Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–2001

Now I don’t want to give up the “they” and “us,” I glory in it. I was wrong, we were all wrong, in trying to find a common platform, in pretending we weren’t different from every Pat and Mick in the village…We were ashamed of everything, ashamed of our birth, ashamed of our good education, ashamed of our religion, ashamed that we dined in the evenings and that we dressed for dinner, and after all, our shame didn’t save us or we wouldn’t be sitting here on the remnants of our furniture.

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It was inevitable that some would find this kind of speech offensive. One correspondent wrote to the Irish Statesman pointedly inquiring why the daughters of the Big Houses “grow flat-footed and thin haired, and the sons degenerate, often a little strange in the head,” opining that in his view it was because the Ascendancy “barred its windows against the native vitality” until “gradually its teeth grew longer and its feet flatter and its viscera more withered.”

(#litres_trial_promo) The Statesman’s editor, George Russell (Æ), however, greeted the play with enthusiasm, recognizing it as an energetic salvo in a battle he had been fighting on behalf of Anglo-Ireland in his journal for several years:

We do not want uniformity in our culture or our ideals, but the balancing of our diversities in a wide tolerance. The moment we had complete uniformity, our national life would be stagnant. We are glad to think we shall never achieve that uniformity which is the dream of commonplace minds and we imagine that many who saw The Big House felt a liberating thrill at the last outburst of Kate Alcock.

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The Irish Statesman had been revived in 1923, when Æ accepted the editorship at the request of Sir Horace Plunkett who was keen that the new state should have a journalistic organ of a high literary and intellectual calibre to act as a leaven in its life. And for the rest of the decade Russell showed that Plunkett had chosen his editor wisely, for the Statesman proved to be one of the most remarkable cultural organs modern Ireland has known – humane, politically engaged, and broadly literate. In its early years the periodical threw its weight behind the Cosgrave administration, berating the Republicans who still hoped that the Treaty might be dismantled, for their obdurate fantasizing. Almost from the beginning, however, the Statesman was alert to those aspects of Irish intellectual and cultural life that tended to national exclusivism, xenophobia, and cultural imposition. From the first Æ was determined that Irish life should be open to diverse influences from abroad: Ireland should be attentive to contemporary historical developments. Writing in November 1923 on “National Culture”, he declared:

We say we cannot merely out of Irish traditions find solutions to all our modern problems. It is no use reading Wolfe Tone or John Mitchel or Thomas Davis in the belief that they had a clairvoyance which pierced into our times with their complexities, or that by going back to Gaelic Ireland we shall find images upon which we can build anew. We shall find much inspiration and beauty in our own past but we have to ransack world literature, world history, world science and study our national contemporaries and graft what we learn into our own national tradition, if we are not to fade out of the list of civilized nations.

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Accordingly, throughout the 1920s Æ filled the columns of his periodical with international as well as national news and comment, with reviews of most of the major writers writing in the English language, with comparisons of Ireland with such countries as Sweden and Denmark, allowing a sense to emerge of Ireland as one small country among many in an effort to counteract what he felt was a prevailing national narcissism. Æ waged strenuous war against the Irish Irelanders’ conception of Gaelic civilization with the Irish language as the matrix of Irish life. He preferred a vision of the national synthesis, believing that the majority of the Irish people were culturally mixed, whatever the polemicist might wish. He certainly approved “the determination to give every Irish child access to the language in which is locked up the history of their race for two thousand years,”

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(#litres_trial_promo) and to the exclusive dogmas of Irish Ireland. “We do not believe,” he wrote, “that the Irish people will ever allow their knowledge of English to lapse.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Instead of the Irish Irelanders’ vision of an absorbent Gaelic reality, Æ vigorously preached a doctrine of national synthesis in which no ethnic group is predominant, no culture the assimilative one. Ireland is a fertile creation of the historic fusion of races, culture, and language.

We wish the Irish mind to develop to the utmost of which it is capable, and we have always believed that the people now inhabiting Ireland, a new race made up of Gael, Dane, Norman and Saxon, has infinitely greater intellectual possibilities in it than the old race which existed before the stranger came. The union of races has brought a more complex mentality. We can no more get rid of these new elements in our blood and culture than we can get rid of the Gaelic blood.

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Crucial to the force of Æ’s argument here is the distinctiveness and distinction of Anglo-Ireland’s contribution to Irish civilization, and it is to this that he frequently turns in his columns, opening them also to writers and critics who could extol the Irish quality of such figures as Swift, Burke, and Berkeley, highlighting too the remarkable achievements of the Anglo-Irish Literary Revival of the preceding four decades. Anglo-Ireland, through its openness to fertilizing ideas from abroad was, and would remain, vital to Irish cultural health. It could fill a crucial social and cultural role, even though its political power was no more. Ireland, he argues,

…has not only the unique Gaelic tradition, but it has given birth, if it accepts all its children, to many men who have influenced European culture and science, Berkeley, Swift, Goldsmith, Burke, Sheridan, Moore, Hamilton, Kelvin, Tyndall, Shaw, Yeats, Synge and many others of international repute. If we repudiate the Anglo-Irish tradition, if we say these are aliens, how poor does our life become.

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The frequent debates in the Statesman as to what constitutes Irish writing and the arguments about Irish and Anglo-Irish culture, it is important to stress, were disguised debates about politics. The underlying political issues were who should shape the new Ireland and what traditions, if any, should be predominant. As Æ put it frankly in 1925, identifying the cultural debate in which he was engaged with current attitudes which had deprived Anglo-Ireland of real political and national opportunities:

Those who inherit the national tradition should not be so scared at the suggestion that Irish people lately of another tradition might take an active part in the building up of the new self-governing Ireland. Man for man they are just as good human beings as any of their nationalist fellow-countrymen. It is their misfortune to be on the losing side in the political struggle.

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They came, indeed, from a tradition which had supplied a modern Irish literature in English that had attracted the attention of the world.

The Irish Literary Revival was for Æ the chief reason why Anglo-Ireland deserved the respectful attention of all Irishmen. Furthermore, for Æ as to a lesser extent it did for W. B. Yeats, it represented the best hope for a resolution of differences between Irishmen. If, he believed, it could be wholeheartedly recognized by all that men and women of Anglo-Irish stock had contributed through their literary and dramatic works to Irish regeneration and that a genuinely Irish literature had emerged through the fusion of the English language with Gaelic mythology and traditions, then political differences in Ireland might lose their sharp distinctiveness, softened in the beneficent glow of culture. Æ argued that “Anglo-Irish literature only began to take on a quality when writers like O’Grady, Yeats, Hyde, Synge, Lady Gregory, Stephens, Clarke, Higgins, O’Flaherty and others either learned a good deal of the language or studied its cultural content in translations,”

(#litres_trial_promo) and “however hateful and unjust the invasion of Ireland was to the Nationalists, the blending of races and cultures finally brought about a more vital and complicated mentality. Some of the most brilliant intellects in modern times are the product of this fusion of races or cultures.”

(#litres_trial_promo) And it was Æ’s conviction that “if these names were deleted from Irish history the country would be almost intellectually non-existent as far as the rest of the world was concerned.”

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It was not easy to sustain the force of this polemic throughout the 1920s. There was a troubling sense that the tide of the Revival as a distinctive intellectual and cultural movement directly associated with Anglo-Ireland had somewhat withdrawn, its energies waning. The closure of the Maunsel publishing company in 1926, the company that had published the work of many of the writers associated with the Revival, was a chilly omen of Ireland’s literary future (the firm of Maunsel and Roberts Ltd. was auctioned off in separate lots). Critical works and histories of the movement began to appear which suggested that observers felt the time was ripe for the assessment of a past period. Memorial and collected editions were published in London. For Æ it was imperative that the vitality and vigour of the Anglo-Irish literary movement should not be seen as in decline. He noted that the work younger writers were now producing, many of them those young men whose talents he so assiduously cultivated, tended to realism and psychological subjectivism. The plays of O’Casey, which set the heroic vision of the Easter Rising and the War of Independence against the squalid but vibrant life of Dublin’s slum tenements, the harsh portrait of revolutionary violence in O’Flaherty’s novel The Informer, the spiky satire of Denis Johnston’s expressionist play The Old Lady Says “No!” which sends the eighteenth-century patriot Robert Emmet abroad in a smugly or foolishly nationalistic and uncomprehending suburban Dublin, all suggested that the new modes were realistic and satiric. Æ absorbed such works into the canon of the Literary Revival, which he felt had been idealistic and visionary, in terms of a dialectical continuity:

That action and reaction are equal and opposite is an aphorism which is true not only in the material but psychic sphere. Oscillations of emotion take place in literature and the arts…Twenty years ago the literary movement in Ireland was spiritual and romantic, and the reaction from that has brought us to James Joyce and Sean O’Casey.

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Some of the young men whose work Æ gladly published in his journal, perhaps because their presence helped to confirm his theory, though he had also an innate literary hospitality, were less than willing to fit easily into their editor’s grand schemes (and it is surely germane to note that most of them derived from Catholic backgrounds). Frank O’Connor was ready in youthful iconoclasm to dismiss Yeats from the pantheon of Irish poets in the name of a genuine Gaelic tradition (as distinct from the spurious kind O’Connor was also ready to denounce); Liam O’Flaherty could blithely inform his tolerant editor:

I don’t for a moment claim that your paper is not doing good work. But I do claim that it is not Irish, that it is not national, and that it is not representative in any respect of the cultural forces, in all spheres, that are trying to find room for birth in this country at present.

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O’Flaherty, with others (Austin Clarke, F. R. Higgins), joined in the chorus of those who hated O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars, directing their attack at the playwright and his eminent defender, W. B. Yeats. Perhaps Æ might have viewed such literary wars as the manifestation of the necessary emotional and psychic oscillations of his theory, but the fact that those he wished to encompass within a general thesis that would allow for the continuity of Anglo-Irish literature as he understood it had no intention of being so encompassed, made his position difficult. For the younger writers were energetically determined that the new Irish writing would be distinct from the Anglo-Irish tradition they associated with Yeats. There is, therefore, something poignant about Æ’s mystified efforts to comprehend the later work of Joyce, the Work in Progress that became Finnegans Wake, for which clearly he felt a temperamental distaste, within his optimistic theory about the continued vitality of the Irish Literary Renaissance, while younger men like the poet and art critic Thomas MacGreevy hailed the novelist in the columns of Æ’s journal as “the most suggestive figure in the history of European art or literature since Leonardo da Vinci.”

(#litres_trial_promo) He associated Joyce not with the Anglo-Irish Revival at all but with the great Catholic writers of Europe, with the Dante of the Divine Comedy.

The poignancy of Æ’s position was compounded by the fact that writers like Joyce, Clarke, O’Flaherty, and MacGreevy himself in fact demonstrated in their work the truth of one element in Æ’s polemic on the nature of Irish reality. The historic fusion of races in Ireland and the introduction of the English language to the country had indeed allowed for the birth of a distinctive Irish literature in English, a cultural endowment that could not be gainsaid. But this literature was and would increasingly be a product of the social and linguistic reality of modern Ireland in which English with an Irish colouring was and is the lingua franca. It could not therefore, even in the 1920s, and certainly could not as the century progressed, be easily employed as a persistent proof of the cultural necessity of the Anglo-Irish Protestants in the new state, which was the other element in Æ’s polemic. In proving the substance of Æ’s ideas on the social and cultural reality of modern Ireland as hybrid and a consequence of racial fusion such writers of Catholic middle-class and rural background were, ironically, vitiating the force of his propagandist efforts on behalf of the Anglo-Irish Protestants. At the high point of the Irish Literary Revival they had perhaps seemed crucial. Now they were less so.