Inventing Ireland (9 page)

In Ireland, writers soon found that it was – as
George Russell said – foolish to try consciously for a Celtic feeling.
⁶⁰
Wilde never made that elementary mistake. His few recorded comments on the "realistic" Anglo-Irish novelists of the nineteenth century are caustic. He endorsed Yeats's view that their Ireland was "a humorists Arcadia": "they came from a class that did not – mainly for political reasons – take the populace seriously ... of its passion, its gloom, its tragedy, they knew nothing".
⁶¹
Wilde charged them with making the error of
magnifying the one sort they did encounter – affable carmen and feckless servants – into a type of the nation. They produced a literature of the "I-know-my-natives" kind, a set of texts purporting to record native psychology as quaint and reassuring to rulers who might otherwise have feared that, if the natives eluded knowledge and control, then anything was possible. Wilde wanted no truck with such representational fallacies. Implicit in his comments on these novelists was the recognition that one of the objects of colonial policy was to maintain conditions in which the production of serious works of literature describing a society in all its complexity was well-nigh impossible. In an address to an American audience, he linked artistic and national freedom, telling his listeners somewhat luridly that "with the coming of the English, art in Ireland came to an end ... for art could not live and flourish under a tyrant".
⁶²
This was, in any strict sense, untrue: what became problematic was not art, as such, but rather that form of art called literary realism.

Wilde refused to write realist accounts of that degraded Ireland which he only partly knew, and he took instead Utopia for theme, knowing that this would provide not only an image of revolutionary possibility for Ireland but also a rebuke to contemporary Britain. "England will never be civilized till she has added Utopia to her dominions", he concluded in "The Critic as Artist", adding the vital afterthought that "there is more than one of her colonies that she might with advantage surrender for so fair a land".
⁶³

One of the first voices raised in defence of Wilde was that of his compatriot in London,
George Bernard Shaw. His one full-length play set in Ireland,
John Bull's Other Island,
was written in 1904, which was also – as it happened – the year in which the veteran Land League radical
Michael Davitt published
The
Fall of Feudalism in Ireland
By then,
Wyndham's Land Act of the previous year had helped Irish farmers buy out more land from the aristocracy, but a sceptical Shaw was not convinced that the fall of feudalism was complete. With so many men and women of enterprise lost to the emigrant ship, the emerging breed of new peasant proprietors seemed anything but the dynamic class needed to revitalize a jaded society. Most of the new petty landlords were far more concerned with land ownership than with land use, as a suspect new
pastoralism took hold on the popular mentality. Worse still, the cultural movement in which this pastoralism prevailed seemed devoted less to a
revival
of Irish culture than to its mummification. The social revolution, imagined by Davitt, was already being aborted by an
arriviste
rural Catholic
middle class. That class found no great difficulty in playing up to the expectations of a romantic English liberal visitor, such as Tom Broadbent in Shaw's play. He was the dramatist's warning that the wrong kind of "
revivalism" might produce exactly what the British now wanted, a tourist's landscape of colourful, non-threatening characters, who mark off their "interesting" cultural differences from the London visitor, even as they become ever more tractable to his economic designs.

Like Wilde, Shaw was another Irishman who used England as a laboratory in which he could redefine what it meant to be Irish. In
John Bull's Other Island,
the defrocked priest Peter Keegan finds wonders in Oxford that he had never seen at home, but on his return to Ireland he discovers that the wonders had been there all the time. "I did not know what my own house was like", he concludes, "because I had never been
outside it".
¹
In similar fashion, the mock-villain Broadbent only discovers what it means to be an Englishman when he pays a visit to Ireland. "Ireland", declared Shaw, "is the only spot on earth which still produces the ideal Englishman of history".
²
John Bull's Other Island
is Shaw's attempt to show how the peoples of the two islands spend most of their time acting an approved part before their neighbours' eyes: and these assigned parts are seen as impositions by the other side rather than opportunities for true self-expression. In the play, stereotypes are exploded, for it is the Englishman Tom Broadbent who is a romantic duffer, while the Irishman Larry Doyle is a cynical realist. The underlying reasoning is sound, for the Irish have become fact-facers through harsh poverty, while the English have enjoyed a scale of wealth so great that it allows them to indulge their victims with expansively sentimental gestures.

On the one hand, Broadbent cynically plots the ruin of the village of Roscullen and packs a gun before his visit to the place; on the other, he fills his head with sentimental claptrap about the charms of rural Ireland. As his caustic Irish partner observes, he keeps these separate ideas in watertight compartments, each "warranted impervious to anything it doesn't suit you to understand".
³
The very ambivalence of Broadbent's gestures evokes the common English oscillation between coercion and conciliation, between contempt for and envy of all that the imperialist denies in himself. A similar ambiguity will mark the gestures of the Englishman Haines in the opening chapter of Joyce's
Ulysses;
he, also, will take refuge from bad dreams behind an imported gun, yet he also will have come over to Ireland to savour the wit and wordplay of the Celtic revival at first hand. So, too, in the opening act of Shaw's play, Broadbent is charmed by the antics of Tim Haffigan, a stage Irishman who wishes him the top-o-the-mornin, until Doyle exposes him as a fraud and an impostor, born not in Ireland but in the streets of Glasgow. Doyle insists that the stage Irishman is a creation of the British folk mind: "all Haffigan has to do is to sit there and drink your whiskey while you humbug yourself", he warns Broadbent, but to no avail, for his English partner attributes this anger to "the melancholy of the Celtic race".
⁴
Doyle remarks that sweeping generalizations about the Celtic race constitute the most insidiously aggressive of all the tactics used by Englishmen – because they imply that the English are invariably the surveyors and the Irish the surveyed (with the depressing inference that the Irish can neither analyze nor represent themselves). Such talk does more harm than ten coercion acts.

Froude's theory that Celts would thrive only under the benign
guidance of Saxons, is voiced confidently by Broadbent, despite his pretensions to liberalism: "I saw at once that you are a thorough Irishman, with all the faults and all the qualities of your race: rash and improvident but brave and good natured: not likely to succeed in business on your own account perhaps, but eloquent, humorous, a lover of freedom ..."
⁵
The fact that the reverse might actually be true – that the Englishman needs the Irish to help him determine his own identity, just as Broadbent relied heavily on Doyle for their joint business success – would not have struck many in Shaw's London audience. Yet the play is at pains to stress that all
nationalisms rely for their construction on outsiders and others.

If the very notion of a centrally administered, united Ireland is an English invention, then many of the features of English nationalism are patented by German Jews, according to the anti-semitic Broadbent: "If my name was Breitstein, and I had a hooked nose and a house in Park Lane, I should carry a Union Jack handkerchief".
⁶
He goes on to refer to a nationalist English song as one written "by a German jew, like most English patriotic sentiment". The Germans thereby help to create the fiction, the "imagined community", that is England; and the English help to invent the idea of Ireland and, in return, are assisted by those Irish in sharpening the definition of themselves. This, indeed, is one of the services to his London audience offered by Shaw in the play.

As an empirical, fact-facing Irishman, Larry Doyle felt uneasy in his own country: his youthful desire was to learn how to do something and then to get out of Ireland in order to have the chance to do it. The plot itself seems to suggest that an Irishman will succeed far better in England than in Ireland, where the only successful men are all English. In Ireland, Broadbent plays the role of a lover of the Celts, the English liberal in search of round towers and fresh-faced colleens. So, by his outrageous antics in the role of English duffer, he manages to see only the Ireland he has come to see, a land of buffoons, derisive laughter and whimsy, where a pig can be taken for a ride in his car and an Englishman (i.e., himself) voted the fittest man to represent Roscullen in parliament. He adopts the protective coloration of the stage-English buffoon to the enormous entertainment of the natives, who reciprocate by adopting the protective coloration of the stage-Irish peasant, taking tea at the wrong time of the day and laughing hysterically at every event which ensues. Larry Doyle foresees that, for his antics, Broadbent will not be mocked out of town but will be rewarded with Larry's sweetheart arid Larry's seat in Westminster: "He'll never know they're laughing at him – and while they're laughing, he'll win the seat".
⁷

The driver who ferried Broadbent into Roscullen told him that the finest hotel in Ireland was there, but there is no hotel, just seventeen pubs. Aunt Jude excuses the driven "sure he'd say whatever was the least trouble to himself and the pleasantest to you".
⁸
This is the psychology which underlies the acting of both sides, Irish and English. For the Irish, the callow labourer Patsy Farrell exudes an air of helpless silliness which, says a Shavian stage direction, "is not his real character, but a cunning developed by his constant dread of a hostile dominance, which he habitually tries to disarm by pretending to be a much greater fool than he really is. Englishmen think him half-witted, which is exactly what he wants them to think".
⁹
This, however, is precisely the strategy adopted by the conquering Englishman, who, according to Larry Doyle, "does what the caterpillar does. He instinctively makes himself look like a fool, and eats up all the real fools at his ease while his enemies let him alone and laugh at him for being a fool like the rest. Oh, nature is cunning, cunning".
¹⁰

In other words, at root the English and Irish are rather similar peoples, who have nonetheless decided to perform versions of English-ness and Irishness to one another, in the attempt to wrest a material advantage from the unsuspecting audience of each performance. Each group projects onto the other many attributes which it has denied in itself, but at bottom both peoples are alike. This
socialist perception is embodied in Hodson, the servant of Broadbent, who does indeed find in Ireland the flexibility of mind to disown his master and to point to the common cause of the dispossessed Irish labourer and the exploited English proletariat. He is, moreover, as impatient of Irish whining as of English repression, pointing to the fact that the bulk of the English work-force was exploited at even closer hand than the Irish peasantry by the imperial system. In all of this, he speaks for the Shaw who wrote: "The people of England have done the people of Ireland no wrong whatever ... in factory, mine and sweatshop they had reason to envy the Irish peasant who at the worst starved on an open hillside ... the most distressful country. . . has borne no more than her fair share of the growing pains of human society. . ."
¹¹

Shaw's play, like Wilde's career, is a radical critique of the Anglo-Irish antithesis so beloved of the Victorians and of many Irish revivalists. By the simple expedient of presenting a romantic Englishman and an empirical Irishman
John Butt's Other Island
mocks the ancient stereotype. Of course, that is not the end of the story, for, by his performance of absurd sentimentality, Broadbent effectively takes over the entire village on the terms most favourable to himself, while Larry Doyle
loses his cynical self-composure in the face of the ruin of his people. Larry's sophisticated intellect paralyses him into inactivity, for he has grown too subtle and too cynical, foolish in his very cleverness, whereas Broadbent's blinkered vision is what allows him to be so efficient, so finally clever in his very foolishness. In the end, the Anglo-Irish antithesis has been questioned only to be reasserted in a slightly modified form.
¹²

Doyle had suspected and predicted as much: to the claim that the
Land Acts have abolished landlordism, he responds derisively that they have simply multiplied the number of petty landlords in every parish. The new proprietors, tuppence-ha'pennies looking down on tuppences, will be far more cruel to the landless labourers than ever the landlords were: Doyle accurately predicts the use to which patriotic rhetoric will be put by the emerging new rancher class, as it seeks to consolidate its selfish interests at the expense of the national economy. His prophecy uncannily anticipates Frantz Fanon's words, half a century later, in
The Wretched of the Earth:

... the landed proprietors will insist that the state should give them a hundred times more facilities and privileges than were enjoyed by the foreign settlers in former times. The exploitation of agricultural workers will be intensified and made legitimate. Using two or three slogans, these new colonists will demand an enormous amount of work from the agricultural labourers, in the name of the national effort of course. There will be no modernization of agriculture . . . the only efforts made to better things are due to the government... the landed bourgeoisie refuses to take the slightest risk . . . The enormous profits which it pockets, enormous if we take into account the national revenue, are never reinvested. The money-in-the-stocking mentality is dominant in the psychology of these landed proprietors . . .
¹³

This is simply the theoretical version of what Larry Doyle phrases more colourfully in the play, when he foretells that his and Broadbent's syndicate "will use your patriotic blatherskite and balderdash to get parliamentary powers over you as cynically as it would bait a mousetrap with toasted cheese. It will plan, and organize, and find capital while you slave like bees for it".
¹⁴
Keegan foresees all this too, but without relish, telling the planners:

.. . you will drive Haffigan to America very efficiently; you will find a use for Barney Doran's foul mouth and bullying temper by employing him to
slave-drive your labourers very efficiently; and [
low and titter
] when at last this poor desolate countryside becomes a busy mint in which we shall all slave to make money for you, with our Polytechnic to teach us how to do it efficiently, and our library to fuddle the few imaginations your distilleries will spare, and our repaired Round Tower with admission sixpence, and refreshments and penny-in-the-slot mutoscopes to make it interesting, then no doubt your English and American shareholders will spend all the money we make for them very efficiently in shooting and hunting . . .
¹⁵

It is, appropriately enough, left to Keegan to explain Broadbent's efficient victory: "let not the right side of your brain know what the left side doeth. I learnt at Oxford that this is the secret of the Englishman's power of making the best of both worlds".
¹⁶
By mastering the stereotype, by pretending to be a stage-fool, Broadbent has eaten up all the real fools, just as Larry
predicted. Ireland has, on this occasion, been a profitable laboratory for another English experiment.

All of which raises a number of questions. Just how sincere were Broadbent's good intentions? Is he, in short, a conscious hypocrite or a woolly-minded
liberal imperialist? His language in the play is couched in two tonalities, one sentimental and the other pragmatic, one idealistic and the other sinister, but both often deployed within a single sentence. He tells Larry Doyle, for instance, "Home Rule will work wonders
under English guidance":
¹⁷
and then proceeds to offer a wholly cynical explanation: "We English must place our capacity for government at the service of nations less fortunately endowed; so as to allow them to develop in perfect freedom to the English level of self-government". It's not surprising that English audiences always assume that Broadbent's gun is only a paper-weight, while the Irish remain quite certain that it is loaded for potential use. It is possible, of course, to see Broadbent as one of nature's innocents, the sincere functionary who mistakes his own interest for the most selfless idealism: but the sheer sardonicism of some of his sentences would indicate that a shrewder brain is at work. Indeed, the opening stage directions warn that he can be "sometimes eager and credulous, sometimes shrewd and roguish".
¹⁸
Is he ever both at the same time? – as, for example, when he acquires Larry's former sweetheart Nora as a consummate political wife who will win him support among the Roscullen villagers of whom he says: "We must be thoroughly democratic and patronize everybody without distinction of class".
¹⁹
If that sounds, perhaps, like an unintended oxymoron, then the sentence which soon follows, concerning the canvassing of Keegan's vote, is all hypocrisy and guile: "What really
flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering. Not that I would flatter any man . . . I'll just go and meet him".
²⁰