"Irelands of the Heart": The Ends of Cultural Nationalism and the Limits of Nationalist Culture

Canadian Journal of Irish StudiesCanadian Association of Irish Studies

"Irelands of the Heart": The Ends of Cultural Nationalism and the Limits of NationalistCultureAuthor(s): Michael MaysSource: The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Jul., 1996), pp. 1-20Published by: Canadian Journal of Irish StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25513039 .

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"Irelands of the Heart": The Ends of Cultural Nationalism and the Limits

of Nationalist Culture

MICHAEL MAYS

I made my song a coat

Covered with embroideries

Out of old mythologies From heel to throat; But the fools caught it,

Wore it in the world's eyes As though they'd wrought it.

Song, let them take it, For there's more enterprise

In walking naked.

?W. B.Yeats/'A Coat"

1

In describing the formative effect Standish O'Grady's History1 of Ireland had on the Irish Revival of the 1890's, George Russell?the poet/mystic/news paper editor better known as AE?wrote in 1902:

Years ago, in the adventurous youth of his mind, Mr. O'Grady found

the Gaelic tradition like a neglected antique dun with its doors barred, and there was little or no egress. Listening, he heard from within an

immense chivalry, and he opened the doors and the wild riders went

forth to work their will. Now he would recall them. But it is in vain,

(qtd. in Lyons 231)

This image of an unleashed and ungovernable force or energy recurs over and

over again, both in contemporary accounts of, and in actual events from the years

leading up to the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. AE's record of the Protestant Unionist O'Grady's dilemma perfectly illustrates a characteristic irony of the period.

As a member in standing of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, O'Grady was an

outspoken advocate of the responsibilities of his own class ("The last champion of the Irish aristocracy," AE called him). And like other Ascendancy figures who

played an active part in "progressive" Irish politics, Horace Plunkett for instance, and Lady Gregory, he was in the paradoxical position of having actively con tributed to the very forces that eventually undermined aristocratic social privi lege. But if that quandary can be read as little more than an ironic historical foot note to a vanishing class, the sense of a Frankensteinian-like energy emerging



2 The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies

from the post-Parnell cultural revival is evident across sectarian lines.

For Yeats, in an open letter poem to "Craoibhin Aoibhin" (Douglas Hyde), that energy was something to be wary of, powerful and seductive but a little

frightening as well. His image of an unbridled Protean force is similar to AE's

"wild riders":

You've dandled them and fed them from the book And know them to the bone; impart to us?

We'll keep the secret?a new trick to please. Is there a bridle for this Proteus

That turns and changes like his draughty seas?

Yeats, like Hyde, felt the wrath of forces they had each helped to shape as the ris

ing tide of that energy began to assume a life of its own: Yeats, when those to

whom he had been most closely allied turned against him in the controversies over the Abbey Theatre; Hyde, more dramatically when, more than two decades after founding the Gaelic League, he was forced to resign as President at the

League's 1915 ard-fheis. For D.P. Moran, the leading proponent of an Irish Ireland free of English

(and Ascendancy) influence, an increasing fervor could only bode well: the revival as a great stirring up portended no one knew exactly what, he wrote, but in the meantime it was a useful lever for doing many desirable things?helping up industry, knocking down the stage Irishman, and making the shoneen ashamed of his West-Britonism (Moran 37). Even John Quinn, the Irish

American lawyer and close friend of many of the leading figures of the Revival, discovered the elusiveness of such energy and felt its capricious sting. It was

Quinn who had in effect kept the Gaelic League alive through his organization of an extensive lecture tour in the United States for Douglas Hyde during 1905 06. The funds raised insured the League's survival, and "thereby nurtured, subli

mated the force that ten years later Quinn [a political moderate] deplored" (Dunleavy 258). Even O'Grady himself wrote excitedly about "a new Irish

movement which has risen with the suddenness and power of a tidal wave,"

releasing "forces no man can predict" (qtd. in R.F Foster 96). But if, as Moran claimed, anything might happen, in retrospect what actu

ally did happen tells us a great deal more about the culture of Irish nationalism than any of its contemporary adherents ever could, and offers us an insight into

the ideological foundations of cultural nationalism in the movement toward Irish

independence.

2

"Every modern nation," Etienne Balibar has observed, "is a product of col

onization: it has always been to some degree colonized or colonizing, and some times both at the same time" (89). "Nationalism" then, as Balibar's comment



'' I re lands of th e Hea rt" 3

suggests, emerged?as an ism, or coherent ideological form?isomorphically out

of the historical conditions and negotiations of colonization. As opposed to ear

lier and more vague notions of "national consciousness," nationalism developed,

paradoxically, as both rigidly "oppositional," and simultaneously dependent; a

peripheric ideological counter-response pitted against imperial domination, but a

counter-response that began from the same fundamental presuppositions as the

imperial model it sought to reject.* In the periphery, colonial nationalism then evolved in two broad but distinct phases: the first phase we might generally call the processes of decolonization, all of those various efforts to eradicate or

"detoxify" the colonial influence and thereby restore what has been perceived to

be lost, broken, corrupted, or contaminated?a continuous, unadulterated, and

pure national identity. As such, the decolonization of this first phase is intimate

ly tied to histories of the nation, histories, as Balibar describes them, "always already presented to us in the form of a narrative which attributes to these enti

ties the continuity of a subject." The nation must appear, thus, as "the fulfillment of a 'project' stretching over centuries"; a project in which different events,

"stages and moments of coming to self-awareness," will be accorded greater or

lesser value depending upon the prejudices of the various historians, but all of which will, in any case, be made to accede to an identical pattern: "that of the self-manifestation of the national personality" (Balibar 86). But if in Ireland dur

ing this first phase national narratives harmoniously assumed a sweeping hostil

ity towards all things English, that euphony quickly turned cacophonous with the second phase struggle to forge a new, independent "post-colonial" nation.

This transition to the practical politics of nation-building is, of course, cru cial?the prescriptive end of colonial nationalism. But the shift in Irish national ist discourse from a virulent anti-Englishism to more or less practical considera tions of what shape the new state is to take also brings to the surface the intrin sic contradictions of nationalism as an idealist political philosophy. That is to say, the very contentiousness of the transition reveals the limitations of an external

and highly idealized Irish nationalism that sought to transcend the actual and

conflicting political, economic, and social interests of a socially stratified soci

ety. Moreover, the disjunction between particular ideals of Irish nationalism?

O'Grady's, say, or Yeats's?and the actual shape modern Ireland ultimately took

illustrates once again the volatility of a wounded Volksgeist, what Isaiah Berlin has called the "bent twig" of nationality, and Tom Nairn, nationalism's "collec tive unconscious." For Berlin, nationalism?as opposed to mere national con

sciousness?is the product of the "infliction of a wound on the collective feeling of a society." And the effect of that oppression is, as Berlin describes it, "like a bent twig, forced down so severely that when released it lashes back with fury" (19). Similarly for Nairn, nationalism?as that "gathering of strength" necessary for what he calls the "ordeal" of development?inevitably involves the tapping of an unplumbed depth of a collective energy fed upon anger and resentment. On




the threshold of "modernity," the developing society

is like a man who has to call on all his inherited and (up to this point) largely unconscious powers to confront some inescapable challenge.

He summons up such latent energies assuming that, once the chal

lenge is met, they will subside again into a tolerable and settled pat tern of personal existence. (349)

But as Nairn goes on to point out, once tapped, this great collective energy

proves an unpredictable and often uncontrollable force. Nationalism then, as the

catalyst which releases such forces, is, to employ AE's analogy, at once rider, and

simultaneously ridden by, the wild horses of the developing nation's collective

unconscious.

3

"I confess I do not love England," AE wrote in the essay "Nationality and

Imperialism." The piece appeared, along with a number of other polemics against

England and English imperial rule in Ireland, in a volume called Ideals in

Ireland. Edited and published in 1901 by Lady Gregory, other contributors

included Yeats, George Moore, Douglas Hyde, D.P. Moran, and the "father of the

Revival," Standish O'Grady. Each of the essays suggests (as the title indicates), a version of an ideal Ireland, but they all do so, significantly, in terms of an

Anglophobic invective which pits some aspect of Irish life or culture against its

decadent, cruel, or exploitative English alternative. The issue here, however, isn't

simply pettiness or injustice. Rather, each describes what is seen to be the fun

damentally corrupted and corrupting processes of colonization?the insidious and destructive effects of an English culture pasted on to a uniquely different Irish "civilization." For AE, as for Yeats, Anglicization was equated with a

regressive modernization:

I confess I do not love England.. .But for that myriad humanity which

throngs the cities of England I feel profound pity; for it seems to me

that in factory, in mine, in warehouse, the life they have chosen to live

in the past, the lives those bom into that country must almost

inevitably lead now, is farther off from beauty, more remote from

spirit, more alien to deity, than that led by any people hitherto in the

memory of the world.2

The response to this generally felt belief in the ignobility of Irish "anglicization" was the creation, throughout the 1880's and 90's, of innumerable cultural asso

ciations, societies, and leagues advancing the cause of specifically Irish customs,

traditions, arts and crafts. And it was precisely this spirit of anti-Anglicization, as the logical continuation of Davis's spiritual nationalism, which, hand-in-hand

with Parnell's Home Rule campaign, created that tidal wave of energy that was to break, finally, in 1916.

The Gaelic Athletic Association was founded in 1884, seven years before



uIrelands of the Heart" 5

Parnell's death and nine years before the establishment of the Gaelic League.

Against the influx of English sports the Association's leading figure, Michael

Cusack, was determined to foster a specifically Irish identity through the pro motion of native games and sports: hurling and Gaelic football in particular.3

Though the GAA was never overtly a political or revolutionary organization, like so many other cultural nationalist organizations of the time, its cultural ends were

never easily or entirely distinguishable from traditional political ends. Rather, it

is more appropriate to describe organizations like, for instance, the GAA and the

Irish Literary Society as umbrella groups for a range of political opinions and

activities. Thus, the Gaelic League could, for a time anyway, accommodate both

political separatists and Unionists. And of the seven founding members of the

GAA itself, at least four were Fenians.

If there was a revolutionary spirit to the Association, however, its specific achievements were again less explicitly political. As F.S.L. Lyons has pointed out, the GAA accomplished three very different purposes: first, it encouraged

patriotism on the local level through competition between counties; second, "it

inculcated among its members an uncompromising hostility to foreign games"; and third, it revived a national spirit that, if not down and out, stood on wobbly

legs (Lyons 221-22). The significance of the GAA?and its success?are direct

ly attributable to its ability to resuscitate the flagging spirit of national pride.

Douglas Hyde described, in an 1891 speech to an Irish-American audience, the

"disgraceful shame" Irishmen were raised to feel towards "their language, insti

tutions, and of everything Irish." And he recalled a recent encounter with two

young Irishmen, one of whom, when asked where he was from, replied "I come

from a little village over there called Ireland" (qtd. in Dunleavy 165). If, for Hyde, it was just this sort of self-deprecation and "colossal cringing"

that had led to the sorry state of the Irish language, customs and people, for

Archbishop Croke, the first patron of the GAA, the prevailing fashion for

English sports was part and parcel of a general betrayal of the national heritage which had led to that self-degradation:

Indeed, if we continue travelling for the next score years in the same

direction that we have been going for some time past, condemning the

sports that were practised by our forefathers, effacing our national

features as though we were ashamed of them, and putting on, with

England's stuffs and broadcloths her masher habits, and such other

effeminate follies as she may recommend, we had better at once, and

publicly, abjure our nationality (qtd. in Lyons 222)

But if for Croke a rejection of English games would lead to a restored sense of

national identity, he got more than he (and perhaps more even than Cusack), had

bargained for. For, as Lyons points out, the GAA developed Croke's incipient anti-Englishism into a full blown Anglophobic obsession, initiating a ban on for

eign games of all types, and forbidding its members from playing them or in




being associated with them in any way whatsoever. This policy was to become

the source of another of those numerous ironic footnotes to Irish history when, more than a half century later, Douglas Hyde was expelled from the GAA for

attending an international soccer match in Dublin. That he had appeared, not sim

ply as a spectator, but in his official capacity as first President of Ireland was

deemed irrelevant; Hyde's name was struck from the list of GAA patrons. The irony of Hyde's expulsion has less to do with his close relationship to

Michael Cusack (Cusack himself was forced to resign from the organization just

eighteen months after he had founded it) than it does with Hyde's own early and

tremendously influential role in the Revival. Though the GAA was well estab

lished by the time Hyde presented, to the National Literary Society in November

1892, his seminal address on "The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland," it was

that speech, coupled with the inauguration of the Gaelic League the following year, that effectively got the incipient Irish Ireland movement off the ground. For

Hyde, the problem was simple: the Irish people had put themselves in the unten

able position of seeking, on the one hand, a distinct national political identity, while throwing off "with a light heart" the best claim they had for that separate identity, their language and customs. "Irish sentiment," he claimed, was stuck in a "half-way house," hating the English and yet continuing to imitate in the most

slavish ways English fashions and customs. If they took the next step and became

good Englishmen, so much the better; but "it is a fact and we must face it as a

fact, that although they adopt English habits and copy England in every way, the

great bulk of Irishmen and Irishwomen ... are ... filled with a dull, ever-abiding animosity against her..." (37). Refusing to become the one thing, good

Englishmen, it was absolutely essential they become the other and "build up an

Irish nation on Irish lines." It was with this purpose in mind, the "build[ing] up an Irish nation on Irish

lines," that Hyde co-founded, along with the "scholar revolutionary" Eoin

MacNeill, the Gaelic League. The League's intent was, as MacNeill wrote, to

"maintain and promote the use of Gaelic as a spoken language in Ireland' (qtd. in Dunleavy 189). If its ends were to be the propagandistic promotion of the Irish

tongue as a living language, its means were to be rigorously non-partisan. Much

has been made of Hyde's insistence that the League maintain a policy of strict

political neutrality, and there can be little doubt of Hyde's sincere belief in a

comprehensive conception of an all-inclusive nationality, a nationality which would unite rather than divide opposing factions. And while it is also true that, in the end, it was Hyde's refusal to commit the League to an openly political posi tion that resulted in his removal from its Presidency, a more complex picture of

Hyde the politician emerges in Dunleavy and Dunleavys recent biography. What becomes clear there is that Hyde, like Parnell, knew the value of a diplomatic silence; he was extremely skilled and, like all good politicians, lucky too in rid

ing out the wave of a controversial political issue and, just as that wave was



"Irelands of the Heart" 7

about to break, exercising his power when it could be wielded most potently. In

this sense he was a cultural inheritor of Parnellism, helping to produce a power ful political force; but it was a force from which he could maintain an ambiva

lent distance. Moving to the background during periods of growing crises as that

political force showed signs of an explosive potential, he masterfully increased

its power by exercising the restraining hand at the opportune moment. In this

respect, Hyde's defeat at the 1915 ard-fheis is better viewed, not as a radical

change in policy, but as a changing of the guard, an evolutionary inevitability? the logical progression of the Gaelic League's always-implicit politics.4

From the start, Hyde's desire had been the restoration of a dignified sense

of national identity rooted in the resuscitation of the Irish language. The Irish lan

guage and its literature was to serve as the medium by which all Irish men and

women could reactivate their national pride, and through that, their individual sense of self-respect:

The dim consciousness of [the heroic past] is one of those things

which are at the back of Irish national sentiment, and our business,

whether we be Unionists or Nationalists, should be to make this dim

consciousness an active and potent feeling, and thus increase our

sense of self-respect and honour. (38)

More than simply as a means of recovering a lost pride, the re-establishment of

the language as a basis for cultural continuity took on an even greater signifi cance given the movement towards Home Rule. This perceived "loss" or "dis

connection" from the past that Anglicization had fostered had created a paradox ical historical moment in which, Hyde argued, the cultural or spiritual life of the

nation had been broken from within just at that moment that political indepen dence seemed possible:

But, alas, quantum mutatus ab illol What the battleaxe of the Dane,

the sword of the Norman, the wile of the Saxon were unable to per

form, we have accomplished ourselves. We have at last broken the

continuity of Irish life, and just at the moment when the Celtic race is

presumably about to largely recover possession of its own country, it

finds itself deprived and stript of its Celtic characteristics, cut off

from the past, yet scarcely in touch with the present. (38)

And for Hyde, as for Davis before him, a political independence detached from a living native culture is nothing more than a sham.

4

This same belief in the interconnection between an active cultural life and a prosperous political one animates all of the essays in Ideals in Ireland, and

marks a shift in the direction of Irish nationalist discourse: a transition from the

overtly anti-English theme of Hyde's call to "de-anglicize" to questions of, as




Hyde's essay in the collection puts it, "What Ireland is Asking For" (though each

of the writers continues to address those questions in the unmistakably anglo

phobic tone of Hyde's earlier essay). This discursive shift is perceptible in the sense of urgency, of desperation even, which marks each of the essays in the col

lection, and nowhere more so than in AE's "Nationality and Imperialism." The

political struggle there is framed in terms of a battle for spiritual liberation, as an

effort to free the national soul and thereby enable it to achieve its destiny. The

language of religious deliverance in the essay is hardly accidental. The "Celts," as he describes them at this point (the language of race is significant?the less

exclusivist "Irish" will soon supplant the "Celt"), are a Chosen Race with a des

tiny to fulfill. Thus the source of the urgency: if the efforts towards independence were to fail, if the spiritual life of the "race" continued to be neglected as it had

since at least the time of the first wave of English plantations, then the dream

would have to be forsaken, the destiny surrendered. The irredeemable expense of such a loss?AE is unequivocal?is a national/spiritual damnation: "the descent of a nation into hell, not nobly, not as a sacrifice for a great end, but ignobly and without hope of resurrection.... God gives no second gift to a nation if it flings aside its birthright" (NI 20). The opportunity to realize a sacred destiny manifests

itself, apparently, only once.

This moment then, is a moment of crisis in the spiritual life of the nation. But out of the desperation of this predicament AE generates hope, an almost boundless optimism. In many ways turn-of-the-century Ireland had reached a

point rife with new beginnings and seemingly infinite possibilities. In this sense the idea of "America"?always imaginatively charged in Ireland anyway since

the waves of emigration associated with the Famine?took on a special signifi cance, for AE as for others. America became an

analogue for present-day Ireland,

and the association enabled an appropriation of the former's myths, that complex of fantasy and desire that we refer to as the American Dream. The American Dream is, of course, anything but unique in its general outlines; every nation

forges its own myths of identity (these being one of the things which defines a

nation). The component which distinguishes the American version from other national fantasies, however, is the release from history an incessant belief in the

ability to begin anew provides. Uprooted from the Old World, the New World became a place where, conceivably, anything was possible, where everything was susceptible to endless refashioning. An incredible optimism? and a naive assurance?form the bases of such a belief. It is precisely this optimism AE seizes upon. But the crisis in Ireland was perceived not as a new beginning or a

repudiation of history, but as a crossroads in that temporal and spiritual voyage to their own New World of nationhood: "Though we are old, ethnologically con

sidered, yet as a nation, a collective unit, we are young or yet unborn" (NI 15).

The opposition between the desperate state of Irish history and an optimism bred

by the imminent birth of a new Irish nation is expressed as the last hope of a new



'' I re lands of the Hea rt" 9

start; a paradoxical condition in which hope is born out of hopelessness. Finding a model in the United States, AE looked frequently to American poets and states

men for insight and inspiration, and in particular to the self-consciousness

involved in the project of nation-building. Invoking Whitman, he wrote:

Being still so young as a nation, and before the true starting of our

career, we might say of ourselves as the great American poet of his

race, with which so many of our own have mingled? 'Have the elder races halted?

Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied, over there beyond the

seas?

We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson.

Pioneers! Oh Pioneers!' (NI 22)

On the brink of independence, it was a question of sink or swim. The Revival had

helped to mobilize a politically effective past. What was needed now was a guid ing vision of the future, a pioneer.

5

Interceding in a dispute between Yeats and the journalist/ librarian John

Eglinton, AE wrote:

Every Irishman forms some vague ideal of his country, born from his

reading of history, or from contemporary politics, or from an imagi native intuition; and this Ireland in the mind it is, not the actual

Ireland, which kindles his enthusiasm. For this he works and makes

sacrifices; but because it never had any philosophical definition, or a

supremely beautiful statement in literature which gathered all aspira tions about it, the ideal remains vague (NC 83)

The argument arose from a column Eglinton had written for the Daily Express in which he asserted that ancient legends "obstinately refuse to be taken out of their old environment and transplanted into the world of modern sympathies"; Irish

patriotism, Eglinton stressed, must look forward rather than back. The old myths were simply incapable of speaking to present day realities in anything but a nos

talgic and sentimental way. Literature, worthy of the name, "must be the outcome and expression of a strong interest in life itself," and free from the constraints of

orthodoxy ("Subjects" 10). "Sooner or later," he wrote elsewhere, "Ireland will have to make up its mind that it is no longer the old Gaelic nation of the 5th or 12th or even of the 18th century, but one which has been in the making ever since these islands were drawn into the community of nations by the Normans"

("Island"). Yeats, who would eventually come to see the virtue of such a posi tion, responded by claiming for the past the essential role of providing a model for the future: "Our Irish romantic tradition.. .should make Ireland, as Ireland and

all other lands were in ancient times, a holy land to her own people" ("Note" 20). AE would later develop his own view of the benefits of the "cosmopolitanism"




Eglinton espoused, but in 1899 he sided firmly with Yeats: "To reveal Ireland in

clear and beautiful light, to create the Ireland in the heart, is the province of

national literature" (NC 83). It would be difficult to imagine a more apt expression of the prevailing

mood of the time. In siding with Yeats, AE gave voice to the need for an imagi native ideal, and reaffirmed that effort to create "the Ireland of the heart." And

next to Hyde, it was AE who, as editor of The Irish Homestead and later The Irish

Statesman, most steadfastly espoused an assimilative "Irish" (as opposed to the

more narrow "Gaelic") nationalism; a nationalism that would reconcile and unify all factions and interests.

In literary circles George Russell is remembered, when at all, for his

occultism, the mysticism of his poetry and painting, his generosity to younger writers sometimes, as a bit of a quack perhaps, and most often, probably, through

Joyce's "tall figure in bearded homespun...A.E.I.O.U." But if his mysticism was

unwavering, there was always simultaneously another, pragmatic side to AE

which made him a formidable figure in the controversies of his time. Drawing on

a rich and lengthy engagement with Irish life, including years of work with Sir

Horace Plunkett's Irish Agricultural Organization Society and two and a half

decades as editor of the Irish Homestead/Irish Statesman, AE envisioned the cre

ation of a rural nation founded on agricultural cooperation. Like Hyde, AE's

vision of the "new" Ireland was non-exclusivist, designed to appeal across parti

san and sectarian lines, to assimilate the individual citizen into the confederation

of souls which constitutes the nation. As the phrase "confederation of souls" suggests, AE imagined the nation

in spiritual terms and the question of national independence as a spiritual crisis. "The state," he wrote in The National Being, a compilation of his thoughts on an

Irish polity written over the first decade of his editorship of The Irish Homestead, "is a physical body prepared for the incarnation of the soul of a race" (2). In con

structing a detailed plan befitting such a state, AE drew from the many sides of himself: from his mysticism and his pragmatism; from the poet and the econo

mist. He began with what he saw as the fundamental first problem, rural flight, the exodus from country to city; not only to Dublin or Belfast, but to Liverpool,

London, New York and beyond. Since the Famine, emigration had become an

unparalleled source of what is now called "brain-drain"; Ireland was losing its best and brightest young people to England and the United States. Insofar as this was rural flight, it was a universal phenomenon. Throughout history, AE argues, the benefits of civilization, its intellectual attractions and material advantages had been accessible almost exclusively to city-dwellers. What Ireland must do was to make rural life vital and interesting so as to make that life more desirable.

Furthermore, city-life had become a nightmare; Dublin slums were among

the worst in the industrialized world. And for one contemporary observer, at

least, these conditions had given rise to a crippling helplessness and despair:



"Irelands of the Heart" 11

Dublin is relatively the poorest [city] in the kingdom. There is a large number of people living on the absolute verge of poverty, and if it were not for the passive type of character so largely represented

among our people, there would be a regular rising in the city, for there

are large numbers of people living on such small sums of money that

we who know them wonder how they keep body and soul together.5

Against the passivity and isolation of urban life, AE proposed rural cooperation. Under cooperation, one would have a vested interest in seeing that one's neigh

bor not only survived, but prospered; the degree to which each individual thrived

(or failed to), marked the success or failure of the Cooperative movement as a

whole.

In its anti-modernism and its anxieties about the decadence and spiritual

poverty of modern urban life, AE's representation of the present as a spiritual cri

sis in Irish history echoed Yeats's own anti-modern, anti-materialism. And like

the early Yeats, AE looked to an idealized past?in this case a misty notion of the

ancient Irish clan system?as a means of authorizing the rural, communal culture

he would implement in the present. Nevertheless, rural flight and emigration were very real and legitimate concerns for a culture that was still predominantly

agrarian, and which lacked an industrial base capable of employing large sectors

of the population. Thus, in The National Being AE addressed both the practical realities of implementing the cooperative program on a national scale and its

spiritual effects as well. Cooperation was, to be sure, promoted as an economic

system. But more importantly, it was advanced as a new moral order:

I do not regard any of these forms of co-operative organization as

ideal or permanent. The co-operative movement must be regarded rather as a great turning movement on the part of humanity towards

the ideal. The co-operative organizations now being formed in Ireland

and over the world will, I am certain, persist and outlast this genera tion and the next, and will grow into vaster things than we dream of;

but the really important change they will bring about in the minds of

men will be psychological. Men will become habituated to the

thought of common action for the common good. (NB 88)

For AE, "civilizations are externalizations of the soul and character of races."

Change, then, could only come from within; in shaping the national soul, the mould for the external body?Civilization?is cast. Without national ideals,

ideals which would "unite in one spirit urban and rural life," there exists only the

empty shell of a nation.

The emphasis on the spiritual nature of nation-building is an extension of

AE's abiding involvement in Madame Blavatsky's Theosophical society. He had

been deeply involved in the society before going to work for Plunkett in 1897, and he continued the association, though more informally, for the rest of his life.

Everything he approached, from his editorships to his promotion of younger




writers (something Yeats complained he did indiscriminately), was informed by his philosophical beliefs?a fact that is nearly always overlooked in discussions

of The National Being.6 But when, after reading Standish O'Grady's History of Ireland, the nationalistic flame began to burn inside him, he sought to conjoin the

two in a systematic mode of thought.

Nation-building, for AE, begins with the individual, the citizen, entering into a relationship with some greater part of life, an oversoul whereby everything that one is or does is heightened as a result of one's participation in this confed

eration of souls. The oversoul is presented here as theosophy's boundless god Lir?in whom all things are one?transformed into a superior realm of life called

the National Being:

In the highest civilizations the individual citizen is raised above him

self and made part of a greater life, which we may call the National

Being. He enters into it, and it becomes an oversoul to him, and gives to all his works a character and grandeur and a relation to the works

of his fellow citizens, so that all he does conspires with the labours of

others for unity and magnificence of effect. (NB 11)

In the theosophical terms of this ideal State, the sum of a nation's citizens?con

sidered individually?is less than negligible when compared to their collective

potential within the National Being. There is nothing particularly extraordinary about AE's idealist philosophy

of history. As he describes it, a National Being assumes different shapes in accor

dance with the age: in a theocracy, the national being is a god; in an aristocracy, a hero; in a democracy, a multitudinous being. Lacking National Being, modern

states have been left with base and irrational leaders, leaders who invoke pas

sions and know nothing?lacking it themselves?of reason. In the vague his

toricity of its general outline, AE's theory of the National Being is interchange able with hundreds of other disgruntled theories of the present. What makes this

project significant, however, is the tenacity with which he attempts to ground his case in precisely detailed historical precedent. And in his appeal to the authority of the past, both as a model of a pristine national essence and as a means of

recapturing that essence in the future, his plan is representative of efforts to forge an Irish nation in particular, and of nation-building more generally.

AE begins, in The National Being, with the present. He collapses political and historical conditions into what is essentially an aesthetic argument: there has been a degeneration; we no longer have any divine leaders. And this is attribut

able, perhaps, to an artistic failure to create imaginative ideals. In the old days the poets wrote about "great men," kings and heroes, stories which served as an

example for the "popular mind" and which in turn encouraged those great men on to further admirable actions. The "great defect" of modern literature is that it has created few such types; a populist aesthetic in the shape of Naturalism and Realism has supplanted the heroic ideal. Cause and effect are circular, of course,



"1relands of the Heart" 13

for who could imagine, AE asks with a certain rhetorical flourish, one of these

modern public men as the hero of an epic? or for that matter, even of a lyric?! Hence the poet, and consequently society as a whole, occupies an awkward posi

tion:

The poets have dropped out of the divine procession, and sing a soli

tary song. They inspire nobody to be great, and failing any finger-post in literature pointing to true greatness our democracies too often take

the huckster from his stall, the drunkard from his pot, the lawyer from his court, and the company promoter from his director's chair, and

elect them as representative men. (NB 14)

"History" in this scenario becomes the story of a Fall from a mythic past to a

spiteful present: "It is how many hundred years since greatness guided us? In

Ireland our history begins with the most ancient of any in a mythical era when

earth mingled with heaven." But following the descent from a mythic to a hero

ic and finally to a human age, the present has been reduced to "a petty peasant

nationality, rural and urban alike mean in their externals" (NB 14). Without good

examples?from life, but even more importantly from art?that is, without an

aesthetic ideal, a heroic image, democracy cannot function properly. There is at least a trace of disingenuousness in AE's argument here about

the aesthetic crisis of the present (to say nothing for the moment of his concep tion of history). It is the same argument put forward by Yeats in his play The

King's Threshold, in which the poet's advisory role to the King?and thus the

poet's power to exercise his unique wisdom in shaping public policy?is elimi

nated (though Yeats's play treats the matter with a great deal more complexity).

Both AE and Yeats had been central players in that creation of the "Ireland of the heart" that served as a catalyst for mobilizing both the cultural and political nationalism of their time; they had very much helped to shape an image of Ireland that, having achieved a certain critical mass, was mobilized in directions

they neither liked nor had much control over. Padraic Pearse, to name just one

example, had taken that heroic literature to heart and had not only founded a

school on its values, but effectively mobilized the Easter Rising around the exalt

ed image of Cuchulain, the most noble and heroic of Irish figures. AE may not

have approved of Pearse's emphasis, but to claim that what was lacking in the

present was a heroic literature was simply an absurdity. Still, it is worth noting that while the aesthetic argument ?especially in

our own time?is easily mocked, and while there are clearly all sorts of problems with its historical blindnesses, we exercise a historical blindness of our own if we too readily accede to the argument, advanced most persuasively by Seamus

Deane, that it was simply a reactionary response on the part of a displaced Anglo Irish elite to an emergent Dublin petite bourgeoisie. AE campaigned actively on

the side of labor in the 1913 Dublin Lock-out?along with Larkin, Connolly, and an array of activists and intellectuals?against the Dublin industrialist William




Martin Murphy. And Yeats had his own run-in with Murphy?"old Paudeen,"

symbol and central figure of that petty, selfish, small-mindedness that Yeats

would immortalize as "the filthy modern tide"?in the Lane Gallery controver

sy.

If the "human age" of the present was, so to speak, "human, all too

human," for AE some "incorruptible spiritual atom" of racial greatness still

remained. Redemption was still possible "if by some inspiration there could be

revealed to us a way back or forward to greatness," through the creation of a poli ty in harmony with, and fully expressive of the National Being. The way for

ward, for AE, was to be discovered by looking backward?to the ancient Irish

clan system as a model of the fully realized spirit of the Irish national character.

He begins with a distinction between "communities" (in which the interests of

the individual and the interests of the community are inseparable), and unorga nized populations. There were at one time, he argues, true rural communities in

ancient Ireland. These communities were based on a vested self-interest. They functioned communally and land was held in common. And each member's indi

vidual existence was enhanced by their participation in the "larger life" of the

collective body of the clan. Little by little, however, these rural communities dis

appeared, victims of a conspiratorial modernization characterized by an urban,

industrial, bureaucratic State apparatus bent on the centralization of power:

The greater organizations of nation or empire regarded the smaller

communities jealously in the past, and broke them up and gathered all

the strings of power into capital cities. The result was a growth of the

State, with a local decay of civic, patriotic or public feeling, ending in

bureaucracies and State departments, where paid officials, devoid of

intimacy with local needs, replace the services naturally and volun

tarily rendered in an earlier period. (NB 36)

And not just in Ireland were these processes at work; the very history of civi

lization, he asserted, was a record of the formation and subsequent destruction of

clan communities by ambitious and greedy rulers.

Clearly, AE's anti-modern narrative is meant to corroborate his own cri

tique of the present. But it also enables a more important rhetorical move. For whether the clan is broken or not,

the moment the rural dweller is left to himself, he begins again, with

nature prompting him, to form little clans?or nations, rather?with

his fellows, and it is there life has been happiest. We did this in ancient Ireland... The European farmers, and we in Ireland along with them, are beginning again the eternal task of building up a civil

isation in nature?the task so often disturbed, the labour so often

destroyed. (NB 64-5)

The tropology is, if heavy-handed and historically reductionist, nonetheless

effective for AE's purposes. By representing the clan system as organic and



"Irelands of the Heart'1 15

(therefore) inevitable, AE endows the cooperative movement with both the

authority of tradition and an air of historical destiny, as something both inextin

guishable and restorative. The clan system, as a force of "nature," is pitted

against the modernizing force of "culture." Here, once again, we find revealed in

the mixed metaphors of nationalism an Irish history at once contaminated and

ruptured, or rather, ruptured because contaminated. The discontinuity of Irish

social life is directly attributed to the infection of English colonization, and the

only antidote to that contagion, as AE describes it, is a return to the essential Irish

form of social organization, agricultural cooperation. By organizing the rural

dweller against those outside forces bent on his destruction, cooperation could

thus break the cycle and ensure the continuation of a "genuine" or purified Irish

"civilisation."

Organization would be the key to that success. History is represented now

as an agonistic battle between the organized and the unorganized: as the clans

had been at the mercy of the more organized and stronger forces of greed and

ambition, so the modern-day farmer was at the mercy of the usurer or "gombeen

man." And the exploitation was not simply economic, but psychological as well.

Wholly resigned to the injustices of such a system, the victims suffer their vic timization passively, as the natural order of things. Cooperation would protect the small, independent landowner against the threat of highly-organized materi al interests. Hence, for both spiritual and material reasons

this must be the work of the present and next generation?to reach

back to the strength of the clan system, and try to so build up the agri cultural Ireland that the farmers may be able to withstand the efforts

of other organized interests, to retain the full profits of their industry, and to build up a rural civilisation where men can find the fullest and

freest play for all their social, economic and intellectual faculties. (C

138)

Drawing on theosophical principles, cooperation began with local co-ops (coop eration between the individual and his neighbors), and moved to a national level

(combining local and national interests), so that the cooperative movement would connect "with living links the home, the center of Patrick's being, to the

nation, the circumference of his being." The goal of this new "social order" was to "provide for essential freedom for the individual and for the solidarity of the nation" (NB 27, 74). Cooperation was then both a metaphor for, and an embod iment of AE's social ideals?unification and reconciliation of difference.

6

There is an undercurrent of anxiety that runs throughout The National

Being, an anxiety about both AE's own role in an Irish future, and the shape that future might take. It is not a specifically class-based anxiety, for in its details it has little to do with partisan considerations and almost everything to do with




shaping a more generous form of life out of already existing conditions in

Ireland. The National Being takes seriously the tradition of rural life and labor in

Ireland and advocates a recuperation of "traditional" values opposed to every

thing petty and mean. Moreover, AE contests Marx and Engels' notion of the

"idiocy of rural life" by attempting to establish a "true rural community." By

foregrounding the problems of ignorance and illiteracy, AE intended to endow

rural life with dignity and independence. And he sought to combat the exploita tion of disenfranchised laborers, rural and urban alike, by relocating the means

of production and distribution into their own hands.

And yet, if AE's grasp of contemporary circumstances was both acute and

concrete, still, a perceived coalescence between his own increasing marginaliza

tion within the culture?a result of the increasing hegemony of Irish Ireland's

ideological predominance?and the instability of actual social conditions creat

ed a confusion of the present's real relations between past and future. The pre sent then, was a matrix, a frustration with contemporary events framed by a nos

talgia for the past and a fantasy of the future. History became, not only what it was for Stephen Dedalus?a nightmare from which the present must awaken?

but simultaneously the dream into which it is hoping to lapse. Towards the end of The National Being AE wrote: "No policy can succeed

if it be not in accord with national character. If I have misjudged that, what is written here is vain" (122). In September 1919, according to AE's biographer

Henry Summerfield, "AE suffered a considerable intellectual disappointment" (193). The Irish historian Eoin MacNeill disproved the assertion of earlier histo rians that the Gaelic clans held their land in common and revealed AE's histori

ography as an act of myth-making, the creation of what Eric Hobsbawm and

Terence Ranger have called "invented traditions." In MacNeill's words:

Only a generation ago, the writer of comic opera thought that Japan was enough of a blank in the English popular mind to be filled with

amusing inventions. In some such way is to be explained the assump tion of a social and economic communal system in ancient Ireland.

The region appeared to be terra nullius, and some enterprising ideal

ists took possession of it in the name of the commune... The politi cal system of ancient Ireland was no more communal than that of the

Roman Republic. It was aristocratic. The ancient Irish "clan system" or "tribal system" are very modem inventions. (144)

Summerfield tells us nothing more of AE's reaction but that "he did not allow it to ruffle his good humour," and that AE "admitted that Irish economic democra

cy began not, as he had supposed, in ancient times, but with the short-lived coop erative community founded on the Vandeleur estate at Ralahine, County Clare, in 1830" (194). Considerable intellectual disappointment indeed.

"Invented traditions" are no less valuable or effective for their lack of his

torical verity, and MacNeill's revelation does not negate what was valuable in the



'' Irelands of th e Heart" 17

Cooperative movement. It does, however, underscore the inadequacy of AE's

myth. And it signals more deeply ingrained problems within the project itself.

For AE, the pre-modern, pre-industrial, pre-English world of the clan is depicted as Paradise, the Edenic order of Irish life. In those days people did not choose

"publicans and hucksters" as their leaders, but "reverenced wisdom." This is ret

rospect as aspiration: a fantasy of a simple, natural, and continuous prelapsarian

world interrupted and nearly destroyed by the interjection of decadent values. AE's version of the Golden Age?a myth functioning as a memory?enabled the

abstraction of a moral order from the destruction of the clans. By superimposing a Platonic ideal of Cooperation on conditions which were complex and inherent

ly unstable, the actual and bitter contradictions of the time could be effectively elided. The element of idealization inherent in the creation of the "Ireland in the

heart," was a necessary and liberating early stage of Irish nationalism. As AE

clearly recognized, the cultural nationalists had embarked upon an important new

beginning: the imagination of a national identity upon which a post-colonial Ireland could be founded. Such a project turned inexorably towards acts of

archaeology and divination, to a search for beginnings or origins. A beginning, Edward Said has written, is accorded eminence "because it came first, because it

began that which has persisted and endured. And thus what is said first, because it is first, because it begins, is eminent" (32). At the same time an eminent begin

ning lends credence to a particular present, it validates that present as the natur

al order. As one's view of present exigencies shifts, so too does one's notion of a

"true" origin. Thus, the two-fold significance of locating historical origins for the

range of Irish nationalists circa 1900: On one hand, there is the force, the emi nence, the beginning behind the present historical moment (a beginning in accord

with one's view of the present and the "true" nature of the national character);

and on the other hand, there is the importance of this historical moment as begin ning, as the initiatory point for a whole new historical period, an autonomous Ireland organized around that same conception of the national character. In order to get some idea of the Irish national character, AE wrote, "we must slip by those seven centuries of struggle and study national origins, as the lexicographer, to get

the exact meaning of a word, traces it to its derivation" (NB 123). But national identities, like words in a language, are subjects of and to his

tory. Constantly in flux, they change their shape?their meaning?over time.

What a word or identity was, while not irrelevant, tells us only part of the story of what it means, or is, in the present. If, for AE, the restoration of dignity and a sense of community to rural life must lead inevitably to the rediscovery of the true spiritual character of the Irish nation, Shaw saw another side of rural life after the land wars of the 1870's and 80's. Having abolished the landlord-tenant

system of land holding, the old tyrants had simply been exchanged for new ones, a new class of small farmer characterized by a

land-grabbing selfishness and

greed every bit as vile as the worst excesses of the landlords:




Cornelius. .. .Every man cant own land; and some men must own it to

employ them. It was all very well when solid men like Doran and me

and Mat were kep from ownin land. But hwat man in his senses ever

wanted to give land to Patsy Farrll an dhe like o him? (Act III)

The desire to free oneself and one's culture from the contingencies of history? "to slip by those seven centuries of struggle"?by returning to the Elysian fields

of "Irishness" simply initiates the cycle anew; by seeking to avoid the burden of

history, one is condemned to an endless series of beginnings again, to a future

that is an endless quest for the oldest thing in the past, the point where/before his

tory began. And the desire to fix an identity outside of that history, especially a

national identity, whether by divining origins or seeking essences, becomes

increasingly problematic as the emphasis in nation-building shifts from the oppo sitional nationalism of decolonization to the hard work of shaping the post-colo nial state.

NOTES

1. On the informing principles which structure both nationalist and imperialist forms of identity in the Irish context David Lloyd's Nationalism and Minor

Literature is seminal. On the relationship between nationalism and imperialism more generally see Anderson, Balibar, Berlin, and Nairn. For a less colonial-cen

tric view of nationalism, see important recent work by Mosse and Greenfield. 2."Nationalism and Imperialism" 21. Subsequent quotations from Russell will be

indicated by the following abbreviations and incorporated parenthetically within the text:

C Contributions to the Irish Homestead and Statesman NB The National Being NI "Nationalism and Imperialism" NC "Nationality and Cosmopolitanism in Literature" 3. Cusack is perhaps best known as Joyce's model for Leopold Blooom's neme

sis "The Citizen" in Ulysses. 4. On the change of leadership, and Hyde's placid response to it, see Dunleavy and Dunleavy 326-28.

5. Rev. Gilbert Mahaffy, in evidence before the street-trading children commit

tee, Parliamentary Papers, 1902. Quoted in O'Brien 161. 6. See, for example, Boyd 212-39; Henn 137-56; Howarth 165-211; and

Thompson 167-201. For a more balanced account of AE's synthesis of theo

sophical belief and practical endeavor, see Summerfield's biography, and Kuch.



"Irelands of the Heart'' 19

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Documents

"Irelands of the Heart": The Ends of Cultural Nationalism and the Limits of Nationalist Culture