On the Necessity of De-Hydifying Irish Cultural Criticism

University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies)

On the Necessity of De-Hydifying Irish Cultural CriticismAuthor(s): Bruce StewartSource: New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring, 2000), pp. 23-44Published by: University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20557628 .

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Bruce Stewart

On the Necessity of De-Hydifying Irish Cultural Criticism

Douglas Hyde's address on the "Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland," deliv

ered to the Irish Literary Society in Dublin on November 25,1892, led to the

formation of the Gaelic League in July of the following year. It also provided a

central plank of propaganda for the Irish separatist movement through its

insistence that Ireland "?5 and will ever remain Celtic to the core."1 More than

the political and economic tenets of Irish republicanism per se, this strand of

cultural nationalism led to the assertion of the right to national sovereignty. As

such, that strand of nationalism was eventually woven into the 1937

Constitution wherein the Irish state laid claim to a territory coextensive with

that of the old insular nation of Gaelic Ireland (Articles 2, 3), and also named

Irish as both the "national language" and the "first official language" of the

country (Article 8).2 The large impact of Hyde's thinking in regard to the

political self-image of the state called Eire-Ireland makes it a matter of more

than academic curiosity to reexamine the way in which he originally formu

lated the doctrine of Gaelic nationhood, as well as the ways in which it was

translated into action by those who revered him as their teacher even if they

applied his teachings in ways he disapproved. Much of Hyde's famous lecture took the form of a spirited attack on the

"illogical position" of the Irishman of the 1890s who "continues to hate the

English, and at the same time continues to imitate them" and who "continues

to clamour for recognition as a distinct nationality" wrhile "throw [ing] away with both hands what would make it so" (PISB 79). In the grey political dawn

i. Douglas Hyde, "The Necessity of De-Anglicising Ireland," in Poetry and Ireland since 1800: A

Source Book, ed. Mark Storey (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 83; hereafter cited parenthetically, thus:

(PISB 83).

2. Bunreacht na h?ireann/Constitution of Ireland (Baile ?tha Cliath: Foilseachain Rialtais, 1980).

This Irish-language edition holds priority in law. Article 3 (p. 5) reads: "Go dti go nd?antar ath

chomhl?n? ar na cr?ocha n?isi?nta, agus gan dochar do cheart na Parlaimeinte is an Rialtais a

bhuna?tear leis ar mBunreacht seo chun dl?nse a oibri? sna cr?ocha n?isi?nta uile, bainfidh na

dl?the a acht?far ag an bParliamint sin leis an limist?ar c?anna le?ar bhain dl?the Shaorst?t ?ire

ann, agus beidh an ?ifeacht ch?anna acu taobh amuigh den limist?ar sin a bh? ag dl?the Shaorst?t

?ireann." Articles 2 and 3 were suspended by an act of D?il ?ireann (Autumn, 1999) in fulfillment

of undertakings reached by referendum in conjunction with the Belfast Agreement of 1998.

NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW/IRIS ?IREANNACH NUA, 4:1 (sPRING/EARRACH, 2000), 23-44




after the fall of Parnell, this initiative was a new source of warmth and light.

Rejecting the cultural regionalism of the parliamentary leadership with its

dependence on the English Liberal Party, it also advocated a more radical kind

of Irishness in which the issues of national language and traditions would move

to center stage: "I shall endeavour to show that this failure of the Irish people in

recent times has been largely brought about by the race diverging during this

century from the right path, and ceasing to be Irish without becoming English"

(PISB 79). This equation of "people" and "race" proved the vital formula for the

politics of Irish nationhood in the new century. Without expressly admitting to

such an unparliamentary ploy, Hyde had swerved drastically away from

Gladstone's "Union of Hearts" toward the adversarial rhetoric of Irish

American Fenianism, taking with him much of the Literary Revival. Though there was nothing manifestly subversive in Hyde's speech, it struck an ominous

note when he suggested that the Fenian method of political organization should be adopted in taking Irish revivalism to the people: "... in order to keep Irish alive ... nothing less than a house to house visitation and exhortation of

the people themselves will do, something?though with a very different pur

pose?analogous to the procedure that James Stephens adopted throughout Ireland when he found her like a corpse on a dissecting table." This "dissecting table," as Hyde's audience well knew, was a citation of Sir Charles Gavan Duffy's celebrated coinage that had entered the literary blood stream of Young Ireland

tradition.3 Yet, in view of their effect on his listeners, the actual details of Hyde's

language-revival program seem surprisingly unadventurous:

We can ... and we shall insist if Home Rule be carried, that the Irish language . . . shall be placed on a par with?or even above?Greek, Latin and modern

languages in all examinations held under the Irish Government [and that]

where the children speak Irish, Irish shall be taught, anf that Irish-speaking

schoolmasters, petty sessions clerks, and magistrates be appointed in Irish

speaking districts.

Hyde then went on to explore an analogy between the Irish and the

Hebrew languages which is better known in the version set in the windy cave

3. In Prison Life (1874), Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa comments: "Charles Gavan Duffy left the

country in 1854 [recte 1855], saying he left the cause of freedom a corpse on the dissecting table."

Excerpted in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, gen. ed. Seamus Deane (Derry: Field Day

Company, 1991), 2: 262; hereafter cited parenthetically, thus: (FDA 2: 262). W. P. Ryan gives an

account of Duffy acting as the chairman at an Irish Literary Club meeting, September 21,1888:

"The Irish Phoenix had arisen many times from its ashes since, on his turning in despair from

Ireland, he [Duffy] had used the most imaginative phrase of his life, telling of a national corpse on the dissecting table." Willim P. Ryan, The Irish Literary Revival (1894; facs. New York: Lemma

Publishing, 1970), p, 26; hereafter cited parenthetically, thus: (ILR 26).

24




of the nationalist Freeman's Journal in James Joyce's Ulysses: "If all this were

done, it [would] bring about a tone of thought which would make it disgrace

ful for an educated Irishman [here he cites some Gaelic family names] to be

ignorant of their own language [or] at least as disgraceful as for an educated

Jew to be quite ignorant of Hebrew." Most of these objectives were actually

attained in local government reforms before 1910, having been pushed through

by a powerful language lobby organized by the Gaelic League (Conradh na

Gaeilge), to which Hyde had been enlisted as the first President on the motion

"that a society be formed ... for the purpose of keeping the Irish language spo

ken in Ireland," at the inaugural meeting of July 31,1893. By 1908, there were six

hundred League branches, and Irish has been established as a National School

subject. It also stood on the Intermediate examination curriculum, and Hyde

himself had led in 1909, as F. S. L. Lyons remarks, "the victorious campaign to

include Irish as a compulsory subject for matriculation in the newly estab

lished National University,"4 which it remained until 1976, when it lost this sta

tus under the Education Ministry of Dr. Richard Burke.

As the Gaelic League became increasingly radicalized through its member

ship, however, Hyde's pacific brand of cultural nationalism was applied to

more overtly political purposes, though, as Harry Boylan has stressed, he "had

always insisted that the Gaelic League must remain a non-sectarian and non

political organisation, but its very success in reviving the national spirit helped to inspire the separatist movement, and it became clear that the language and

the political struggle could not be kept apart."5 In 1915, Hyde resigned, remark

ing that he would not be a figurehead for the Irish Republican Brotherhood

(IRB): "[W]hy, [Hyde] asked, should he allow himself to be browbeaten and

outwitted on every question of politics, and be held responsible by the public for acts of flaming indiscretion?'6 For Pearse and others in the IRB, the substi

tution of the scholar-revolutionary E?in MacNeill, mainspring in the original Gaelic League committee and now commander-in-chief of the Irish

Volunteers, was a highly significant move. It actually took John Redmond's

commitment of the Volunteers to Flanders in his speech at Woodenbridge that

summer to set the scene for a republican insurrection in Dublin. Events there

after followed their less than predestined course in 1916-19, leading to the for

4. F. S. L. Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine (London: Fontana, 1971), p. 225. Hyde's submission to

the Palles Commission (1898-99) appears in Irish Educational Documents, ed. Aine Hyland,

Kenneth Milne (Dublin: CITC, 1987). Patrick Pearse's disappointed reaction to the new educa

tional code (1900) may be found in his Letters, ed. Seamus ? Buachalla (Gerrards Cross: Colin

Smythe, 1980), p. l/ff.

5. See Harry Boylan, Dictionary of Irish Biography, rev. edn. (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1988).

6. L?on ? Br?in, Protestant Nationalists in Revolutionary Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan,

1985) pp, 107-8.

25



On the Necessity ofDe-Hydifying Irish Cultural Criticism

mation of the first Irish government in 1922. Hyde later admitted that 'he had

not foreseen the utter and swift debacle of the Irish Parliamentary Party and

the apotheosis of Sinn F?in."7 In 1937, Hyde was honored with the presidency of Ireland under the 1937 Constitution.

Viewed from a southern standpoint, this was a fitting reward for Hyde's

remarkable achievement as man of letters, scholar, teacher, and publicist for

Irish Ireland. His nomination and election to the highest state office?in prac

tice another "figurehead" position?had the added merit that it seemed to

show that the new state was religiously impartial, Hyde being a member of the

Church of Ireland. Indeed, in the 1940s the only voice raised against the Gaelic,

Catholic orthodoxy of the state which Hyde's initiative had made possible was

Sean O'Faolain's. O'Faolain vigorously repudiated what he saw being taught in

the schoolrooms of Ireland: "The main notion of it is that we have since the

dawn of our history been united in our efforts to eject all foreign ways, peo

ples, manners, and customs_This farrago is called Nationalism."8 If such an

orthodoxy was irritating to the disillusioned freedom-fighter, what must it

have been to those whom Hyde's philosophy had so pointedly excluded from

the realms of Irishness? Hereditary Palesmen left Ireland in droves after 1922.

From the Northern stand-point, where flight was less thinkable and less need

ful, the incumbency of the first president of the Gaelic League in the viceregal

lodge was not so much sop to Irish Protestants as a confirmation of the fact

that the new state was rootedly antagonistic to their different forms of civil

and religious polity.9 It may be that the intransigent Unionism of Northern Protestants made

some kind of partition unavoidable from the outset, but Hyde's rosy vision of

a Gaelic Irish nation did nothing to diminish the differences between the two

groups whose duty it was?and is?to find a modus vivendi on the island. A

few specimens of Hyde's eloquence will illustrate how gratuitious was his ani

mosity to the Northern majority:

[W]e must strive to cultivate everything that is most racial, most smacking of

the soil, most Gaelic, most Irish, because in spite of the little admixture of

Saxon blood in the north-east corner, this island is and will ever remain Celtic

to the core. (PISB 83)

7. Ibid.

8. Sean OTaol?in, "The Stuffed Shirts," The Bell (June, 1943)? in FDA 3:101-107.

9. Calling for the "Dehydration of Irish Literature," John Wilson Foster also makes the point:

"Where unassimilated Gaelicism was a virtue, unassimilated Scots-Irishness was a vice. Further

comment is unnecessary, beyond reminding readers that Hyde became the first President of the

Irish Republic, embodiment of the highest ideals of the state." John Wilson Foster, Colonial

Consequences (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1991), p. 253.

26




Further on, Hyde asserts that "in the north-east of Ulster ... the Gaelic race

was expelled and the land planted with aliens, whom our dear mother Erin,

assimilative as she is, has hitherto found it difficult to absorb." Just how Hyde, a Roscommon man, could imagine that the Scottish Presbyterians who made

up the Unionist majority could be characterized as a strain of 'Saxon blood'

requires some explaining. The reason may be found no further off perhaps than in the patriotic balladry of The Nation collected in The Spirit of the

Nation (1843), and The New Spirit of the Nation (1892). The jingoistic phrases in Hyde's speech?"mother Erin," "smacking of the soil"?were calculated to

strike a chord with that prolific, potent, and addictive brand of sentimental

writing that had sustained for half a century the idea of a national literature in

Ireland.

The political objectives of that literature had never been disguised: Thomas Davis had formulated the idea of a "ballad history of Ireland" pre

cisely as a propaganda weapon. For Hyde, who advocated it expressly in his

1892 lecture, it was known as "Anglo-Irish literature," a phrase deriving from

the coinage "Anglo-Irish ballads" used by Charles Gavan Duffy in the preface to his anthology The Ballad Poetry of Ireland (1845), and speedily endorsed by

Denis Florence MacCarthy in a copy-cat anthology of 1846, The Book of Irish

Ballads. In Duffy's reading of the matter, the Anglo-Irish ballad was "the pro duction of educated men, with English tongues but Irish hearts."10 Curiously, for Davis in 1840, the priority was to replace the pedagogic diet of Greek and

Roman classics with works of modern literature, in particular English litera

ture, "and, perhaps I may add, Irish literature."11 Fifty years later, this "Anglo Irish literature" was for Hyde a kind of patriotic half-way house on the road to

the Gaelic Ireland that the widespread decline in Irish speakers had rendered

inaccessible.12 Hence, the advocacy of Irish culture that he expounded in the

Leinster Hall took this compromise form:

Perhaps the principle point of all is the necessity for encouraging the use of

Anglo-Irish literature instead of English books, especially instead of English

periodicals_Every house should have a copy of Moore and Davis.13

?o. Seamus Deane quotes the editorials of these anthologies in his introduction to "Poetry and

Song, 1800-1900" (FDA 2: 5).

11. Thomas Davis, Address to the Trinity College Historical Society (Dublin, 1840), quoted in W. B.

Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition (Blackrock: Irish Academic Press, 1976), p. 60.

12. For an account of Hyde's compromise position, see Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine, p. 224.

13. J. J. Lee, The Modernisation of Ireland, 1848-1918 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1973),

PP-138-39

27



On the Necessity of De~Hydifying Irish Cultural Criticism

It was not, therefore, in the year 1892 that Douglas Hyde gave himself whole

heartedly to the aims of Irish-language revival, the very possibility of which he

doubted until Eoin MacNeill, Thomas O'Neill Russell, and others convinced

him otherwise. The turning point came when he saw MacNeill, in the Royal Irish Academy Library, poring over the old Irish of the Book of Leinster like a

modern novel.14

Hyde had much in common with Thomas Davis, beside the class from

which both had sprung. Davis had been an antimodern who believed that the

"plague of utilitarianism and industrialisation" which he called Anglicization was a "greater though less obvious danger to Ireland than even Papal suprem

acy."15 As J. J. Lee pointed out sardonically a few years back, Hyde's ruling atti

tudes were likewise formed more from pastoral notions than influenced by ideas of economic development: "The whole infra-structure of modernisation

appalled him, and he assumed that Ireland could not survive in a modernised

world. They should therefore ... opt out from the modernisation process and

continue to dwell in a mythical world of knee-breeches."16 It is on the language

question that an Anglo-Irish antecedent for Hyde's attitude may best be

sought in Davis, whose romantic sense of the importance of a national lan

guage added a political accent to the cultural antiquarianism cultivated by his

contemporaries Mangan, O'Donovan, and O'Curry?as well as the staunch

Unionist Ferguson. Partly the product of his absorption in such German

philosophers as Herder, Davis's language policy was also a riposte to the utili

tarian attitude adopted by Daniel O'Connell, whose preoccupation with eco

nomic progress caused him to say: "I can witness without a sigh the gradual disuse of Irish."17 Under the title "Our National Language" Davis wrote:

A people without a language of its own is only half a nation. A nation should

guard its language more than its territories?'tis a surer barrier, and more

important frontier, than fortress or river ... To lose your native tongue, and

learn that of an alien, it the worst badge of conquest. To have lost entirely the

national language is death.18

To Hyde, speaking in 1892, it must have seemed that the nadir had been

reached: "We find ourselves despoiled of the bricks of nationality.... The old

bricks that lasted eight hundred years are destroyed "

14- O'Broin, Protestant Nationalists in Revolutionary Ireland, p. 10.

15. See Charles Gavan Duffy, "Title?" in Young Ireland: A Fragment of Irish History (New York:

Appleton Press, 1881), pp. 299-300.

16. J. J. Lee, The Modernisation of Ireland, pp. 137-40. Lee cites the above passage from Hyde's address on pp. 138-39.

17. An early diary entry quoted in Patrick Rafroidi, Irish Literature in English: The Romantic

Period (Gerards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1980), 1: xxi.

18. Thomas Davis, "Our National Language" (The Nation, April 1,1843) in P1SB 47-48.

28




Yet, if Hyde's attitude on the language question was in tune with Davis's,

they were less akin on the essential composition of the modern Irish nation.

The locus classicus of Young Ireland's theory of Irish nationhood is in the 1842

"Prospectus" of The Nation which speaks of "a nationality which may embrace

Protestant, Catholic, and Dissenter?Milesian and Cromwellian?the

Irishman of a hundred generations and the stranger within our gates."19 On

the precise arrangements of accommodation between the native and the

planter, Davis was uncertain, though the matter

began to come clear to him a

few years later, as he enthusiastically reported in a review of Duffy's Ballad

Poetry of Ireland (1845):

At last we are beginning to see what we are, and what is our destiny.... The ele

ments of Irish nationality are not only combining?in fact, they are growing

confluent in our minds. Such nationality .. . must contain and represent the

races of Ireland. It must not be Celtic, it must not be Saxon?it must be Irish.

The Brehon law, and the maxims of Westminster, the cloudy and lightning

genius of the Gael, the placid strength of the Sasanach, the marshalling insight

of the Norman?a literature which shall exhibit in combination the passions

and idioms of all, and which shall equally express our mind in its romantic, its

religious, its forensic, and its practical tendencies?finally, a native govern

ment, which shall know and rule by the might and right of all; yet yield to the

arrogance of none?these are components o? such a nationality.20

This was a position more multicultural than either Hyde or his followers in the

republican movement were to subscribe to when they adopted the theory that

Ireland "is and ever will be Celtic to the core." Yet, Davis's coeditor on The

Nation, Charles Gavan Duffy, was still promulgating the corporate nationality idea in 1893. Thus, in his second address to the Irish Literary Society in

London, Duffy spoke of a fruitful amalgamation of "the fine qualities of the

Celtic family" with "the sterner strength of the north" and the "Norman genius of Munster."21 Duffy was, on the whole, quite skeptical about the uses of Celtic

imagination, so widely advertised as impractical by Matthew Arnold. The chief

interest of this address, in the end, is its kindly reference to the Presbyterians of northern Ireland. Duffy, who has lately been reclaimed for Ulster,22 was a

Roman Catholic from County Monaghan, essentially self-educated, and at one

time connected with the Academical Institute in Belfast.23

19- Quoted in Stephen Gwynn, Irish Literature and Drama in the English Language: A Short

History (London: Nelson, 1936, p. 90.

20. Thomas Davis, "Ballad Poetry of Ireland" (PISB 52-53),

21. Charles Gavan Duffy, "What Do We Hope to Make of Ireland?" {ILR 83).

22. Ulster Lives, ed. Peter Roebuck (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1992), pp. 99-110.

23. In Irish Literary Figures, William Maguire attributes a striking piece of paternalistic peda

goguery to Duffy: "The practice of speaking and acting only the truth, more than military or

29




In placing Hyde's Irish Literary Society address of 1892 directly on the map of

Irish political history, there is some danger of viewing it out of its primarily lit

erary context and thus mistaking it for an absolute declaration in favor of cul

tural separatism. Hyde actually offered it as a reply to Dr. George Sigerson, who

had inaugurated the Dublin branch with a lecture on "Irish Literature, Its

Origin, Environment and Influence" in August, 1892. This was printed with

Hyde's address in 1894 under the title taken from the first of Charles Gavan

Duffy's two addresses to the London branch: "The Revival of Irish Literature"

(June, 1892), and "What Irishmen May Do For Irish Literature" (July, 1893). In

both his speeches, Duffy devoted himself to advocating the revival of the spirit of the men of 1848 and 1867 through the republication of their poetry. Having

accepted a British knighthood in 1873, Duffy was less interested in revolution

than in Home Rule, but he believed more ardently still in raising the educa

tional and moral levels of the Irish people: "Liberty will do much for a nation,

but it will not do everything."24 The poets in question would help toward real

freedom, he argued, by inculcating a sense of self-respect and a code of honor

as part of a program of national education.25 This was not very remote from

the emphasis that Hyde placed on "Anglo-Irish literature" as a primer in Irish

nationality in his own lecture later in the year. In fact, Hyde was sufficiently attuned with Duffy to visit him in Nice during his own honeymoon in 1893.26

Sigerson and Hyde addressed their papers to audiences at Dublin's

Leinster Hall; Duffy spoke on both occasions in London where he had been

appointed president of the Irish Literary Society in May, 1892. This caused

W. B. Yeats to found the Dublin branch of the society in order to escape from

the thrall of Irish literary Victorianism, with momentous consequences for

modern Ireland.27 Notable for its absence from The Revival of Irish Literature

commercial or intellectual eminence, makes a country great and happy: while contempt for oblig ations and authority does not make citizens, but banditti. The slave s vice of paltering with the

truth clings to our people like the rust of chains. They must unlearn the practice of boasting and

exaggeration; they must learn?hard task to demonstrative, imaginative people?to be direct and

literal." William Maguire, Preface, Irish Literary Figures: Biographies in Miniature (Dublin: Metro

politan Publishing, 1945), np.

24. This is the opening sentence of Duffy's "The Revival of Irish Literature" (June, 1892), PISB 69.

25. The phrase "Educate that you may be free ..." precedes the passage Maguire quotes in note 23.

26. ? Br?in gives an account of Hyde's meeting with Duffy in Protestant Nationalists in

Revolutionary Ireland, pp. 10-11. See also ? Br?in's Charles Gavan Duffy, Patriotic and Statesman

(Dublin: J. Duffy, 1967).

27. See ILR 60. Ryan recounts fully Duffy's involvement with the Chiswick society following the

posthumous publications of poems by J. H. O'Donnell?poems particularly deplored by Yeats as

automatic and inept?and the history of the Library of Ireland project.

30




(i894)> was the lecture delivered by Stopford Augustus Brooke in London

(March, 1893). Though given comfortably in time for inclusion with the oth

ers, this lecture was printed separately under the cumbrous title The Need and

Use of Getting Irish Literature into the English Tongue (1895). It is difficult to

determine whether Brooke jumped or was pushed out of The Revival of Irish

Literature; yet, judging by the title alone, his offering was designed less as a

companion piece than as a riposte to Hyde's. Billed as the belated inaugural

of the London Society, Brooke's address frankly endorsed the second-lan

guage method of cultural revival as best calculated to salvaging the epic mate

rials of ancient Ireland while purging the bardic originals of their more

unseemly ramblings, listings, monkish superstitions, and inveterate indecen

cies. "Translation is our business," Brooke declared, "We wish to get the

ancient Irish literature well and statelily [sic] afloat on the world-wide ocean

of the English language, so that it may be known and loved wherever the

English language goes" (ILR 60). At the close of Brooke's address, Hyde, whose newly published Love Songs

ofConnacht Brooke had taken care to praise as a small example of his theory, felt it necessary to state his position from the floor by urging the merits of the

originals. "Dr. Douglas Hyde had a word to say for Gaelic literature through the medium of the Irish language" (ILR 61), as W. P. Ryan reported in his con

temporary history of the Revival. The interesting alternation between

"Gaelic" and "Irish"?perhaps no more than a stylistic grace?was soon

made redundant by a general abeyance of the former usage.

George Sigerson's inaugural address to the Dublin society differed from

Brooke's in being Irish-oriented rather than Anglophilic. An acknowledged enthusiast for Gaelic literature, Sigerson offered a view of classical writing in

Irish as a composite of traditions, fusing together the influences of successive

historical invasions as well as more peaceful forms of cultural transmission

out of Europe. The tenor of his discussion of such matters was to suggest that

the native tradition is essentially indifferent to national distinctions as nar

rowly defined by race or class. Sigerson told his audience that "Irish literature

is of many blends, not the product of one race but of several."28 Going on to

confess his dismay at "some of [his] patriotic young friends" who were ready to decide "what is and what is not the Irish style," he went so far as to charac

terize their ideals of Irish song and poetry as "plebeian." Sigerson himself was

28. Quoted editorially by Deane {FDA 2: 722-23). It is noteworthy that Hyde acknowledges

Sigerson s point?"Dr. Sigerson has already shown in his opening lecture the debt of gratitude

which in many respects Europe owed to ancient Ireland"?while himself emphasizing the reverse

aspect of it {FDA 2: 529).

31



On the Necessity ofDe-Hydifying Irish Cultural Criticism

an admissably patrician Irishman in whom Danish and Saxon blood were

proudly-owned tributaries. This chromosomal mix had moved him in an ear

lier writing to express his opposition to the custom "of speak[ing] of the Irish

as altogether Celts, and then to construct the usual theory"?the Fenian one

of conquests and rebellions.29 Having arranged the amnesty for mistreated

prisoners of 1867 in English jails, Sigerson was a man respected in Irish nation

alist politics. Also the author o? Poets and Poetry of Munster (i860)?the sequel to Mangan s great work?Sigerson later produced Bards of the Gael and Gall

(1897), which has been called "an astonishing feat of exact, yet musical, trans

lation from Irish into English."30 While Yeats chose to dismiss him as a

"learned, artificial, unscholarly, a typical provincial celebrity" in his

Autobiographies?1 for such modern students of culture criticism in Ireland as

Luke Gibbons, Sigerson's high significance consists in the fact that he vigor

ously proselytized a "syncretic form of Irishness"32 in the shadow of the

monolithic and volcanic mass of Gaelic-nationalist populism.

The fate of this syncretic doctrine is precisely marked in Literature in

Ireland: Studies in Irish and Anglo-Irish (1916), where Thomas MacDonagh? the 1916 signatory?effected the cultural divorce of Irish and Anglo-Irish in a

work bearing a formal dedication to Dr. Sigerson, but defining "the Irish note"

in a racially exclusive sense. The possession of Irish-speaking, peasant and,

presumably, Roman Catholic grandparents was now pronounced the hallmark

of true Irishness, while "the patriotism of the Pale" was adjudged "very differ

ent from the national feeling of the real Irish people." Although MacDonagh views the loss of the native language in the light of a compensating gain for

"sincerity" because of its literary traditions of pedantry and convention, it is

very clear which side the writer is on.33 As the central character in MacDonagh's

Abbey play Pagans (1915), declares prophetically: "I shall do better than write

... I am going to live the things that I have imagined."34 A. N. Jeffares has sum

marized the cultural history of the period as a "quarrel between an Irish

Ireland which insisted that all who were not with it were against it, and an

29. See Sigerson's chapter "Irish Republicanism, from his Modern Ireland: Its Vital Questions,

Secret Societies, and Government (1869) quoted in FDA 2: 238-49.

30. Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine, p. 223n.

31. W. B. Yeats, Autohiohraphies (London: Macmillan, 1955), pp. 202,463.

32. Luke Gibbons, "Challenging the Canon: Revision and Cultural Criticism" (FDA 3: 561-68) and

"Constructing the Canon: Versions of National Identity" (FDA 2: 950-55).

33. Thomas MacDonagh, Literature in Ireland: Studies in Irish and Anglo-Irish Literature (Dublin:

Talbot Press, 1916), pp. 24, 27.

34. Thomas MacDonagh, "Pagans" (1916), in Lost Plays of the Irish Renaissance, ed. William Feeney

(Dixon, CA: Proscenium, 1980); quoted by David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland:

Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 104,

32




Anglo-Irish Ireland, which fought desperately to establish a common ground

between the Gaelic and the English cultures and to call the common ground

simply "Irish."35 This was the quarrel that D. P. Moran had graced with the

name of "the battle of two civilizations." Not surprisingly, it evolved into a tus

sle between two governments under arms. Anglo-Ireland to all appearances

lost that battle, and as a consequence "Irish literature" became a term exclu

sively used for literature in Irish, despite the small number of books being

printed and read in the language by the mid-century?notwithstanding com

missioned translations of Donn Byrne, Maria Edgeworth, and R. B. Sheridan

to give employment to the Gaelic League faithful.

It was not until Hyde wrote the preface to a 1902 reprint of his own Literary

History of Ireland (1899) that he explicitly tuned his argument for Gaelic-Irish

literature to the polemical note struck by Moran in the Leader, pleading the

obstruction of a practically minded publisher:

The present volume has been styled?in order to make it a companion book to

other of Mr Unwin's publications?a Literary History of Ireland, but a Literary

History of Irish Ireland would be a more correct title for I have abstained alto

gether from any analysis or even mention of the works of anglicised Irishmen

of the last two centuries.36

Earlier, Hyde had actually offered to write A Guide to Gaelic Literature for

Charles Gavan Duffy's Irish Library series (ILR 70), but that was before

Stopford Brooke's lecture showed that "Gaelic literature" was in danger of

becoming little more than a foreign-language source-book for the

Anglophone literature of the British Empire.37 In the meantime, D. P. Moran

had arrived on the scene with The Philosophy of Irish-Ireland (1905), a dispu tative scripture of Irishness developed in his articles for The Irish Review from

1898 on and later promulgated tirelessly in the pages of his paper the Leader.38

The Leaders cultural policy was expressly founded on Hyde's indictment of

35- A. N. Jeffares, Anglo-Irish Literature (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 144, summarizing F. S. L.

Lyons, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland 1890-1939 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1980).

36. Douglas Hyde, Literary History of Ireland (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1902), p. ix.

37. Tennyson had already exemplified this kind of transfer by writing his "Voyage of Maeldun"

(1880) to a translation by P. W. Joyce that had been furnished by Alfred Perceval Graves, as Graves

related in his Irish Literary and Musical Studies (London: Elkin Mathews, 1913).

38. D[avid] P[atrick] Moran has proven something of a b?te noir for contemporary Irish critics.

His presence in Terence Brown's Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922-1972 (London:

Fontana, 1981) is only a little less than that of Pearse, Yeats, JE, and O'Faolain. F. S. L. Lyons adopt ed Moran's characteristically pugnacious essay title "The Battle of Two Civilizations" for his own

chapter on the Revival in Ireland Since the Famine. See Donal McCartney, "Hyde, D. P. Moran and

Irish Ireland," in Leaders and Men of the Easter Rising: Dublin 1916, ed. F. X. Martin (London:

Metheun, 1967), pp. 45-54, and William J. Feeney, "D. P. Moran's Tom O'Kelly and Irish Cultural

Identity," Eire-Ireland, 21, 3 (Fall, 1986), 17-26.

33




the "illogical position," which in the former becomes "the muddled thinking, the confusion of ideas, the contradictory aims which even the most cursory

observer discerns in the Ireland of today."39 If Moran's enlargement on the

topic is categorically political in a way that Hyde's was not, the racial subtext

remains the same:

[S]ince G rattan's time, every popular leader, O'Connell, Butt, Parnell, Dillon,

and Redmond, has perpetuated this primary contradiction. They first threw

over Irish civilization whilst they professed?and professed in perfect good

faith?to fight for Irish nationality. (PISB 14)

It is notable, moreover, that Hyde?not Moran, as commonly believed?was

the first to use the phrase "West-Briton" in a pejorative sense, as he did in 1892

when he said "I have no hesitation at all in saying that every Irish-feeling Irishman who hates the reproach of West-Britonism, should set himself to

encourage the efforts, which are being made to keep alive our once great nation

al tongue" (FDA 2:532). It was only fitting therefore that Hyde should return the

compliment by borrowing from Moran the phrase "Irish-Ireland" in 1902.

Moran had hard things to say about Trinity College in particular, always

exempting Dr. Hyde explicitly by name. He donned the coat of state patholo

gist to announce the cause of death: "Anglo-Ireland of today has no heart"

(PISB 154). J. P. Mahaffy was Moran's chief antagonist. Mahaffy's hostility to

Irish as a school language at the Palles Commission in 1898 and his later ani

madversions against "that man Pearse" were the widely advertised causes of his

deep unpopularity. But it was Stopford Brooke and Rolleston who drew the

heaviest fire from Moran when they issued together A Treasury of Irish Poetry in the English Language in 1900, notwithstanding the fact that the editors were

if anything obstrusively deferential toward Dr. Hyde in accommodating the

change of style from "Gaelic" to "Irish" in respect to the older literature of

Ireland in the troubled phrasing of their title. To judge by their reply, which

Moran printed only to counter-attack in the same issue, they were mightily

surprised to find themselves so unequivocally situated on the wrong side of the

literary Boyne: "Once you have crossed the bar between Anglo-Ireland and

Ireland, an anthology of this kind will have little interest for you," proclaimed Moran.40

This kind of partition would have rendered it impossible for Hyde to speak of "Anglo-Irish literature" any longer, had he been inclined to repeat the affec

39- D. P. Moran, "Battle of Two Civilisations" PISB 147.

40. The Field Day Anthology reprints the offending preface, Moran's December 22,1900, counter

attack, Rolleston's response of January 5,1901, and Moran's reply, as well as extracts from Moran's

1900 "Philosophy of Irish-Ireland" {FDA 2: 969-75, 553-56).

34




tionate advocacy of his 1892 lecture. At the same time it tended to endanger the

commercial prospects of any publishers who dared to issue anything other

than an Irish-language study under the rubric "Irish literature"?a rubric

effectively implied in Hyde's title A History of the Literature of Ireland. This was

indeed the fate of the two existing English-language anthologies then trading under the name: Charles Read's Cabinet of Irish Literature, in four volumes

(1876-79) reissued by Katherine Tynan (1903), and Justin McCarthy's Irish

Literature, in ten volumes bound as five (1904), copies of which were soon rel

egated to the remainders boxes in Irish bookshops, where they still survive in

nearly pristine condition having been widely and comprehensively unread for

generations.41

Irish Literature was chiefly compiled by Charles Welsh of the University of

Notre Dame, with "special articles" and "appreciations" by Austin Dobson, G.

A. Greene, Lady Gregory, Douglas Hyde, Lionel Johnson, Stephen Gwynn, D.

J. O'Donoghue, Standish O'Grady, John Redmond, W. P. Ryan, T. W. Rolleston,

George Sigerson, AE (George Russell), J.F. Taylor, and W. B. Yeats. These vol

umes were eminently

a result of the earlier revival mood, though not an

Anglo-Irish production. The whole tendency of the anthology?which pro ceeds alphabetically through all classes and ages?is epitomized by the photo

graph facing the extract from Roderick O'Flaherty's Ogygia showing the Lia

Fail tucked under Edward II's coronation chair at Westminster. This was

intended as the Home Rule canon of Irish literature and, as such, was clearly

unsuited to the future D?il ?ireann. Since then there has been no comprehen sive anthology of Irish "literature" per se, inasmuch as Seamus Deane has

shrewdly elected to call his immense gathering an "anthology of Irish writing," a wholly appropriate title for the indispensable vade mecum of Irish cultural

debaters. Both Welsh's Irish Literature and the The Field Day Anthology partic

ipate in the totalizing project of literary nation-building in obvious if sub

stantially different ways. It is an irony of some significance that both are con

nected, at nearly a century's remove, with the University of Notre Dame.

If the ideal site of "Irish literature" was soon to be equally remote from

Houses of Parliament at Westminster and those at College Green, thanks to the

success of the Gaelic League and Sinn F?in, then the term "Anglo-Irish" would

soon come to be used by nationalists exclusively to mark off writers in Ireland

whom they regarded as alien in spirit to authentic nationality as evinced by the

plain people of Ireland. It happened, moreover, that there were precious few

aristos left in the years following the Land Act of 1903, major social and eco

41. The frontispiece of each volume of McCarthys Irish Literature displays a harp and the word

"Eire." The Field Day Anthology (FDA 1: xix) refers to an edition of 1911, which was in fact an octa

vo reprint.

35




nomic reforms having effectively demolished the Ascendancy class by that

date. Daniel Corkery, the most polished exponent of the popular viewpoint that he found legitimized in MacDonagh's obiter dicta on the hereditary essence of Irishness, had to strain to invent a crusty Anglo-Irish colonel to

ostracize in the story "Cowards" in his Hounds ofBanba (1920). If an Anglo Irishman was "a Protestant with a horse," for Brendan Behan, then for Corkery

the Anglo-Irishman was a dead horse he could not resist flogging.

A national literature is primarily written for its own people . . . Can Anglo

Irish, then, be a distinctive literature if it is not a national literature? And if it

has not primarily been written for Ireland, if it be impossible to refer to Irish

life for its elucidation, if its continued existence or non-existence be indepen

dent of Irish opinion?can it be a national literature?42

It is on this proscriptive basis that Samuel Lover, whom Corkery particu

larly anathematizes, has been unceremoniously deposited not only outside the

bounds of "Irish literature" but of "Irish writing" by the Field Day editors, in

spite of the felicity of his comic verses, his ingenious position inside and out

side the tradition of patriotic sentiment, and his being the literary progenitor of Irish melodrama in Rory O'More (1832). Along with the comic and senti

mental creations of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Alfred Perceval Graves, sim

ilarly excluded as lacking in the "whatness" of an Irish national literature,

Lover's Rory O'More and Handy Andy are felt to be gross caricatures of the

plain people; and so the weight of patriotic indignation against the Stage-Irish tradition still falls on Anglo-Irish literary shoulders.43 And special reasons are

given for the severe downgrading of Charles Lever.44 This seems particularly

42. Daniel Corkery, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature: A Study (1931; New York: Russell and Russell,

1965), pp. 2-3. Sean O'Faolain frequently wrote against Corkery's Irish-Ireland ideology in his edi

torials for The Bell in the 1940s. A more recent critique is Louis Cullen's 1969 article republished as a pamphlet: The Hidden Ireland: Re-assessment of a Concept (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1988).

43. In a footnote to the extract from Corkery's Synge and Anglo Irish Literature in the Field Day

Anthology, Lover is dismissed as one of those writers who made the native Irish ridiculous for the

amusement of an English audience {FDA 2: ?oiin). In comparison, it may be worthwhile to refer

to G. C. Duggan s authoritative and balanced study The Stage-Irishman (Dublin: Talbot Press,

i937)> p- 292. Duggan cites Thomas Mac Donagh's remarks in Literature in Ireland (1916) on Irish

practitioners of this theatrical type: "occasionally they introduced ... English-speaking Irishmen,

but they were either caricatures, or were obviously only half-articulate in their new speech." About

this Duggan remarks: "A generalisation of this kind can hardly be sustained on a fair examination

of the plays". Duggan also speaks of Lover's and Lever's "excellent... delineation of the comic side

of Irish life" and he laments "the final deterioration of the stage-Irishman at the hands of

buffoons."

44. The inclusion in The Field Day Anthology of Charles Gavan Duffy's scathing critique in The

Nation (1843) of Lever's plagiarism {FDA 1: 1255-65) was a brilliant stroke on Deane's part, to

which W. J. McCormack clearly concurred {FDA 2: 840). Yet Duffy's critique scarcely disarmed

36




remorseless as flying in the face of the hospitable ideas professed in the Field

Pay introduction. By their exclusions shall ye know them, and this exclusion

is occasioned chiefly by an unacknowledged ache for the comforts of a self

congratulatory national literature.

The criterion in operation in The Field Day Anthology is mainly energized

by the hurt feelings of the Irish masses conceived toto simpliciter as the Irish

nation. It was precisely the intellectually undifferentiated rural masses that

Corkery adopted as his measure of "the Ireland that counts" when he looked

about him in the crowd at a hurling match in Thurles one Sunday. The polit

ical rights of that non-Sabbatarian crowd have now been vindicated in full.

Even so, its authority as a measure of literary value in or out of Ireland has

never been established, though the day has obviously passed when Beckett felt

a need to voice "his chronic inability to understand ... a phrase like 'The Irish

People' or to imagine that it ever gave a fart in its corduroys for any form of

art whatsoever."45 The tantalizing question of how sound was Corkery's

con

cept of a national literature and its popular basis must await another occasion;

yet, it is worth pausing to reflect on Robert Crawford's double-edged con

tention that the idea of English national literature was evolved at the British

periphery by Scots and Irishmen, not at the center of English literary culture.46

Thus, D. P. Moran first issued the aggressive charges against Anglo-Irish lit

erature that Corkery later fashioned into a fully articulated judgement:

"Expatriation is the badge of all the tribe of Anglo-Irish literary men; and in

nearly all cases it is a life sentence."47 The defense of the breed was formulated

by T. W, Rolleston when speaking at a Press Club meeting of 1896, which he

seems to have called for the express purpose of challenging the growing per suasion that the modern Irish literary movement was in any material sense

continuous with the ancient Gaelic literature of Ireland. aRevival [was] a mis

nomer," Rolleston said, since "Irish literature, in the sense in which we now use

the term, never lived till now. He then gave a thumb-nail sketch of Irish liter

ary history that, though full of coat-trailing comparisons, was probably not

conceived in malice:

such old admirers of Lever as O'Donghue, Yeats, and Duggan. See also Charles Lever: New

Evaluations, ed. Tony Bareham (Gerards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1992) and A. N. Jeffares, "Reading

Level," in Images of Invention: Essays on Irish Writing (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1996),

pp. 150-63.

45. Samuel Beckett to Thomas Mac Greevy, quoted in Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography

(London: Jonathan Cape, 1978), pp. 381-82. Beckett's sentence continues: ". . . or that it was ever

capable of any thought or act other than rudimentary thoughts and acts delved into by the priests

and demagogues in service of the priests."

46. See Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1992).

47. Corkery, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature, p. 3.

37




Education was forbidden to the Gaelic-speaking Irishman and the development

of the language was arrested. It remained in a childlike condition. . . . Anglo

Irish literature on the other hand, powerful as it was in the hands of Swift, pro

found in those of Berkeley, brilliant in those of Lever was as incapable as the

Gaelic of filling the place of a national literature for Ireland. . . . They might

defend and champion the Celt?those brilliant Anglo-Irish writers?and they

often did so; but it was as Wilberforce championing the West Indian slave; they

had little in common with him; they could not share his memories; they could

not share his aspirations; the iron of bondage had never entered into his soul.48

This was an answer of sorts to the popular theory of Anglo-Irish remote

ness from "true Irishism," but not by any means a recantation on the score of

social and literary values as the writer understood them. In Rolleston's view, a

modern Irish national literature ought to be the synthesis of Gaelic and Anglo

Irish, for neither was independently sufficient to the spiritual and material real

ities of the country. Rolleston's minor premise regarding the demise of Irish in

remarks to the effect that "[t]hese two streams . . . flowed beside each other

without intermixing until at last the hour of doom struck for the Gaelic lan

guage," led to a speedy reaction from the Gaelic League, which specially con

vened in Dublin to devise a translation-test based on a passage about crus

taceans taken from Herbert Spencer?the archetypal modern?a test that the

Irish language, vindicated by the skills of Douglas Hyde and E?in MacNeill,

passed with flying colors. Rolleston later supported Sinn F?in on the basis of his

belief that it seemed to represent "the rise of resistance to clerical domination."

John Eglinton was the next to attempt the rescue of Anglo-Irish literature

from trash-heap of literary history where Irish-Ireland had deposited it.

Characteristically, he saw the matter in terms of cultural development and

liberal values:

When Anglo-Irish Literature has brought us so far as the literary integrity and

hearty directness of John Mitchel, it seems a pity if the 'Language Movement'

is to transport literature in this country back again to that point where the .;

good Davis left it, to that region ... in which the Irishman has to speak in his

national rather than his private character.49

He also wondered how "a literary movement [could] be in any sense national

when the whole interest of the nation lay in extirpating the conditions which

produced it?" Eglinton had already expounded this evidently fruitless line of

thinking in his contributions to a gathering of controversial articles exchanged

4$. Charles H. Rolleston, Portrait of an Irishman (London: Methuen, 1939), pp. 27-28.

49. John Eglinton, "Isle of Saints," in Anglo-Irish Essays (Dublin: Talbot Press; London: T. Fisher

Union, 1917), pp. 45-49.

38




with Yeats, Russell (JE), William Larminie, all edited by him as Literary Ideals

in Ireland (1899). His editorials in Dana (1904), an "intellectual" magazine

edited with Fred Ryan, likewise carry on a running battle with cultural retro

gression?a topic further elaborated under the title "The De-Davisisation of

Irish Literature" (1903).50 Eglinton consistently spoke for a modern literary

culture expressing what he called with prosaic force the values of "the normal

human consciousness."51

About the preface and the lengthy Gaelic League dedication to the second

edition of Hyde's Literary History (1902) there is more than a hint of willing ness to mix literature and populism. Therein Hyde argues that Swift and

Farquhar and other "anglicised Irishmen" of that ilk are irrelevant to the liter

ary experience of Ireland, because they "find, and have always found, their true

and natural place in every history of English literature that has been written,

whether by Englishmen themselves or by foreigners."52 For Hyde, Swift was an

obvious target, being a "declared enemy of the Gaelic tongue."53 As it happens, several other Irish writers of the day were just as busily trying to reclaim Swift

for the Irish nation, if not precisely as an Irish nationalist, then as a friend to

the underdog in Ireland. In three successive issues of The Irish Review for 1912,

D. J. O'Donoghue argued that the self-same passage in Swift damning the Irish

language that Hyde selects in his Literary History when characterising him as

"the declared enemy of the Gaelic speech" can be interpreted no less ironical

ly than the prose of A Modest Proposal?4 From another quarter, Stephen

Gwynn?a moderate nationalist, like Lady Gregory?persisted in naming as

"Irish Literature and Drama" what his contemporaries were

increasingly dri

ven to call "Anglo-Irish literature." Gwynn wrote of Swift as "the leader of a

leaderless people," thus making him the eponymous modern Irish patriot and

the first to speak in English for the whole nation.55

50. John Eglinton, "The De-Davisisation of Irish Literature" The United Irishman, 31 March 1903,

collected in his 1906 volume of essays Bards and Saints {FDA 2: 995-96).

51. Quoted by Louis MacNeice, The Poetry ofW. B. Yeats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941),

p. 84.

52. Hyde, A Literary History of Ireland (1902), p. ix. The foreigners alluded to are probable Legouis and Cazamian.

53. A Literary History of Ireland, p. 621. Hyde further cites Swift to the effect that "it would be a

noble achievement to abolish the Irish language in the kingdom, so far at least as to oblige all the

natives to speak English on every occasion of business."

54. D. J. O'Donoghue, "Swift as Irishman," [Pt. Ill] The Irish Review (August, 1912), 305-11.

55. See also Gwynn's History of Ireland (1923), Dean Swift (1933), and Irish Literature and Drama

(1936). Robert Mahony summarizes the debate on Swift's Irishness in his Jonathan Swift: The Irish

Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), though he overlooks D. J. O'Donoghue's contribution.

39




Unlike such apologists as Gwynn, nationalists coming out of bondage sided with Hyde on the language-nation question. For Patrick Pearse, Davis's

notion of the Irish language as the defining characteristic of Irish nationhood

hardened into a political dogma:

The Irish language is an essential of Irish nationality. It is more, it is its chief

depository and safeguard. When the Irish language disappears, Irish nationali

ty will ipso facto disappear, and for ever. Political autonomy, on the other hand,

can be lost and recovered, and lost again and recovered again. . . . Now, if

Ireland were to lose her language?which is, remember, an essential of her

nationality?there might conceivably me a free state in Ireland at some future

date; but that state would not be the Irish nation, for it would have parted from

the body of traditions which constitute Irish nationality.56

A Gothic scenario deriving from these premises cries out for operatic treat

ment (FDA 2: 1000)?ideally with Maud Gonne in the leading role: "The

people which would give up its language in exchange for political autonomy would be like the prisoner who would sell his soul to the Evil One that he

might be freed from his bodily chains."57 To this, Fred Ryan's answer in Dana

is still valid, as far as reasoning with national destiny goes: "The theorem crys talises that metaphysical habit of regarding politics which is ... one of our con

stitutional vices" (FDA 2:1001).

Yet, the mystical equation of language and nationality was to become an

integral part of Irish republicanism irrespective of the number of people capa ble of speaking Irish at any time. Thus Eamon de Val?ra?being like Pearse

Irish on one side only?considered the revival of the language a more urgent matter than the question of partition. John Bowman has written, that de

Val?ra "sometimes ... went so far as to say that he would abandon the goal of

a united Ireland if that necessitated abandoning the language."58 It was de

Val?ra, of course, who wrote the constitutional articles proclaiming its status

as the national language of the modern Irish state. In the wake of Pearse's

remarks, it is easy to see why de Val?ra felt ideologically compelled to do so: if

a free state in Ireland could have no authentic existence as apart from the lan

guage, then it were best to assert that Irish was in principle the national Ian

56. Quoted by Frank Ryan in "On Language and Political Ideals" Dana: An Irish Magazine of

Independent Thought, i (May, 1904-April, 1905), (Facs.: New York: Lemma, 1970), p. 274; FDA 2:1000.

57. In 1892 Hyde had posed this question: "... the fact that we were not of Saxon origin dropped out of sight and memory, and let me now put the question?How many Irishmen are there who

would purchase material prosperity at such a price?" {FDA 2: 528).

58. Quoted by Basil Chubb in "De Valera and the Constitition "

in The Constitution of Ireland

[1966] (1970; Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 1991), p. 29.

40




guage ofthat state. As de Val?ra declared with obvious Pearsite inflections dur

ing his well-known St. Patrick's Day speech in 1943: "It is for us what no other

language can be. It is our very own. It is more than a symbol; it is an essential

part of our nationhood." (FDA 3: 749) Given the principle, it only then

remained to make it so in fact. Unfortunately a policy of compulsory Irish in

the schools did little?as Joseph Lee has said?to elevate the language, and

much to demean education. Moreover, as Lee notes, "[t]he refusal of all gov ernments since the foundation of the state to practise what they preached alerted an observant populace to the fact that the revival was ... a sordid

sham" instead of a "noble chapter in the history of the new state."59

It would be misguided to suspect de Val?ra of hypocrisy on the language

question. More likely, he was the victim of a confusion arising from the intrin

sic incompatibility of his chief aims: to establish an independent and united

Ireland and to close the door on non-Gaelic and non-Catholic elements. It is

clear from John Bowman and other writers on the subject, that de Val?ra was

incapable of grasping the attitude of most people in the North of Ireland

towards those national articles regarding language and territory in the 1937

Constitution. According to de Val?ra's official biographers, "his view would be

that the Northern Unionists were, at bottom, proud of being Irish; that the his

tory, tradition and culture of the historic Irish nation could not fail to attract

them; that the language was a mine of this tradition and culture."60 It is prob able that he hoped he could entice those errant Celto-Presbyterian Britishers

back into the Gaelic family from which they had so unaccountably strayed.61

Yet, it does appear that, when forced to chose between language and unity, de

Val?ra was driven by the logical of cultural separatism to declare for language.

Certainly de Val?ra was thinking in these terms when he reverted?again in the speech of March, 1943?to that identitarian fraction computed by Davis

and Pearse before him: "With the language gone we could never aspire again to being more than half a nation." Considering that de Val?ra was then occu

pying the highest state office on one side of a geopolitical divide that had in a

59- ?. ?- Lee, Ireland 1912-1985: Politics and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),

P-135.

60. Lord Longford and Thomas O'Neill, De Valera (London: Hutchinson, 1970), p. 297.

6i. The same attitude appears in Eoin Neeson's aggrieved preface to his Irish Civil War. "These

people, originally of the same ethnic stock?they were descendants of the Irish or Scots who

colonised and eponymously gave their name to the new country?and with similar traditions

were, nevertheless 'Planter' both alien and privileged in the land, homes and territories of those

they had dispossessed and persecuted. Moreover the subscribed to a variant sect. Throughout the

succeedin centuries they preserved and developed and artificial sense of identity. E?in Neeson,

E?in Neeson's Irish Civil War (Dublin: Poolbeg Press, 1989), p. 6.

41




large part been created by the self-same doctrinaire equation of nationality with language, this was a sufficiently impractical remark to make one wonder

whether the substitution of "the nation" for "the country" and "the Irish peo

ple" for "Irish people" has been good for Irish?or even half-Irish?brains.

Applying the ideological arithmetic of Irish nationalism, this is what we get:

according to Pearse's calculation, the modern Irish state of Eire-Ireland cannot

be any more than half of the authentic Irish nation, while even an English

speaking united Ireland would be less than that, perhaps in an absolute degree.

According to de Val?ra's classroom mathematics, the modern state is likewise

fifty percent of the real Ireland, which?allowing for the third hived off by

Partition?may be totted up more accurately as thirty-three percent of the full

sailing: precisely half of two-thirds of the metaphysical "whatness" of true

Gaeldom. This does not take into account deductions for the further numbers

effectively disenfranchised by emigration through the economic incompe tence of successive governments, or the impossibility of the task that faced

them under prevailing macroeconoic conditions.

Besides Gaelocentric historiography, the Irish separatist movement was

strongly motivated by an idealized conception of Ireland based largely on the

attempt of the colonial subject at self-valorization, though combined also with

the cramped puritanism of the post-Famine economy. "The Ireland we

dreamed of," said de Val?ra in that curiously elegaic speech, was to be "the

home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis of right living

[and] things of the spirit." It is hardly necessary to say that this was not the

Ireland of the strong farmer and the gombeenman, any more than it is the

Ireland of the Lotto and the Beef Tribunal Yet, this aura of national sanctity, de Val?ra alleged, was the essence of the gospel of Irish independence:

One hundred years ago the Young Irelanders, by holding up the vision of such

an Ireland before the people, inspired our nation and moved it spiritually as it

had hardly been moved since the golden age of Irish civilisation. Fifty years of

the Gaelic League similarly inspired and moved the people of their day, as did

the later leaders of the Volunteers. (FDA 3: 749)

In later life, Charles Gavan Duffy attempted to learn Irish, though making no contribution to the Irish-Ireland movement, as we have seen. Nevertheless

he acted as one of the most effective conduits for the hygienic conception of

Irish nationality as a bulwark against what Yeats characterized as "the filthy modern" tide in "The Municipal Gallery Revisited." In his second address to

the Irish Literary Society (June, 1892), Duffy concisely echoed Hyde's notion of

the pernicious influence of England's "literary garbage," which Duffy also saw

as threatening the "defining qualities" of the Irish?purity, simplicity, and

piety. In his first address to the Irish Literary Society, he had conjured up a still

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more radiant vision of the spiritualized future: "In that mystic clime on the

verge of the Western horizon, where the more debased current of European

civilization only visits at high tide, there is place for a great experiment for

humanity." For W. P. Ryan, the first historian of the Irish literary movement, it

was touch-and-go whether such oratory could be practised in modern times

without seeming risible and, thus, he added dryly: "[T]his was a high key to

strike, but the Irish Literary Society regarded it as the right one" (ILR 64).

High as it was, the pitch of Gaelic self-adulation could be raised yet higher, as Pearse was to show in a student address of 1900: "The Gael is not like other

men; the spade, and the loom, and the sword are not for him"?or not yet,

anyway:

... a destiny more glorious than that of Rome, more glorious than that of

Britain awaits him: to become the saviour of idealism in modern intellectual

and social life, the regenerator and rejuvenator of the literature of the world,

the instructor of nations, the preacher of the gospel of nature-worship, God

worship?such, Mr Chairman is the destiny of the Gael.62

In this romantic stance, the vision of the Celt as an impractical and dreamy

escapee from "the despotism of fact" as promulgated by Henri Martin and

Matthew Arnold?has been stood on its head and turned into an argument for

the spiritualizing influence of the Gael.63 Such ideals are blissfully suspended in the realm of the imagination. By 1913, however, Pearse had drawn the prac tical inference from the Larne gun-running that the only thing more ridicu

lous than an Orangeman with a gun was a nationalist without one. His frame

of mind thus altered, Pearse began to write about Hyde's manner of presiding over the Gaelic League in a new tone, at once

personally affectionate and intel

lectually dismissive:

Whenever Dr Hyde, at a meeting at which I have had a chance of speaking after

him, has produced his dove of peace, I have always been careful to produce my

sword; and to tantalise him by saying that the Gaelic League has brought into

Ireland "Not Peace, but a Sword" This does not show any fundamental differ

ence of outlook between my leader and me; for while he is thinking of peace

between brother Irishmen, I am thinking of the sword-point between banded

Irishmen and the foreign force that occupies Ireland, and his peace is necessary

to my war. [FDA 2: 557)64

62. Collected Works of P. H. Pearse: Political Writings and Speeches, ed. Desmond Ryan (Dublin:

Phoenix, 1924), p. 221.

63. One of the qualities that W. P. Ryan finds to praise in E?in MacNeill is that he is not dreamy about the Gael: "The fact that he sees the whole Gaelic ideal so clearly, and it has become so much

a part of himself, that to his philosophic nature the notion of growing impassioned about it would

be ludicrous ..." (ILR 62).

64. Patrick Pearse, "The Coming Revolution," An Claidheamh Soluis (November, 1913).

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The point may be taken that it was Jesus of Nazareth who first pronounced those words as his mission passed from one phase to another, as noted by Ernest Renan and other modern biographers. In this scenario, Hyde is the

pacific and the Pearse the militant Christ-figure. No wonder, then, that Pearse

could say with only apparent contradiction in 1915 that "the Gaelic League is a

spent force" and, at the same time, that "the Gaelic League will be recognized in history as the most revolutionary influence that has ever come into

Ireland."65 In the columns of An Claidheamh Soluisy Pearse had presided over

the transformation of the Gaelic League from a primarily cultural to a pri

marily political movement, and set it in opposition to a "foreign force"?by which he primarily meant the British administration in Ireland, but which

could be freely conceived as anyone deficient in the appropriately pro-Gaelic orientation.

Looking at the record now, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Hyde introduced a false premise into the discussion of the civic arrangements of

modern Ireland when he attached the idea of Irish nationality exclusively to

the Gaelic tradition, and that subsequent generations of nationalists have

made an error of political judgment in sanctifying his romantic racialism in

the name of an aspiration toward North-South unity in Ireland, especially when that premise is unlikely to bring it about except by force of arms. As a

contribution to Irish statecraft, the proposition that Ireland is "Celtic to the

core" is fatally flawed. As a sociological description of the whole country, its

counterpart in the 1937 Constitution (Article 8) is particularly vacuous. Irish

is not in any practical sense the "national language" of Ireland, or any sizeable

part of it. Only a few people speak Irish regularly, and fewer still transact eco

nomic or political business in it. Yet, Irish remains the official language of a

state that claims on its behalf indefeasible, though temporarily suspended,

rights of jurisdiction over others even less adept at speaking Irish than our

selves. Much of this conundrum stems from the formulations in Douglas

Hyde's address the Irish Literary Society and the wider politico-cultural dis

course that he so brilliantly crystallized. It is no surprise, therefore, to find

that the population explicitly vilified as "alien" by him in 1892 were legally so

regarded by the Oireachtas if not the constitution at the end of the chapter of

Irish history that Hyde had inaugurated.

o*-> THE UNIVERSITY OF ULSTER

65. Pearse, Political Writings and Speeches, p. 91.

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