Inventing Ireland (15 page)

Finn begins the third and final act behaving like an ageing fetishist, kissing the print left by Grania's foot upon the fields of Ireland. His desire has grown mimetic, being no more than a lust for the Grania whom he knows to be already wanted by Diarmuid. To Grania his real sin is malice, "putting a hedge between myself and Diarmuid". She rails against the unnatural bond laid on Diarmuid by his leader, and "he was a fool to make it, and a worse fool to keep it".
⁴¹
The result is that a king's daughter is living like a wandering tramp, an image of the Anglo-Irish gentry fallen upon hard times, like the Gaelic nobility which preceded them. Throughout the play, indeed, there is much talk of nobles experimenting with a life of beggary, just as the language of the play itself represents, in its homely directness, a critical attempt by Lady Gregory to explore the relation between the noble tale and the peasant Ireland in which it lingered. Diarmuid, having been tricked by the disguised messenger into fighting the King of Foreign, returns badly wounded.

When he regains consciousness, he believes that he is already dead and asks Finn to pardon him for an ill-remembered offence committed
in the past. All of his thoughts are about Finn, his former Comrade of the
blutbrüderschaft,
and not about Grania: "It would be a very foolish thing, any woman at all to have leave to come between yourself and myself. I cannot but laugh at that".
⁴²
Because his desire is only mimetic, Finn loses his interest in Grania at that very moment when Diarmuid seems to abandon her himself. She will have none of this, however, and insists that she will return to Finn:

He will think to come whispering to you, and you alone in the night time.
But he will find me there before him!
⁴³

In fact, her return is purely technical: at the close, she has so little respect for any of these pallid men that she is compelled
to crown herself
queen.

The mocking laugh at the conclusion, which may come from the dead Diarmuid, or even from his still-living comrades, is surely at the expense of Finn who says:

I thought to leave you and to go from you, and I cannot do it. For we three have been these seven years as if alone in the world . . . And now there are but the two of us left, and whether we love or hate one another, it is certain that I can never feel love or hatred for any other woman from this out, or you yourself for any other man.
⁴⁴

Grania is beyond such care: "there is not since an hour ago any sound that would matter at all, or be more to me than the squeaking of bats in the rafters, or the screaming of wild geese overhead". As she walks royally out, the peal of laughter stops as suddenly as it started, for she has in that very gesture invented and given birth to herself. Abandoned by male suitors who love only their own reasons for "loving" her, she steps outside their discredited system altogether. A world filled with male fantasists leaves
women no choice but to get real: "It is women are said to change, and they do not, but it is men that change and turn as often as the wheel of the moon. You filled all Ireland with your outcry wanting me, and now, when I am come into your hand, your love is rusted and worn out".
⁴⁵
That could have been the voice of the child who arrived, an unwanted and unloved female, at
Roxborough House in 1852.

Grania
was never performed in Lady Gregorys lifetime. She said that a three-act play with only three characters would tax even the most indulgent audience: but it may well be that the public ventilation of its very private themes would have taxed the author most of all.

At the outset, the aspiring young poet W. B. Yeats was sure that a literary career of any worth would only be possible in London. Ireland, for him, would be an "imaginary homeland", the sort of place endlessly invented and reinvented by exiles who fear that, if they do not give it a local habitation in words, it may entirely disappear. There was some justification for that fear.
Friedrich Engels in a letter to Marx had described post-Famine Ireland as "an utter desert which nobody wants", a place with a number of big houses "surrounded by enormous, wonderfully beautiful parks, but all around is waste land".
¹
The exiled patriot
John Mitchel concurred: "the very nation that I knew in Ireland is broken and destroyed; and the place that knew it shall know it no more".
²
Yeats may eventually have returned to Ireland tike so many exiles before and since, simply to make sure that it was still there.

But first in London he busied himself with the invention of a literary movement and the shaping of a post-Parnellite culture. He had his poems published by a prestigious house, in whose offices he wore the black cloak of a professional Celt. (Some said that this gave him a priestly appearance, appropriate to the leader of a new cult: but the satirist George Moore quipped that it made him look like an umbrella left behind after a picnic.) At all events, London was the crucible in which the elements to make a modern Ireland were distilled On the streets of that city, diverse persons and types met and conspired. Their haunts were the
Irish Literary Society (founded in 1891), the Gaelic League (1893), and of course the Gaelic Athletic Association (set up in 1884). The political activists of a later period as well as creative artists, first formed an idea of Ireland at these meetings: the list would include
Michael Collins, first a young post office clerk but subsequently to become one of the most lethal guerrilla commanders of the new century;
Desmond FitzGerald, 1916 rebel and minister of
the first Free State Government;
Pádraic Ó Conaire, author of the first novel in the Irish language;
W. P. Ryan, one of the great crusading journalists of his day and a constant orchestrator of significant meetings and clubs.

This loose federation of personalities was one of the very first groups of decolonizing intellectuals to formulate a vision of their native country during a youthful sojourn in an imperial capital – and then return to implement it. Many would follow their example in other parts of the world, but the Irish had only one precedent to which to turn for inspiration: the invention of the American republic by
Washington and Jefferson, and of its democratic culture by Whitman and Emerson.

Yeats was perhaps the most gifted and charismatic member of that group of exiles. In the fate of Wilde and Shaw – great artists reduced to the status of mere entertainers by a public too scared to confront their radical ideas with full seriousness – he found a warning for himself and for his friends. If they were to create an authentic movement, Irish writers must commune above all with themselves and with their own people. They must go back to Dublin and there found a national theatre and publishing houses, in the attempt to gather around them a truly national audience.

Most writers of the Irish Revival identified their childhood with that of the Irish nation: those hopeful decades of slow growth before the fall into murderous violence and civil war. In their subsequent autobiographies, childhood was identified as a kind of privileged zone, peopled with engaging eccentrics, doting grandmothers and natural landscapes. What they were describing, of course, was childhood in a colony, and there could have been few experiences as intense as that of family life in such a setting. The subject people owed no allegiance to the state, its courts, its police, its festivals, and so all the energies which might in a normal society have been dispersed over such wide areas were instead invested in the rituals of family life. As
G. K. Chesterton remarked "wherever there is Ireland there is the family, and it counts for a great deal".
¹
That comment was made after a visit to the family of
John Butler Yeats in
London, proving that habits so deeply rooted survived the experience of emigration, even among those like the Yeatses whose background was in the minor landowning class. The neighbours of the Yeats family in London, hearing the raised voices of father and son, sometimes falsely concluded that the two were locked in a violent quarrel, when in fact they were engaged in animated discussion of the family's life. Their friends in Blenheim Road could not understand, in the words of
Lily Yeats, that this was simply "the Irish way".
²

Whenever sons revolted against fathers in a revival text, the confrontation was soon metaphorized as the story of Ireland. The writer, typically, began the autobiography as a subject in the colony, clashed with and surmounted a father, and ended as the citizen of a free state or of a state intent on freeing itself. Beginning as a nonentity, he or she grew into an Irish person. Like Americans of the same period, me Irish were not so much born as
made,
gathered around a few simple symbols, a flag, an anthem, a handful of evocative phrases. In the process, childhood – like Ireland itself – had to be reinvented as a zone of
innocence, unsullied and intense, from which would emerge the free Irish protagonist.

The celebration of the peasant by artists like Yeats was intimately connected with these aspirations: one of his favourite rhymes was "wild" and "child". It was a legacy of the
English Romantics, whose peasants achieved Coleridge's ideal of carrying the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood. The unselfconsciousness of the countryman's sense of place, as in the poetry of
William Allingham, permitted Yeats to question the more programmatic and "conscious patriotism" of Davis and Young Ireland. For Yeats, as for Synge, the child's earliest feelings were for the colour of a known and concrete locality, which even a baby could express in gibberish and syllables of no meaning. As a boy in Sligo, Yeats had often thought how terrible it would be to go away and live where nobody would know his story or the story of his family. "Years afterwards", he wrote, "when I was ten or twelve years old and in London, I would remember Sligo with tears, and when I began to write it was there I hoped to find my audience". From that moment on, Sligo became a place sacred to the youth who longed to hold a sod of earth in his hand. "It was some old race instinct", he recalled, "like that of a savage".
³

At the Godolphin School in London, he felt himself a stranger among the other boys: "there was something in their way of saying the names of places that made me feel this".
⁴
The Sligo of his early childhood became a dream landscape, a never-never-land to which it was hopeless to expect to return, "for I have walked on Sinbad's yellow shore and never shall another's hit my fancy". For Yeats, that fall came early with the enforced emigration of his family to London, in order that his artist-father could pursue an already-flagging career. "Here you are somebody", said a Sligo aunt to the nine-year-old departee, "there you will be nobody at all".
⁵
It was a fall from a pastoral landscape into a world of urban blight, war and treachery, as he would recall in the later poem "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen":

We too had many pretty toys when young:
A law indifferent to blame or praise,
To bribe or threat. . .
⁶

The deeper the world plunged into the chaos of imperial wars and freedom struggles, the more necessary did it become for the poet to secure the Sligo idyll against accusations of
naïveté,
and the harder. The more he sought to recapture the dream, the more it seemed to elude
him. When the much older man finally brought his newly-wed English wife on a boat-trip across Lough Gill, he failed ignominiously to locate, much less land on, the lake isle of Innisfree: a sign, perhaps, that the past in that simple-minded version was not easily recoverable.

Some of the less sophisticated texts of the early
Yeats were attempts to deny civilization and its discontents by escaping to the Happy Islands of Oisín and
Tír na nÓg, the land of the forever young. Similarly, the short stories of
Patrick Pearse often stressed the redemptive strangeness of the child, bearing to fallen adults messages from another world. The paradox was that these texts, which so nourished Irish national feeling, were often British in origin, and open to the charge of founding themselves on the imperial strategy of infantilizing the native culture. What was lacking in them was what Yeats would later call the vision of evil, without which art was merely superficial, unable to chronicle the tragedy of growth and change.

It was just such an unreal state of changlessness which the writer seemed to endorse in his 1894 play
The
Land of Heart's Desire.
Here a young man still in his twenties used a fairy-child to voice his disenchantment with the ageing process:

But I can lead you, newly-married bride,
Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise,
Where nobody gets old and godly and grave . . .
⁷

It is significant that when the young wife dies in the play, the child leaves the stage: experience has not so much been confronted as denied in this Celtic version of
Peter Pan.
All this is in keeping with the tendency of British authors of the late nineteenth century to confuse innocence with inexperience, whereas the earlier
romantics Blake and
Wordsworth had taught that the root-meaning of innocence (
in
-
nocentes)
was openness to the injuries risked in a full life. In the judgement of one critic, after the novels of
Charles Dickens in the mid-century, "children no longer grow up and develop into the maturities of Wordsworth's
Prelude . .
. The image is transfigured into the image of an innocence which dies ... of life extinguished, of life that is better extinguished, of life, so to say, rejected, negated at its very root".
⁸

This is a fair account also of the landscape of early Yeatsian desire, where childhood is surrounded by a
cordon sanitaire
of nostalgia and escape. It is a world neither of change nor of growth: intense, unpurged feelings for childhood are not submitted to the test of adult life or, for that matter, of childhood itself. What the child actually
is
or
wants
means nothing in such literature, for this is the landscape of the adult heart's desire. Just as a sexist portraiture depicted women not as they are but as men wish them to be, so here the child is reduced to an expendable cultural object. The inhabitants of Tír na nÓg do not grow up, and this is not because they don't want to but because their adult creator (for the time being, anyway) prefers to keep them and his readers ignorant of a world based on sexual suffering and social injustice. This early Yeatsian attitude is based on the widespread but false assumption mat childhood exists outside the culture in which it is produced as a state of unspoilt nature, and on the related assumption mat children's literature can preserve for all values which are constantly on the verge of collapse. So, as a result of Yeats's equation between child and unselfconscious peasant, childhood is recommended as the zone in which the older forms of culture now jeopardized by modernity are preserved in oral tradition.

This has the unintended but undeniable effect of infantilizing the native culture. Within British writing, there had long been a link between children's fiction and the colonial enterprise, which led to an identification of the new world with the infantile state of man.
Captain Marryat, that ultimate purveyor of lands of heart's desire, had once exclaimed: "what a parallel there is between a colony and her mother country and a child and its parent!"
⁹
All through the nineteenth century, the Irish had been treated in the English media as childlike – "broths of boys" veering between tears and smiles, quick to anger and quick to forget – unlike the stable Anglo-Saxon. In the words of historian
Perry Curtis: "Irishmen thus shared with virtually all the non-white peoples of the empire the label childish, and the remedy for unruly children in most Victorian households was a proper licking".

In an age when children had few legal rights, the Irish and the child were victims of a similar duplicity of official thought. Present-day readers are often amazed at the fact that those same Victorian adults who wept copiously for the innocent outraged children of Dickens belonged to a generation which still sent children up into chimneys and down into coal-mines. The powerful have an instinctive desire to be entertained, and even accused, by their subjects. How else to explain the preponderance of female forms in the art galleries of a world so clearly run in the interests of men? Or the continuing popularity of Irish writers and media-personalities in England? The manipulation of childhood by sentimental Victorians was just another example of such functional hypocrisy: and it was no accident that the
cul-de-sac
into
which writers on childhood were led was blown open not in England but in
Mark Twain's
United States.

Such renewal could not come from nineteenth century Ireland, because to write book-length celebrations of an Irish childhood was to flirt dangerously with the stereotype of the childlike Hibernian peasant. A shrewd awareness of this probably accounts for Yeats's growing reluctance to exploit the image of the child after the comparative success in the London theatre of
The Land of Heart's Desire.
Revival writers were caught in a double bind. Disenchanted with the growing murderousness of their land, they sought relief amidst the scenes of childhood memory, only to discover that the very act of dreaming that dream was itself tainted with the politics of Anglo-Irish relations. The inspired solution turned out to be part of the underlying problem.

So Yeats, though he devotes more than seventy pages of
autobiography to "Reveries Over Childhood and Youth", uses the space to challenge English preconceptions by depicting himself as a gifted, mature child among rather juvenile, derivative English boys. At school in London during election time, he was amused at the way in which classmates covered the walls with the opinions relayed by their fathers from newspapers, whereas he, an artists son, thought things out for himself. One of his recurrent narrative strategies is to reverse many traditional manoeuvres. Where the English had used the Irish as a foil to set off John Bull's virtues, Yeats now deploys the English boys as a measure of Irish intellectual superiority. He marvels, for instance, at the contrast between his father's view that it was bad manners for a parent to speak crossly to a child and the widespread English belief in discipline, law and force. Yeats would later repent of his rather English-style sentimentalization of childhood in
The Land of Heart's Desire,
but the writer who turns on Christmas Day 1914 from a war-torn world to "Reveries Over Childhood and Youth" finds in the past only suffering of a kind that led him in the first place to evoke it. This may sharpen the focus on an apparent contradiction in the autobiography between his nostalgia for Sinbad's yellow shore and the following thoughts from the opening chapter "Indeed, I remember little of childhood but its pain, I have grown happier with every year of life, as though gradually conquering something in myself, for certainly my miseries were not made by others but were a part of my own mind".
¹⁰
The poet may have been too forgiving in this instance, for some of his troubles were caused by the puritanical gloom and inconsiderate handling which he experienced among the
Pollexfens, his mothers people in Sligo. Permanently afraid of both uncle and aunt, the young boy
confused grandfather William Pollexfen with God, praying that he might punish him for his sins.

Pollexfen himself was something of an eccentric, who could not bear to hear the tapping sound made by the children with spoons as they removed the top from an egg. He chastened them with an alternative, and of course superior, method:

His way was to hold the egg-cup firmly on its plate with his left hand, then with a sharp knife in his right hand to behead the egg with one blow. Where the top of the egg went to was not his business. It might hit a grandchild or the ceiling. He never looked ...
¹¹

The Pollexfens passed on their propensity for gloomy introspection to Willie, who was sometimes so filled with "hobgoblin fancies" that his aunts wondered whether the boy was in possession of all his faculties. This judgement would be echoed years later by London neighbours who wondered why the nice young Yeats girls used to walk down Blenheim Road "with the mentally afflicted young gentleman".

Small wonder that the poet in middle age could write of:

. . . that toil of growing up;
The ignominy of boyhood; the distress
Of boyhood changing into man . . .
¹²

or that the old man could write (in an imitation from the Japanese):

Seventy years have I lived,
Seventy years man and boy,
And never have I danced for joy. . .
¹³

For one of his earliest recollections had been of his grateful surprise when great-uncle
William Middleton had said: "We should not make light of the troubles of children. They are worse than ours, because we can see the end of our trouble, and they can never see any end".
¹⁴
As a boy, Yeats made a mental note never to talk as grown-up people do of the happiness of childhood. This returns us to the question already asked in another way: how can these childhood ignominies be reconciled with nostalgia for the Sligo of Yeats's youth?