Inventing Ireland (20 page)

The Irish writer has always been confronted with a choice. This is the dilemma of whether to write for the native audience – a risky, often thankless task – or to produce texts for consumption in Britain and North America. Through most of the nineteenth century, artists tended to exploit far more of Ireland than they expressed. Cruder performers resorted to stage-Irish effects, to the rollicking note and to "paddy-whackery", but even those who sought a subtler portraiture often failed, not so much through want of talent as through lack of a native audience. Most of these writers came, inevitably, from the upper classes and their commerce with the full range of Irish society was very limited.

The audience for most writing was primarily in England, and its expectations had to be satisfied. Occasionally, a writer like
William Carleton might spring from the common people to real international success: but that success, in removing the artist from his own people into the ranks of the "classes", would often seem like a form of betrayal. This was why a group at the end of the century came to the conclusion that, if they were to create a truly national literature, they must also gather a national audience. If they were to invent Ireland, they must first invent the Irish. "Does not the greatest poetry always require a people to listen to it?" asked Yeats,
¹
whose dream was to achieve with the Irish masses the sort of
rapport
enjoyed in the previous century only by the political leaders Daniel O'Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell.

The very success of both of these statesmen posed a problem, for neither had promoted the Irish language. O'Connell, though fluent in it, said that he could witness without a sigh the gradual disuse of Irish as it made way for the "superior utility" of English in matters of business and politics
²
: and Parnell, a Protestant gentleman educated at Cambridge, never had occasion to learn the language. O'Connell had chosen to use English at
monster meetings attended by Irish speakers,
on the shrewd understanding that his immediate audience was converted and that his need was to move
English readers of his words in the next mornings newspaper. Almost inexorably, English had become
the
language in which the Irish nationalist case was made: a knowledge was essential for rebels who sought to defend themselves in court or for those agitators who wrote threatening letters to landlords.
³
The very notion of a modern nation is of a community, few of whose members can see or know one another, and who are thus bonded less by their massed bodies than by the abstract mechanism of print-technology. "Print language is what invents nationalism", observes Benedict Anderson, "and not a particular language
per se":
⁴
and so Irish, being largely part of an oral culture, was supplanted by English, the logical medium of newspapers, and of those tracts and literary texts in which Ireland would be invented and imagined. If the colonial administration justified itself by waving pieces of paper bearing "tides" to occupied land, then the resistance movement would have to come up with its own set of documents to make its countervailing claim.

The literature so produced would base itself on a return to the people, the "hillside men" who were charmed by the
hauteur
of Parnell, a landlord who had gone against his own class. In this thrilling example, Yeats could find a model for the movement he hoped to lead: and so he wrote in October 1901:

All Irish writers have to decide whether they will write as the upper classes have done, not to express but to exploit this country, or join the intellectual movement which has raised the cry that was heard in Russia in the seventies, the cry "to the people". Moses was little good to his people until he had killed an Egyptian; and for the most part a writer or public man of the upper classes is useless to this country till he has done something that separates him from his class.
⁵

Accordingly, in the idealism of youth, Yeats had tried in
The Wandering of Oisin
to recreate a Gaelic golden age, but working from "a version of a version" of the Gaelic original at his seat in the
British Museum, he produced only the rather derivative "Celtic colourings" of a
late-romantic English poem.
⁶
The problem was the same one that he had diagnosed in the patriotic ballads of Thomas Davis and Young Ireland: "they turned away from the unfolding of an Irish tradition, and borrowed the mature English methods of utterance and used them to sing of Irish wrongs or preach of Irish purposes. Their work was never wholly satisfactory, for what was Irish in it looked ungainly in an
English garb and what was English was never perfectly mastered, never wholly absorbed into their being".
⁷
The themes might have been patriotic but the forms were borrowed sedulously from the English romantics: a complaint which would be repeated by J. M. Synge, when he castigated the "bad art" often favoured by the Irish Irelander, "imitations of fourth-rate English poetry and nineteenth-century Irish novels".
⁸

In exalting the fight against England into a self-sustaining tradition, the leaders of the previous century had largely forgotten what it was that they were fighting for: a distinctive culture of folktales, dances, sports, costumes, all seamlessly bound by the Irish language. This grave error became clear to a young Protestant named Douglas Hyde, a rectory child at Frenchpark, County Roscommon, who learned from humble cottiers in the fields around his parents' home the idioms and lore of a culture quite different from that of the Anglo-Irish drawing-room. By the time he had entered Trinity College, Hyde was an enthusiast: asked by a bemused fellow-student if he could actually speak this exotic language of which he talked so movingly, he responded "I dream in Irish".
⁹
In 1892, his ideas came to fruition in a famous lecture which was to be Ireland's declaration of cultural independence, analogous to
Ralph Waldo Emerson's epoch-making address on "The American Scholar".

Hyde's gospel was epitomized by one word: deanglicization. He argued that previous leaders had confused politics and nationality, and had abandoned Irish civilization while professing with utter sincerity to fight for Irish nationalism. He sought to restore self-respect to Irish people, based on a shared rediscovery of the national culture: far from being "the badge of a beaten race", as Matthew Arnold had called it, the Irish language should be spoken henceforth with pride. Hyde's suggestion met with much cynicism and much amusement. Society ladies on meeting Hyde would whisper to friends that "he cannot be a gentleman because he speaks Irish": and even those more sympathetic to the language were often irritated by Hyde's wide-eyed fervour.
¹⁰
George Moore wickedly remarked that whenever in his public speeches Hyde reverted to his incoherent brand of English, it was easy to see why his greatest desire was to make Irish the first official language.
¹¹

But the young Yeats was profoundly impressed, on hearing Hyde's songs sung by haymakers in Connacht fields who were quite unaware that their author was passing: in such a moment, Yeats saw the return of a learned art to people's craft. Hyde truly had the capacity to make Ireland once again interesting to the Irish. Fired by his example, Yeats
hoped for "a way of life in which the common man has some share in imaginative art. That this is the decisive element in the attempt to revive the Irish language I am quite certain".
¹²
He dreamed of a literary form so pure that it had not been indentured to any cause, whether of nation or of art, a form so fitted to a people's expressive ensemble that it would seem but an aspect of daily life.

Yeats wrote: "In Ireland, where the Gaelic tongue is still spoken, and to some little extent where it is not, the people live according to a tradition of life that existed before commercialism, and the vulgarity founded upon it; and we who would keep the Gaelic tongue and Gaelic memories and Gaelic habits of mind would keep them, as I think, that we may some day spread a tradition of life that makes neither great wealth nor great poverty, that makes the arts a natural expression of life, that permits even common men to understand good art and high thinking, and to have the fine manners these things can give". He went on:

Almost everyone in Ireland, on the other hand, who comes from what are called the educated and wealthy classes ... seeks ... to establish a tradition of life, perfected and in part discovered by the English-speaking peoples, that has made great wealth and great poverty, that would make the arts impossible were it not for the sacrifice of a few who spend their lives in the bitterest of protest. . .
¹³

This line of approach impressed many readers in England, too, who saw in it an interesting development of Matthew Arnold's critique of the specialist barbarism of the commercially-minded middle class. In seeking to express Ireland, these writers also hoped to challenge the culture of commercial exploitation in England: rather than have the Irish imitate the worst of English ways, they hoped to bring around a time when the English could emulate the finest Irish customs.

The invention of their idea of Ireland by Hyde and his friends happened, it should be noted, at the same time as English leaders were redesigning the image of England, in the decades between the 1880s and the
Great War. These were the years when Queen Victoria, recovering from the republican challenge of Dilke and from her own grief after bereavement, restored a dimension of public pageantry to the monarchy, with much ancient costumery, archaic carriages and historical symbolism. Her 1887 jubilee proved so successful that it was repeated ten years later in 1897, and this prompted Irish nationalists in the following year, under the guidance of
Maud Gonne, W. B. Years
and James Connolly, to mount a similar counter-commemoration of the rebellion of 1798. Yeats said in March of 1898: "This year the Irish people will not celebrate, as England did last year, the establishment of an empire that has been built on the rapine of the world".
¹⁴
The new mania in England for erecting statues to historic figures was also emulated by the Irish, who began at once to collect funds for a massive monument to Wolfe Tone (as if a state which still did not exist were already rehearsing its consolidation by ceremonial recollections of the revolutionary struggle). Both the jubilee-cult and the statuary were relatively new phenomena, and mocked for their sentimentality by the young James Joyce in
Dubliners,
but it is easy to understand the function which they served.

The world was changing more in those thirty years than it had since the death of Christ. All over Europe leaders sought to reassure peoples, gone giddy from the speed of the changes, with images of stability. Part of the modernization process was the emergence of nation-states, which often arose out of the collapse of the old ways of life and so were badly in need of legitimation: this was afforded by the deliberate invention of traditions, which allowed leaders to ransack the past for a serviceable narrative.
¹⁵
In this way, by recourse to a few chosen symbols and simple ideas, random peoples could be transformed into Italians or Irish, and explain themselves by a highly-edited version of their history. Gaelic Ireland had retained few institutions or records after 1601 to act as a brake on these tendencies: all that remained were the notations of poets and the memories of the people. These played a far greater part in Hyde's remodelled Ireland than they did in many of the other emerging European countries. His lecture, rather cumbersomely tided
"The Necessity for Deanglicizing Ireland", was delivered to the Irish Literary Society in November 1892, and it led, within a year, to the foundation of the
Gaelic League, a movement for the preservation of Irish. The fall of Parnell, and subsequent split in the Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster, may have left a number of unionists and landlords feeling free to express a cultural (as distinct from political) nationalism. If so, there was a real shrewdness in Hyde's strategy. He launched his appeal for Gaelic civilization as one coming from a man who could still feel the landlordly hankerings of a disappointed imperialist:

... It is the curious certainty that come what may Ireland will continue to resist English rule, even though it should be for their good, which prevents many of our nation from becoming unionists on the spot ... It is just because there appears no earthly chance of their becoming good members
of Empire that I argue that they should not remain in the anomalous position they are in, but since they absolutely refuse to become the one thing, that they become the other; cultivate what they have rejected, and build up an Irish nation on Irish lines.
¹⁶

That subterranean pull back to all things
English as touchstones of excellence is ironic in a text headed "deanglicization", but Hyde knew what he was about. He wanted to found Irish pride on something more positive and lasting than mere hatted of England. Yeats agreed: "I had dreamed of enlarging Irish hatred, till we had come to hate with a passion of patriotism what Morris and Ruskin hated".
¹⁷
The reactive patriotism which saw Ireland as not-England would have to give way to an identity which was self-constructed and existentially apt. Those peoples who
had
constructed themselves from within, the French for instance, never accused their bad citizens of being "unFrench": but throughout the nineteenth century delinquents were often called "un-Irish", because Irish nationalism too often defined itself by what it was against.

The Gaelic League might properly be seen as a response to the failure of a political attempt by nationalist leaders to shock English opinion by showing up the discrepancy between English order at home and misrule on the neighbouring island. The Irish resolved instead to instil in their people a self-belief which might in time lead to social and cultural prosperity. In its early years, the League received encouragement from the more enlightened colonial administrators like
Augustine Birrell, who hoped that it might help to solve problems which the authorities had found intractable.