of life". He believed Maria Montessori's methods invaluable, but he wished to see them combined with the ancient Gaelic system of fosterage, of sons sent for special training to distant families or centres of excellence. Whether Pearse's notions of fosterage were accurate is doubtful, but, as his literary contemporaries reinterpreted Shakespeare for their own strategic purposes, so Pearse discovered in the Gaelic past the lineaments of a modernized state, with careers open to talents. According to him, at Clonard monastery a carpenter's son named Kevin sat alongside Colmcille, the son of a king, both of them studying under a charismatic teacher: and "never the state usurping the place of father or fosterer, dispensing education like a universal provider of readymades".52 Pearse's inspiring rhapsody may have owed more to John Ruskin and William Morris than to any Gaelic records:
... In the Middle Ages there were everywhere little groups of persons clustering around some beloved teacher, and thus it was that men learned not only the humanities but all gracious and useful crafts. There were no State art schools, no State technical schools: as I have said, men became artists in the studio of some master artist . . .53
This ideal was to be reasserted by Yeats in A Vision. There he conjured up a Byzantine mosaic artist who could answer all philosophical questions. In Autobiographies he explained how such an education could lead to Unity of Being:
Somewhere about 1450, though later in some parts of Europe by a hundred years or so, and in some earlier, men attained to personality in great numbers, "Unity of Being", and became like "a perfectly proportioned human body", and as men so fashioned held places of power, their nations had it too, prince and ploughman sharing that thought and feeling.54
Yeats wrote A Vision as a sort of Celtic constitution for a free Ireland, in the belief that such a moment might come again. And he wrote his epic cycle of Cuchulain plays in the conviction that their performance before an Irish audience would actually bring that moment round.
Materialists might scoff at such ideals as pure self-delusion on the part of culturalists, but the British themselves never underestimated their power to sway public opinion. When the 1916 rebels struck, the authorities had no doubt that a "poets' insurrection" would have to be countered by something more than gunboats: it would require a programme of intellectual counter-revolution as well. Literature itself became a weapon in the ensuing struggle, invoked by The Irish Times in its appeal to the values which it associated with Shakespeare, but also by the architects of imperial policy in London. In the aftermath of the Rising, as the poetry and prose of the rebel leaders were widely circulated among a sympathetic American audience, H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett published essays critical of them in the United States. The poets' crazy dream was to be countered by some of the leading practitioners of modern English prose.55
Sixteen
Inventing Irelands
In theory, two kinds of freedom were available to the Irish: the return to a past, pre-colonial Gaelic identity, still yearning for expression if long-denied, or the reconstruction of a national identity, beginning from first principles all over again. The first discounted much that had happened, for good as well as ill, during the centuries of occupation; the second was even more exacting, since it urged people to ignore other aspects of their past too. The first eventually took the form of nationalism, as sponsored by Michael Collins, Éamon de Valera and the political élites; the second offered liberation, and was largely the invention of writers and artists who attempted, in Santayana's phrase, "to make us citizens by anticipation in the world that we crave".1 The nationalism of the politicians enjoyed intermittent support from a major artist such as W. B. Yeats, but eventually he grew tired of it; the liberation preached by the artists sometimes won the loyalty of the more imaginative political figures, such as Liam Mellows or Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington. Inevitably, neither model was sufficient unto itself: even its stoutest defenders were compelled by the brute facts of history to "borrow" some elements of the alternative version.
The problem with the "return to the source" model was clear enough: there was very little source left, just a scattered Irish-speaking community in the most westerly regions. Nor were members of that community especially impressed by the lure of nationalism: a group of Blasket islanders, gathered around a cottage hearth in Easter Week 1916, was brought the momentous news of the rebellion in Dublin. "Abair an focal republic i nGaoluinn" (Say the word republic in Irish), urged the mischievous Tomás Ó Criomhthainn; but the islanders had no word, only a local king known as an rí. "Agus is beag a chuir a soláthar imní ach oiread oraibh" (And it's little its attainment troubled ye, either), added the laconic Ó Criomhthainn.2 In his autobiography An tOiléanach (The Islandman), he described his feelings of dismay when first he stepped onto the Irish mainland, and felt himself in alien territory. One generation later, when Muiris Ó Súilleabhain stepped off the same boat onto the same quayside, his strange, island gait prompted the derisive question "Murab Éireannach thú, cad é thú?" (If you're not an Irishman, what are you?), to which he replied after some thought "Blascaodach" (A Blasketman).3 Gaelic would not easily be made equivalent to Irish.
These islanders and Gaeltacht-dwellers truly were the last Europeans, perched precariously on those very fastnesses where a whole civilization ran out of continent; and so they might have been seen to epitomize Europe at that point where it bordered on the emerging post-colonial world. "These strange men with receding foreheads, high cheek-bones and ungovernable eyes seem to represent some old type found on these few acres at the extreme edge of Europe", wrote Synge while among them, "where it is only in wild jests and laughter that they can express their loneliness and desolation".4 Synge's greatest play, even in its tide, can be read as a mockery of the presiding myths of the western, Eurocentric world; and his thwarting of generic expectations, in a comedy which concludes without the predicted marriage, was certainly an attempt to plunge his audience through the same experience of "cognitive dissonance" which he went through after setting foot on the islands. Weldon Thornton has persuasively argued that each of Synge's plays somehow eludes the generic stereotypes of tragedy or comedy, "representing as they do received western categories of respon
se". He observes very justly that Synge's aim was to give an honest reflection of "the complexity, perhaps even the incongruity and irrationality, of his characters' feelings or their milieu, without regard for whether the result fell into a recognizable genre".5
In The Aran Islands, Synge constructed a sort of pastoral, which had many of the classic features of earlier forays in Africanist or Orientalist mode: the reconstitution of the setting as a landscape of the individual consciousness; the recognition on the part of the visitor that he can understand more of the natives than they will ever know of him; a betrayed friendship with a sensitive local youth; a mandatory but largely wordless romantic infatuation with a native woman; a readiness to being mocked by the natives for being unmarried at such a ripe age; and, finally, a sad withdrawal from a world which increasingly takes on the contours of a dream.6
Synge's pastoralism, however, is not of the conventional western kind which is designed to occlude painful class differences: in his world, rather than have aristocrats play at being peasants, he effects a revolutionary reversal, which allows him to impute to the islanders an aristocratic mien and lightness of foot (just as, in Deirdre of the Sorrows, he can portray peasants in the garb of royalty). His island is a Kropot-kinian commune, wherein every man and woman becomes a sort of artist. Their work changes with the seasons, creating a wonderful versatility of body and of mind: and most of them can speak different languages. Inishmaan, the nearest analogy in Europe to the undeveloped world, affords "something of the artistic beauty of medieval life", whose artefacts "seem to exist as a natural link between the people and the world that is about them". When the meitheal oibre (voluntary work party) comes to a house to do the shared labour, work ceases to be such, becoming "a sort of festival" and the cottager "a host instead of an employer". On the neighbouring island of Inishmore, however, he notices the creeping class-consciousness of an "advanced" society: "the families here are gradually forming into different ranks".
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