Inventing Ireland (19 page)

In his attempt, Yeats was able to invoke the ancient Gaelic bards as he tried to educate an English-speaking audience; but even more stunning is his insistence on self-explanation and autocriticism within the poem itself. He shared with Whitman the lonely pioneer's need to talk to himself, to review his own work, to become his own first and
ideal reader. Both men did not just say things: they also said why these things were appropriate to a national poet. They affected to discuss their own performances with the implied nation of readers in an unbuttoned fashion seldom possible within the English poetic tradition. The poets became their own critics, even as they urged their readers to become their own poets.

A consciousness which liberates a national idea by means of a renovated style lives in eternal peril: that, after humiliating failures to reproduce itself in the material world, it may become an end in itself. The beautiful soul, too good for this world, ends up experiencing society only as an irritant on the fringe of awareness, and those who began in hopes of recreating the conscience of a race may finally settle for defending a wearied sensibility. That is the progress of many a revivalist autobiography, not least that of Yeats. He started out in the conviction that texts by Synge, Lady Gregory and himself would provide the foundation for "the idea of a nation":
³³
much later, he sadly concluded that he must settle for expressing "the individual". One consequence of this was that Yeats, like Whitman, could never write a satisfactory novel. Nor, truth to tell, could the great Irish or American novelists. Joyce and Beckett, like
Melville and
Hawthorne, so transformed the genre that the characteristic narrative in both cultures was asocial, the ongoing monologue. Such monologues originated in a puritan tradition of anxious self-scrutiny, of every person being his or her own priest.

The crucial passages in a book like
Moby Dick
or
Ulysses
are written as soliloquy: and the great poems by Whitman and Yeats are based on introspective self-analysis. The Yeats who saw poetry as a confession by one side of his personality to the other clearly operated in this way, much like the Protestant child who awakened to the accusing voice of conscience in the opening pages of his autobiography. In many late lyrics, Yeats sought to "cast out remorse" as a prelude to the moment when the body blazed and he could celebrate it. "I sing the body electric" proclaimed Whitman in launching an ecstatic catalogue of bodily parts: and Yeats praised "the thinking of the body" in a democratic equality of matter and mind. For each poet, the
decolonization of the body was a task almost as important as the decolonization of the native culture: those two freedoms went together. If the body was a metaphor for the state, then its repossession in an epic mode meant as much to Whitman as to Yeats and Joyce: it was part of their attempt to construct themselves as national artists.

Nineteenth-century American literature was such a clear instance of a decolonizing culture that it would have been amazing if its writers did not exert a tremendous influence on the makers of the Irish revival. The influence of 'Whitman on Yeats is perhaps the most striking of all. In the 1904 issue of
Samhain,
the journal of his national theatre society, Yeats remarked that a national literature "is the work of writers who are moulded by the influences that are moulding their country, and who write out of so deep a life that they are accepted there in the end".
³⁴
This seems a deliberate echo of
Whitman's famous declaration that "the proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it".
³⁵
In the 1904 essay, Yeats went on to say that the initial relationship may be adversarial, since whenever a country produces a man of genius he is never like that country's immediate idea of itself "When I was a boy, six persons who, alone out of the whole world it may be, believed Walt Whitman a great writer, sent him a message of admiration, and of those names four were English and two were Irish, my father's and Professor Dowden's. It is only in our own day that America has begun to prefer him to Lowell, who is not a poet at all".
³⁶
Though Yeats would later claim that Whitman, like Emerson, lacked "the vision of evil", he never ceased to regard the American as a test-case, devoting his analysis of Phase Six in
A Vision
to Whitmans attempt to reconcile individualism with communal ideals: which is to say that he used him as a sort of sounding-board in his own internal struggle between "freedom" and "necessity", self and society.

Both Yeats and Whitman were initially more popular in England than in their home countries. Amy Lowell accused Whitman of playing the wild man or stage Yank and thus of appealing to recent immigrants whose America is large, simple, and had to be remade from day to day, i.e., those whose America had to be blatantly asserted rather than effortlessly assumed. The same strictures against Yeats as professional Celt were, of course, offered by Joyce and subsequent writers in Ireland. Yet both poets were far more subtle than such a critique implied: Whitman's theory of poetic "suggestiveness" is close to the Yeatsian doctrine of "the half-said thing".
³⁷
Their poems are founded on a necessary contradiction: they celebrate a nation's soul, while at the same time insisting that it has yet to be made. The tendency of many of Yeats's poems to begin with an emphatic statement only to end in self-questioning offers a variant on Whitman's theory that it is the reader, rather than the poem, who needs to be complete.

Whitman mythologized himself, as Yeats later would, by pursuit of a mask, realizing what his disciple would put into words: that the poet is never the bundle of accident that sits down to breakfast, but one who
speaks through a phantasmagoria. Both described their ambitions in bardic terms, invoking the example of
Homer and Shakespeare in their new national contexts: and both wrote their greatest texts out of the subsequent tragedy and disappointments of civil war. Whitman saw himself as counsellor of president and people: and so did Yeats. Both assumed intimacy with their personal lives on the part of their readers, expecting even such esoterica as Whitmanian
phrenology or Yeatsian gyres to be indulged and understood. Both, experiencing themselves as media for unseen forces which spoke through them, staked their claim as "representative men", as types of a nation. Yet the traditions which they pioneered were also international, in the sense that they were certain that the conditions which produced them and their poems could be repeated in other places. Yeats was indeed an exemplar to Indian poets like
Rabindranath Tagore, as was Whitman to many
Latin Americans including
Pablo Neruda. Thus was born "the international theme". The Irishman, no less than the American, was the heir of all the ages, creating not just a national poetic but also a new species of man.

There was no shortage of advice for Yeats as he embarked on his project. Many cautioned him that the national longing for form could be appeased only by a return to the native language. Irish, however, had been in decline for centuries. Ever since the 1650s, it had largely ceased to be a medium in which an intellectual life was possible, becoming the language of the poor and, in truth, a decisive mark of their poverty The setting-up of the
National Schools in the 1830s (schools in which English was both the main subject and the sole medium of instruction) dealt another grievous blow, as did O'Connell's insistence that children be taught English as a language more fitted to the modern world of business, professional activity and, of course, possible emigration. It was, however, the Famine which arguably did most damage of all.

No sooner did the demise of Irish seem likely than various antiquarian societies were founded often by interested Protestant gentlemen who wished to assert the distinctiveness of Gaelic culture even as their own professional activities often served to integrate Ireland ever more fully with Britain. A remarkable number sprung up in the Famine decade, including the
Archaeological Society (1840) and the
Celtic Society (1845), yet none of them was committed to the preservation or revival of the Irish language. The interest was strictly antiquarian: manuscripts were collected, studied and translated but that was all. Of the
Gaelic Union, still active in the latter part of the nineteenth century, it was caustically observed that its discussions and publications were
conducted in the English language. None of these considerations blunted the ardour of those who preached a "return to the source" available only in the energies and potentials of the ancestral language. On the opposing side were to be found those who argued for a further integration with Britain, then at the apex of the modern world system: these contended that only by cosmopolitanism of the kind which they professed could Ireland become a truly modern state. Put like this, the argument might seem to have been conducted in familiar terms of tradition versus modernity, but this was not quite so: at a deeper, more interesting, level, the debate was about how best to modernize.

Modernity, after all, was not a state which the Irish could choose or reject at will: to be Irish was to be modern in the sense that the Irish were seeking to find a home for themselves after a period of chaos and disruption. The crisis at the imperial centre had been transferred to the colonial periphery, where drastic juxtapositions of wealth and poverty, of the advanced and primitive, were the order of the day. England could insulate itself from many developing conflicts and then confront them at a safer remove in its colonies: the problem was that, all too often, the English would fail to understand the debates in the colonies in their own terms. English historians and commentators would translate the challenge posed by the Gaelic League back into the familiar binarism of tradition against modernity, rural versus urban, culture as opposed to industry. This, however, was not at all how the Irish Inlanders saw things: had this analysis been true, they would simply have been making common cause with the most backward and conservative elements in English aristocratic tradition. They, on the other hand had learned from Thomas Davis of the vital link between culture and industry, and so they opted for a both/and philosophy rather than the either/or binarism of imperial theory. The Gaelic League did indeed wish to revive Irish as a prelude to a recovered national pride and economic prosperity, but its methods
–
mass democratic action, workers' education, mingling of the sexes on a basis of equality at free classes and summer schools – were anything but conservative. The League was in fact responsible for organizing the first great industrial parades held on St. Patrick's Day.

The cultural movements to which the League gave rise also refused to succumb to simplistic notions of tradition and innovation as opposed entities. Patrick Pearse's call for Gaelic artists to get in simultaneous touch with Old Irish literature and with the mind of contemporary Europe would be one instance,
¹
and his conflation of ancient Gaelic systems of fosterage with the educational theories of
Maria Montessori might be another. Even the aesthete and playwright J. M. Synge contributed to the new both/and thinking with a proposal that a complex system of railways be constructed across the island which would convey workers from their homes in healthy country cottages to built-up factory sites for the day's labour and back home again in the evenings.
²
That blueprint seems to anticipate the idea of the "electronic cottage" which would be advanced many decades later by ecologically-minded socialists.

At the root of these proposals was a sense, common to their authors, of the
Irish movement as an alternative to the values epitomized by London. Regarding themselves as a new centre, they refused to cathect the margins so that the English could persist in seeing themselves as central Instead, they insisted, like Buck Mulligan in
Ulysses,
that Ireland could he the
omphalos,
the navel-point. The centre of gravity in the artistic world was indeed passing from London to Dublin.

Even more audacious was another related idea: that London was not just provincializing but itself provincial Power in the emerging world system was always elsewhere: London itself was filled with characters looking nervously over their shoulders to distant exemplars in Paris or New York. If there was no longer any absolute centre anywhere, there was clearly no point in remaining the province of a province. Better by far, for those who found themselves at a nodal point in a webbed network, to assert a proud centrality, at least for themselves. For most of the nineteenth century, and for some time before that, England and the English had been presented to Irish minds as the very epitome of the human norm. Now it began to be clear that, far from being normal, England's was an exceptionally stressed society, whose vast imperial responsibilities were discharged only at an immense psychological and social cost.

In some respects, the invention of modern Ireland had far more in common with the state-formation of other European countries such as Italy or France. In other ways, the analogies – especially in the domain of culture – would be with the emerging peoples of the decolonizing world. The debates about language revival, like the arguments about nationality and cosmopolitanism in literature, anticipated those which would later be conducted in Africa and
Asia. One abiding difference, however, which left the Irish experience unique, was the sheer proximity of the imperial power, as a not-always-appreciated model, as a source of ideas, and as a market for surplus theories and labour.

Few of these comparisons and contrasts were available to Irish writers at the time. When some comparisons were finally made, they were mostly cast in terms of Britain and Europe: so it may be useful here, having considered the ways in which the Gaelic League was representative of the forces of state-formation in Western Europe, to widen the angle of vision and analyse the forces in Ireland which prefigured those in the "developing" world.