PATRICK PEARSE: the VICTORIAN GAEL Pat Cooke
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PATRICK PEARSE: THE VICTORIAN GAEL Pat Cooke © Published in Roisin Higgins and Regina Uí Chollatáin (eds.) The life and after-life of PH Pearse. Irish Academic Press, 2009, pp. 45-62 Pearse’s generation Patrick Pearse was already twenty-one years of age when Victoria’s long life ended in 1901. He was the son of an Englishman, James Pearse (1839-1900), a classic Hardy- esque stone-carver who lived and died within the ambit of Victoria’s reign. Already a young man when his father died, Patrick was old enough for his father’s opinions and tastes to have made an impression on him. But he was also the son of an Irish mother, Margaret Brady, born in 1857, with roots in the Irish-speaking area of County Meath. He attributed the kindling of his love of the Irish language and culture to his Irish-speaking aunt, whose story-telling entranced him as a child and instilled in him a fervent love for Irish language and culture. It was this influence that propelled him to join the Gaelic League at the early age of sixteen in 1896. Only once in the substantial corpus of his writings did he ponder these bifurcated origins, and that was in a fragment of unpublished autobiography written towards the end of his life. The handwritten manuscript provides some crucial insights into Pearse’s mind, because here, in his exceptionally clear hand, we can see not only what he wrote, but what he crossed out. Summing up the elements of his Anglo-Irish parentage, he writes: “And these two traditions worked in me and fused together by a certain fire proper to myself, a fire fostered by her whom I have just named made me an Irish Rebel but nursed by that fostering of which I have spoken made me the strange thing I am”.1 While it is not possible to date the manuscript precisely, internal evidence shows that it was written sometime in the last sixteen months of his life. 2 So it is even more surprising to find here not the adamantine certainties about the destiny of the Gael found elsewhere in his late writings, but a man deeply unsure of his identity: a man who finds in himself a peculiar amalgam of cultural elements, a ‘strangeness’ that transcends his Gaelicism. But where to begin the search for a Pearse not Gaelic merely, but strange as well? In an essay of 1934 entitled ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ Samuel Beckett used a phrase that may provide a key. Here, Beckett used the term ‘Victorian Gael’ to describe a type of Irish writer “in flight from self-awareness” and in thrall to a set of literary conventions amounting to a “correct scenery, where the self is either most happily obliterated or else so improved and enlarged that it can be mistaken for part of the décor”. These “antiquarians” he accuses of “delivering with the altitudinous complacency of the Victorian Gael the Ossianic goods”.3 While there is no evidence that Beckett was thinking of Pearse here, the usefulness of this neologism for present purposes lies not so much in the literary analysis as in the way it suggests the syncretic quality of Irish experience in the late nineteenth century. Ireland’s claim to cultural and political 1 independence was being asserted by a people exposed to forces of modernisation that prevailed throughout Europe and in the rapidly developing world generally, influences which dialectically sharpened efforts at defining nationality in the experimental climate of the Irish Revival. But what exactly does it mean to describe Pearse in any meaningful sense as ‘Victorian’? The era to which the term applies spanned almost seventy years. It had no clear internal demarcations, shaded into Edwardianism, and contained many of the roots of twentieth century modernism. Nevertheless, there are aspects of Pearse that bring to mind a much wider range of cultural experience than that of an insular Dubliner fixated on language revival. In him are found some of the classic traits of the middle-class Victorian: the tension between respectability and the itch for reckless, foolhardy adventure; the worship of childhood and the ennui induced by encroaching age; the belief in discipline and hard work; and the longing for a cause worthy enough to sweep away the pettiness of everyday life in a mission characterised by chivalry, honour, nobility, and self-sacrifice. All of these traits Pearse shared not only with contemporary Irishmen but with Englishmen, and more widely with Europeans, of his generation. When Robert Wohl in The Generation of 1914 undertook a study of the pre-war fixation with this very idea of generation, he could not envisage an exercise confined to a single European country, “because the idea of the generation of 1914 came to imply a unity of experience, feeling and fate that transcended national borders; because different national experiences brought out different aspects of the generational phenomenon”.4 Such a perspective provides a solid enough theoretical base for a broader interpretation of Pearse’s life, but the grounds for doing so are more than theoretical. Even among middle- class Irishmen of his day Pearse was exceptionally well-travelled, and exposed through it to the kind of varied cultural experience taken for granted today. As a young and prominent member of the Gaelic League he attended the Eisteddfod in Wales and Celtic gatherings in Scotland; among middle-class Dubliners he pioneered the holiday home in the west with his house at Rosmuc, to which he travelled by train; in 1904 he had travelled to Europe to study bilingualism in the schools of Flanders and to listen to the operas of Wagner at Bayreuth; and he was in America for three months in 1914. But it was not travel alone that gave Pearse an unusual range of cultural breadth for a young Irishman of his day. The influence of his father James, particularly in the formative years of childhood, was probably deeper than has been appreciated. James Pearse, for whom an uncanny fictional parallel can be found in Hardy’s journeyman stonemason Jude in Jude the Obscure, was an autodidact and bibliophile. As his business prospered, James put together a substantial library that displayed a wide interest in history, literature, the visual arts and comparative religion. The young Pearse, a shy and bookish boy, grew up surrounded by this eclectic collection. Evidence of the ranginess of his childhood reading is found abundantly in the fragment of autobiography. It is here that he locates his obsession with the martyr-hero: This was my way with every book that was read to me, with every picture that I saw, with every story or song that I heard: I saw myself daring or suffering all the things that were 2 dared or suffered in the book or story or song or picture: toiling across deserts in search of lost cities, cast into dungeons by wicked kings, starved and flogged by merciless masters, racked with Guy Fawkes, roasted on a gridiron with St. Laurence, deprived of my sight with the good Kent.5 That makes two English martyrs (one real, one Shakespearean) and a Spanish one. Remarkably, and perhaps testifying to the authenticity of these childhood recollections, Cuchulainn, with whom he became obsessed in later years, is not mentioned. In the December 1909 edition of An Macaomh, the school magazine, Pearse observed that “Wellington is credited with the dictum that the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. I am certain that when it comes to a question of Ireland winning battles, her main reliance must be on her hurlers”.6 Pearse’s cast of mind was more analogical than perhaps has been credited. To describe the exemplary aspects of Gaeldom, Pearse drew on a far wider range of cultural influences than is to be found in early Irish literary sources. Character and the man To the Victorian mind, the martyr represented an exaltation of character above all other virtues.7 Character (typically perceived as a male quality) is a matter of bearing, fortitude and, above all, style. As a mode of action, it finds its sharpest expression in the way a man bears up to the prospect of death. As Seamus Deane has noted, Pearse’s prophetic effect is largely a matter of style, of a high-pitched prose, biblical in its cadences and resonances, that grows shriller in his last years.8 But where an examination of Pearse’s style in an exclusively Irish context can lead readily to a sense of its pathological excess, looked at within a broader field of cultural reference, it appears more derivative and conventional. The Jesuit, Francis Shaw, was one of the first to point out how “aggressively unorthodox” was Pearse’s biblical tone; the conflation of Christian and pagan values, of Cuchulainn with Christ, he concludes, is “in conflict with the whole Christian tradition”.9 But Shaw too readily attributes this to Pearse’s exotic personality, and fails to see how typical it is of a high Victorian sensibility; its eloquent origins can be found in Carlyle, who, as A.O.J Cockshut observed, was setting a fashion which “many later Victorians were to follow, of trying to use the language and emotional power of Christianity without accepting its doctrines”.10 A more pointed instance of where a larger perspective offers a richer reading is Pearse’s notoriously sanguinary sentiment that “bloodshed is a cleansing and sanctifying thing” and “the old heart of the heart needed to be warmed by the red wine of the battlefield”. It is to be found in ‘Peace and the Gael’, written at Christmas 1915, and is frequently given a narrow reading, confined to the corpus of his own writings, in which it serves to crystallise the uniquely morbid pitch to which Pearse took Irish republican rhetoric.