Inventing Ireland

by Declan Kiberd

  In the south, such anti-partitionism as was voiced was feeble in the extreme: the factors which caused Protestants to leave were often the same considerations that impelled Catholics to take the boat as well – economic stagnation, boredom, a search for a more sexually liberal society, resentment against a culture of censorship. Mr. de Valera was as careful to befriend the professors of Trinity College as his predecessors had been to create Protestant senators: nevertheless, when he unambiguously announced in a broadcast to the United States two years after the passing of his Constitution by popular vote that "we are a Catholic nation",10 the members of the religious minority who had been reassured by the elevation of a co-religionist to presidential office might have been forgiven for wondering which of the gestures to take the more seriously.

  Twenty-Three

  Protholics and Cathestants

  In Saint Joan Shaw causes the heroine to say that, although the English soldiers may become devils incarnate when they touch French soil, in England – the place made for them by God – they behave honourably enough. She endorses national pride, while repudiating a chauvinism which can develop into imperialism. The English chaplain in the play is the most strident imperialist onstage: he believes that English nationalism is so perfect a code that it entitles its sponsors to impose themselves on other peoples as well.

  In previous plays, Shaw had offered similar portraits of a self-assured imperial psychology. Tom Broadbent in John Bull's Other Island had proclaimed it the mission of the English to place their capacity for government at the service of nations less fortunately endowed. How one nation could progress in freedom to become the facsimile of another is not a question which detains Broadbent. What was good for England is – must be – good for the world.

  The self-deceiving mentality which permitted a junta of robbers to live at peace with their consciences always fascinated Shaw, who was acutely alert to the part played by religious convictions in the process. It was, after all, in the name of religion that English armies made so many political conquests, afterward taking the markets as a reward from heaven.

  Shaw was well aware that the British monarchy was a Protestant institution. On coins the monarch was named defender of the faith (fidei defensor) and, therefore, the proper ruler of empire. As the product of a Protestant schooling in Ireland, however, Shaw must have wondered at the contradiction underlying a religion which sought to evangelize that empire with a faith whose first principle was the right to democratic individualism and private judgement. This was a paradox as glaring as Broadbent's enforced freedom. At the core of Shaw's thinking is the conviction that well-intentioned English duffers have managed to construct a world out of such unexamined contradictions, but that the edifice will crumble once the inconsistencies are exposed.

  The brand of Christianity brought by the British to places like Ireland or India could, in the right hands, become a powerful weapon of insurgent nationalism. "I am violently and arrogantly Protestant by family tradition", he boasted, "but let no English government count on my allegiance. I am English enough to be an inveterate Republican and Home Ruler".1

  On another occasion, he said he was "proud of being a Protestant, though Protestantism is to me a great historic movement of Reformation, Aspiration and serf-Assertion against spiritual tyranny rather than that organization of false gentility which so often takes its name in vain in Ireland".2 The bogus gentility of Dublin Protestants had led them to empty their religion of much of its spiritual content, making the Church of Ireland more a social club than a community of true believers. This thinning may have been attributable, at least in part, to a shrewd intuition by the ascendancy class that a politicized version of self-election could issue only in one slogan: Sinn Féin.

  That theological timidity troubled Shaw, who understood that it might eventually lead to the marginalization of the Protestant community in an Irish Free State which would badly need such people, if it were to become a pluralist democracy. He also foresaw how it could leave the way open for extremists of Northern Ireland to assume the leadership of Irish Protestantism, a development which proved even more disastrous than he had feared.

  The false gentility of southern Protestants had roots that went back to the eighteenth century. In the 1790s, Edmund Burke had written that the clashes in Ireland had less to do with popes than with potatoes. The Irish problem, as he understood it, was the resolution of a Protestant minority to reduce a Catholic majority to slavery under a military power, and thereafter to divide the public revenues, the result of general taxation, as a military booty solely among themselves:

  By the use that is frequently made of the term . . . the name Protestant becomes nothing more or better than the name of a persecuting faction, with a relation of some sort of theological hostility to others, but without any sort of ascertained tenets of its own, upon the ground of which it persecutes other men; for the patrons of this Protestant Ascendancy neither do, nor can by anything positive, define or describe what they mean by the word Protestant.3

  Shaw was simply rephrasing that idea, when he wrote that Irish Protestantism was "not then a religion but a side in a political faction; actuated less by theological principle than by class prejudice".4

  His remedy for this state of affairs might have surprised many socialists, who would have expected him to call on the Protestants to abandon their spiritual posturing and to admit the material nature of their interest in Ireland. Instead, in 1912 – the year which marked the foundation of the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force – Shaw called upon them to recover the lost contents of their faith and become again fully-fledged protesters. "What is wanted on both sides of the Irish Sea", he wrote in that year, "is a little real Protestantism".5 He saw the need for Protestant values, and not just token Protestants, at the centre of the Irish national and literary revival. Self-assertion against tyranny became, in Shaw's mind, the enabling principle of the modern nation-state. The education given the natives brought them to a point at which they could demonstrate how, even within its own set terms, the imperial code flagrantly contradicted itself.

  Shaw's Saint Joan is, therefore, not just a feminist play: it is also a sharp dismissal of one of the earliest exercises in English expansionism. The Maid's claim that the English are fine at home and awful overseas anticipates a famous assertion in Forster's A Passage to India (1924): "the original sound may be harmless, but the echo is always evil".6 In other words, the English in England behave with decency, but out in the colonies the rejects of that parent country offer only botched impersonations of the very people they have never managed to be. The result was what Burke and Shaw both described as a materialistic middle class posing as an aristocracy, falsifying themselves and inducing an echoing falseness in others. Forster showed in his novel how that echo could have lethal effects on those who heard it but could not identify it for what it was. Shaw's Joan has no such difficulty, and fights honourably to repulse the English to their own soil, on which they could be free to resume their true selves again.

  By casting his Joan as a Catholic, who just happens to be a sort of Protestant saint, Shaw rebuked not just British imperialism, but those of his compatriots foolish enough to equate "Catholic" with "nationalist", or to see in the national revival the promise of a final triumph for Catholic Ireland. Exposing imperial mindsets, the play also repudiates the answering narrowness of a certain kind of Catholic nationalism.

  The Palestinian writer Edward Said has complained that the study of imperialism as an issue was until quite recent times declared off-limits by most twentieth-century Anglo-American critics.7 English and American scholars worked in institutions often founded or funded with spoils of empire: and they were unlikely to bite the hand that feeds them.

  If imperialism has been little considered in Anglo-American scholarship, the study of cultural Protestantism has been treated as off-limits in modern Ireland. There are many reasons for this. For one thing, at a time when murder-gangs prowled the streets of Belfast and Derry
, genteel people shied away from any debate that savoured of the sectarian. Another explanation may lie in the fact that southern Protestantism puts a premium on private judgement and is correspondingly wary of making grandiose general statements about itself.8 In the infant state, Protestants were reticent in the assertion of their civil rights, adopting a live-and-let-live policy, and acting with such self-effacement that they have been all but effaced. This near-erasure was effected partly by the Catholic Church's Ne Temere decree, which forbids the children of mixed marriages to be raised as Protestants; by the collapse of many rural parishes; by migrations to England; and so forth.

  One consequence of this effacement may be the unspoken assumption by most literary critics that the Protestantism of leading Irish writers was only superficial, that it did not deeply colour their writings, and that, therefore, those who abandoned it could do so without the trauma registered by Joyce in the account of his own apostasy in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. If Joyce can be credited with annexing, for his own artistic purposes, the notion of epiphany or the Catholic theory of transubstantiation, then it is no great surprise that libraries are full of books with tides like Joyce Among the Jesuits or Joyce's Pauline Vision. These studies are all written in the conviction that Joyce remained obsessed by the religion which he professed to reject, but there is not a single full-length book yet written on the Protestant elements in the art of Shaw. The same might be said of each of the following: O'Casey, Beckett, Synge, Yeats. This state of things is profoundly if quite unintentionally insulting to these artists, since it implies that their religious experiences were as shallow as those of the timid fellow-Protestants whom they criticized so fiercely in their writings.

  A cursory inspection of their texts would reveal just how deeply they were imbued with Protestant values. Even the alleged thinness of southern Protestantism had a saving grace, for it threw its writers back upon their own resources. This may explain why Protestant Ireland continued to produce far more spiritually audacious artists than did Catholic Ireland, even – perhaps especially – after entering its slow decline in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The failure of Maynooth College, the national seminary founded in 1795, to produce a single theologian of international stature in its first century of existence was attributed by George Moore to the fact that "the Roman Catholic Church relies on its converts, for after two or three generations of Catholicism the intelligence dies".9 The Protestant intellectual, by contrast, lived in a state of perpetual anxiety and self-questioning, as one of the few remaining leaders of a pressured minority whose clergy had ceded control, but it was a state conducive to the creation of literature.

  In a mainly Catholic island, where the nostra of that faith were part of the air everyone breathed, few writers of Catholic background have cared to discuss the spiritual content of religion, preferring to focus (as Joyce did) on its social effects or its personal consequences. There is, of course, much writing about religion in Ireland, but, for all that, remarkably little religious writing, little spiritual probing in the literary form. What there is comes not so much from the Catholic side, as from Protestant-trained minds such as Shaw, Yeats, Beckett or O'Casey. The latter, for instance, always insists in his plays on self-responsibility as a Protestant virtue: in The Plough and the Stars, it is the drunken loyalist who finally sacrifices her life for Nora Clitheroe, while all around her Catholic neighbours speechify about Christian giving. The theatrical-ization of the nationalists evokes only O'Casey's distrust. In Juno and the Paycock his desire to strip away such symbolic artifice is implemented in the final removal from the stage of the few poor sticks of furniture which remain. The false consecration of the chalice by Harry Heegan at the central moments of The Silver lassie may also arise from O'Casey's scepticism about a religious cult of blood-sacrifice, which can so easily be invoked by war-mongers. In Red Roses For Me a countervailing form of responsible Christianity is sponsored by the Protestant clergyman, who endorses a socialist strike against exploitative factory-owners.

  Equally, Synge invented an Ireland which was a zone of displaced Protestantism. Finding his mother's evangelical fervour too great a burden to be borne, he propounded his own aesthetic version: "Soon after I had relinquished the Kingdom of God I began to take a real interest in the Kingdom of Ireland".10 In The Playboy of the Western World may be found a series of reworked biblical themes – as, for example, when Shawn Keogh leaves his coat in the hands of the men in the shebeen: "Well, there's the coat of a Christian man!"11 Christy, the Christ-like scapegoat, being presented with gifts by three village girls is a clear parody of the infant adored by the Magi . . . and so it is predictable that he should later ride an ass in triumphant entry after the sports, like Jesus on Palm Sunday, and that he should more generally take upon himself the "sins of the world". There is undeniable mockery in these manoeuvres, as if Synge were avenging himself on the rigid religion of his mother by having such unabashed pagans rehearse its themes: but that mockery is relatively light and gentle, compared to the savage handling of sacred Catholic references ("With the help of God, I did surely, and that the Holy Immaculate Mother may intercede for his soul").12

  That anti-clerical strand in Synge's thought erupts spectacularly in The Tinker's Wedding, where the tying-up of a priest in a sack was deemed too unholy a gesture for early Abbey audiences: but it is never far from the surface of each of his plays, which delight in putting sacred formulae to frankly secular uses. The Shadow of the Glen, in its very tide, recalls the biblical valley of darkness, with its intimations of dreadful evil and good shepherds. The Well of the Saints was originally called When the Blind See, but that underlying idea yields some very unholy conclusions: "The Lord protect us from the saints of God".13 Deirdre of the Sorrows, set in an undeniably pre-Christian world, makes much of those motifs which the later churches never fully Christianized: "by the sun and the moon and the stars, I thee wed".14 Synge remained obsessed by the Bible. There is a strongly biblical rhythm, tone and imagery to his language, and he was at all times fascinated by the idea of the Word.

  Little wonder, then, that his characters are often so anxious to bring their lives into conformity with a revered text ("and a story will be told forever"),15 though Synge was also aware, from his painful arguments with his mother, of the suffering to which this could give rise.

  There was nothing triumphalist about the cultural Protestantism of such writers. Far from it. As in the case of Joyce, their conscious use of religious terminology was often subversive of the codes from which they had ripped it. They were exemplary instances of the mind "employing the energy imparted by evangelical convictions to rid itself of the restraint which Evangelicalism had laid on the senses and intellect; on amusement, enjoyment, an; on curiosity, on criticism, on science".16 What distinguished them from Joyce, however, was the fact that so many of them came from families with ecclesiastical or rectory backgrounds – so many, indeed, that Vivian Mercier once joked that "the true purpose of the Irish Literary Revival was to provide alternative employment for the sons of clergymen after disestablishment had reduced the number of livings provided by the Church of Ireland".17

  In fact, it was the convulsions wrought by Darwinism and the Higher Criticism which left these intellectuals unable to embrace the faith of their ancestors along traditional lines. (Had Catholic priests and nuns been allowed to marry, it is arguable that the intellectual life of Catholic Ireland might have been enriched by their offspring: but, under the rules of the Catholic Church, this was impossible.) Refusing to follow the clergyman's calling, the scions of the rectory sought to aestheticize elements of Protestant belief, in the conviction that the place once held by the priest would now be taken by the literatus. As soon as the Bible had been reduced to mere literature, it was inevitable that writers would assume burdens once thought more appropriate to the leaders of religion. With the waning of Christian belief came a crisis in the spiritual leadership of the Protestant community, which passed from clerical to
lay intellectuals. The latter confidently expected to be held in the same esteem as the clergy had once been, and were often dismayed when their reluctance to preach the old beliefs led to their being disowned by family and by Anglo-Irish kindred.

  Caught in the no-man's-land between the two main island traditions, they attempted to "theorize" their position, and to construct Utopian schemes. The absence of a truly metropolitan culture in Dublin in the later nineteenth century, along with a centuries-old feeling of exclusion from real political influence over their land, was all the more conducive to such idealistic thinking. Standish O'Grady said "I have not come out from my own camp to join any other. I stand between the camps and call".18 One of the attractions of the ancient Gaelic world lay in the fact that such people could identify with it as they could never have identified with post-Reformation Gaelic Ireland. It was sufficiently remote and vague to be malleable to their current purposes, but it also provided – pagan rituals and all – the bedrock on which a common Irish culture had been built before later divisions. Yeats, deprived by Huxley and Tyndall of "the simple-minded religion of my childhood", made a new religion, "almost an infallible Church of poetic tradition", of a fardel of Celtic stories.19