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4. 2008 Inside back cover: Thomas Allen, Thomas cover: back Inside Allen, Thomas cover: front Inside Images. Geographic/Getty Dale/National Bruce Photo: England. Greenwich, at longitude zero marks strip brass A cover: Front Knockout. Topple. www.fieldday.ie www.fieldday.ie www.fieldday.ie Editors Seamus Deane Breandán Mac Suibhne
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Field Day Review is published annually by Field Day Publications in association with the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
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[email protected] FIELD DAY REVIEW 2008 www.fieldday.ie Essays
Pascale Casanova 7 The Literary Greenwich Meridian Thoughts on the Temporal Forms of Literary Belief
Toril Moi 25 Ibsen in Exile Peer Gynt, or the Difficulty of Becoming a Poet In Norway
John Barrell 40 Radicalism, Visual Culture, and Spectacle in the 1790s
Breandán Mac Suibhne 63 Afterworld The Gothic Travels of John Gamble (1770–1831)
Claire Connolly 115 Ugly Criticism Union and Division in Irish Literature
Denis Condon 133 Politics and the Cinematograph The Boer War and the Funeral of Thomas Ashe
David Fitzpatrick 147 ‘I will acquire an attitude not yours’ Was Frederick MacNeice a Home Ruler, and Why does this Matter?
Seamus Deane 163 Snapped Thomas Allen’s Pulp Fictions
Michael Cronin 175 Minding Ourselves A New Face for Irish Studies
Fintan Cullen 187 The Lane Bequest Giving Art to Dublin
Robert Tracy 203 ‘A statue’s there to mark the place’ Cú Chulainn in the Gpo
Máirín Nic Eoin 217 Idir Dhá Chomhairle/Between Two Minds Interculturality in Literary Criticism in Irish
REVIEWS
Luke Gibbons 235 ‘Mourn — and then Onward!’
Patrick Griffin 247 Reckoning with the English
Bruce Nelson 261 ‘My countrymen are all mankind’
Deirdre McMahon 275 Plato’s Cave?
Sean Ryder 289 Ireland’s Difficulty, the Novelist’s Opportunity?
Peter McQuillan 297 Bardic Realities
Terry Eagleton 305 The Lack of the Liberal
Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh 315 Once upon a Time in the West www.fieldday.ie www.fieldday.ie
Essays Field Day review www.fieldday.ie
The Greenwich or Prime Meridian in south-east London. Photo: Fred Mayer/Getty Images.
The Literary Greenwich www.fieldday.ieMeridian Thoughts on the Temporal Forms of Literary Belief Pascale Casanova For Pierre Bergounioux
A sine qua non of the existence of a world literary space is a measure of time shared by all international players. That is why I suggest the idea of a literary Greenwich meridian. The fact that the ordinary world was unified in part by the British invention and that there then followed the worldwide acceptance of the Greenwich meridian — the imaginary arbitrary line enabling the whole world to measure and thereby to share time — is, it seems to me, objective proof that:
1 an imaginary line can have objective measurable effects on the real order of the world; 2 the prerequisite to the political and economic unification
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of the world rests to a great extent on pause to reflect, in terms of ‘literary space’, 1 I would like to thank an organization of time that enables as I try to do, using Pierre Bourdieu’s notion Bruce Robbins and Gayatri Spivak for having all of the countries that recognize the of ‘field of artistic production’,3 we begin reminded me that some Greenwich meridian to measure their to think that it is not enough to describe countries have modified position with respect to this line and thus and define these two kinds of time, that their relative position in www.fieldday.ieto determine their own time. many other kinds of time exist side by side the world system of time zones. Hugo Chavez, (both in our heads and in the world), and for instance, recently In other words, this unification rests on that these relatively separate worlds, these created a new time zone universal recognition of a common clock artistic or scientific worlds that operate set 30 minutes ahead that allows everyone, not to have the same relatively independently of political and of the old one (cf. bbc. news.co.uk, 9 December clock-time, but to situate themselves with social constraints generate their own tempo, 2007, ‘Venezuela creates respect to the prime meridian. It also enables their own temporality. Which means that own time zone’); India us to calculate the longitudes, designated in these worlds have another way of counting is 30 minutes ahead of minutes and seconds, that is, to determine time, another chronology, have important Pakistan (UTC [Universal Time Coordinated] + very precisely the location of every point on events other than those of the political or the 5h30, and Nepal marks 1 the face of the earth. historical world. its own difference by The world of literature can be seen In other studies I showed that the adding another 15 in the same way (at least to a certain progressive and relative process of unifying minutes (UTC + 5h45); Iran is another time extent and differentially according to the the international literary space has been dissident (UTC + 3h30). zones, territories or spaces). It can even be first of all the history of the unification Opposition to the time considered that it is precisely this specific of (literary) time, through gradual and system is clearly a way of measure of a particular time that enabled transnational agreement of all protagonists challenging the dominant world order while the world of literature to constitute itself, in this collective enterprise, on the specific recognizing its power: to unify itself gradually around this highly way of measuring it. This unification temporal dissidents distinctive ‘clock’. As the literary planet gradually came about over the four centuries merely want to mark an expanded, as new claims to literature’s during which the Republic of Letters took internal distinction while remaining within the right of existence appeared, as new national shape, but it was probably in the first half of world time system. literary spaces emerged over the nineteenth the nineteenth century that the unification 2 Henri Bergson, Essai sur and twentieth centuries, protagonists was actually completed and that we can les Données Immédiates gradually came to agree on a shared measure begin to glimpse its objective effects. de la Conscience (Paris, 1888); Time and Free of (literary) time. Little by little, they agreed Such international unification of time Will: An Essay on the on the localization of a present (which is possible only if each party agrees to Immediate Data of I therefore suggest we call by homology recognize one or several places as reference Consciousness (London, the literary Greenwich meridian), which points that make it possible to measure time 1910; New York, 2001). 3 Pierre Bourdieu, The made it possible not only to situate oneself and to evaluate practices using universally Field of Cultural (and to be situated) with respect to other recognized standards. In the world of Production: Essays on literatures, but also to implement strategies literature, this unification is first effected in Art and Literature, ed. for drawing closer to this line, for rejecting certain major literary capitals, which, at a and introd. by Randall it, laying claim to it, distancing oneself from given moment in the history of the structure Johnson (Oxford, 1993); see also The Rules of Art: it, discussing it, proposing other definitions, and distribution of resources, embody Genesis and Structure of and so on. specific power or even represent literary the Literary Field, trans. Western philosophical tradition, as we prestige (‘prestige’ being one of the major Susan Emanuel (Stanford, know, makes a classic distinction between forms of power in the literary space). As 1995). 4 See among others, two aspects of time: collective or social time a consequence, the places endowed with Gilles Deleuze and Felix (also known as historical time), on the one the most prestige ‘territorialize’ (to use an Guattari, A Thousand hand, and inner time or psychological or expression coined by Gilles Deleuze4) the Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, existential time, on the other hand. Henri literary present. Simply, unlike the ordinary trans. Brian Massumi Bergson thus opposes scientific time to what social world, no one in the literary world (Minneapolis, 1988). he calls ‘duration’.2 However, when we clearly explains its structure; there is tacit
The Literary Greenwich Meridian
Kathy Prendergast, City Drawings Series (Paris), 1997–, pencil on paper. Courtesy Kerlin Gallery, www.fieldday.ieDublin.
agreement on the one or two places where agencies of consecration and the investment modernity is decreed, since it is more or less of many members of literary circles in the obvious to all protagonists of this world; discussions about the present of literary but it is never explicitly stated for fear of legitimacy that create or designate the literary disenchanting the reputedly quasi-magical capitals as places where literary time is mechanisms of literary consecration. continually engendered and reproduced. The literary meridian is not located in It can be said that the two places, the a single place. In fact, there are struggles two capitals that have been vying for this between several centres vying for the monopoly for nearly two hundred years are monopoly to inscribe and impose the London and Paris, to which must of course present. And that is why the criteria used at be added, no doubt for at least the past fifty the literary Greenwich meridian are neither years, New York and Frankfurt. If these frozen nor set; they are always multiple, places are recognized, at different spots on contradictory, plural. There are several the literary planet and for different reasons, competing measures of the present, several as Greenwich meridians, it is because they criteria of literary legitimacy, which exist provide writers from the zones most remote side by side and vie with each other. And it is from the present, those desirous of entering the presence and the concentration in these the fray, those pretending to the title of competing definitions of the most powerful writer, with ‘certificates of modernity’. It
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is in Paris, London or New York, in effect, The Faulknerian Present 5 E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, that we encounter what we euphemistically Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’, call the most influential literary critics, Let us take the case of the Faulknerian Past and Present, 38, 1 thus disguising the fact that the recognition revolution, which was and remains in (1967), 56–97. they provide produces objective and many respects, and in an extraordinarily www.fieldday.iemeasurable effects; it is there that the most important way, one of the measures of consecrating translators and the most the present to which numerous writers in recognized publishers work, there that the the world used to and continue to refer. most prestigious literary prizes are awarded, Those who claimed William Faulkner as and so on. The major capitals embody the the true founder of their aesthetic position present because the decree of modernity they were, and still often are, in positions issue is effective (since everyone is convinced homologous to that of the American writer. that the label ‘modern’ they award is They come from a rural world that is often grounded in ‘literary reason’) and because economically disadvantaged and far away this decree is assumed to be authorized. from the literary centres. Until the arrival of These literary centres ‘make’ the modernity these new novelists, such regions typically of the works that are, at any given moment, produced novels that had not got beyond declared to be ‘contemporary’, in other the stage of Naturalism and its beliefs: in words synchronous with the criteria of the other words, their writing dated to the present in use at the meridian. preceding major revolution in the world E. P. Thompson, in his famous article novel, and writers referred to this writing, on time-measurement and the changes it unaware that other standards had come to provoked in the organization of labour prevail in the world literary space. António in England at the end of the eighteenth Lobo Antunes in Portugal and Juan Benet century, showed that it took the diffusion in Spain, in the 1950s and 1960s; Mario and imposition of clock-time on one and Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Márquez all, in other words the unification of social in Latin America at the end of the 1960s, time, to overhaul the whole organization of all similarly recounted their discovery of labour.5 In the sphere of literature, to refer Faulkner’s work as a sort of revelation: it to a shared, that is to a unified, time is to taught them that access to literary time was posit, beyond the diversity and idiosyncrasy possible; for them, Faulkner represented, in of national times, aesthetic reference points very different contexts and at very different common to all international protagonists; times, something they all acknowledged it is to engage in a discussion (even tacit) explicitly: not only a decisive influence but, about the art of narrative using the same above all, what might be called a ‘temporal presuppositions; it is to be able to refer to accelerator’. By this, I mean that he was the same great revolutions in the literary a creator who enabled them, in spite of world, to the same major works of which their geographical, and especially aesthetic, it is said, precisely, that they mark a date. remoteness, to synchronize themselves with It is the great innovations in the literary the present time of the art of the novel upon world that, when they have been recognized, arriving in the world of literature. celebrated, remarked on, analysed as In a 1981 article published in Lima, marking a date in ‘literary history’, change ‘Faulkner in Laberinto’, Vargas Llosa the measure of time, themselves become explained his fascination with Faulkner’s instruments for measuring the present, reset novels in terms of a homology of their the clock to literary time: they become ‘time- economic as well as cultural and literary marks’ (as in landmarks or bookmarks). positions. Speaking of Peruvian Amazonia, he wrote:
10 The Literary Greenwich Meridian
Kathy Prendergast, City Drawings Series (London), 1997–, pencil on paper. Courtesy Kerlin www.fieldday.ieGallery, Dublin.
6 Mario Vargas Llosa, It is impossible not to think of Faulkner. that backwardness and marginality also ‘Faulkner in Laberinto’, This is the heart of Amazonia, far away, contain beauty and virtues that so-called Making Waves, ed. and trans. John King (New of course, from the Mississippi. The civilization kills. He wrote in English, but York, 1996), 148–51. language, the race, the traditions, the he was one of our own.6 Emphasis added. religion and the customs are different. 7 Claude Simon, who was But the citizens of Yoknapatawpha The diffusion pattern of Faulkner’s innovation one of the Nouveau Roman group, received County and those of the settlement in the can be applied to France, that is to say, to the Nobel Prize for department of Madre de Dios ... have a French writers or those writing in French literature in 1985. He lot in common: violence, heat, greed, ... who come from the periphery of the national spent his childhood in short, life as an adventure in which and/or colonial, in other words linguistic, and teenage years in Perpignan, a town the grotesque, the sublime and the tragic literary space. With Faulkner begins one of in southern France’s are enmeshed as inextricably as branches the great genealogies of the French-language Pyrénées-Orientales. of trees in a wood. ... Faulkner’s world novel: Claude Simon, in particular, who was really not his alone. It was ours. ... lived in the south of France and who also in the turbulence and complexity of the identified strongly, in his beginnings, as a world ‘invented’ by Faulkner, we readers provincial writer remote from the centre, in Latin America discovered, transfigured, with Faulkner’s South.7 In the same line, our own reality and we learned that, we would have to analyse the case of the as in Bayard Sartoris or Jenny du Pre, French- and Creole-speaking writers from
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Martinique — above all Edouard Glissant dare ... Because he was a barbarian. A 8 Translated by Barbara (who devoted a long analysis to the American barbarian from this barbarous country, Lewis and Thomas Spear novelist in Faulkner, Mississippi8) but also his a hick among this raggle-taggle bunch of (Chicago, 1999). 9 See Patrick Chamoiseau, 9 younger compatriots, Patrick Chamoiseau Southern hicks; but spewing forth from Texaco, trans. Rose- and Raphaël Confiant; the case of the novelist this hinterland a prose that was more Myriam Rejouis and www.fieldday.ieKateb Yacine,10 certainly one of the greatest than Bostonian, much more than Yankee Valerii Vinokurov (New Algerian writers to have worked in French ... His inconceivable exploit was that he York and London, 1997); Solibo Magnificent, trans. until now and who described his discovery of was something urbane, like Proust, for Rose-Myriam Rejouis Faulkner on several occasions;11 the case of a pathetic salon of lynchers in stetsons, and Valerii Vinokurov the Algerian writer Rachid Boudjedra, who in Oxford, in the state of Mississippi (New York, 1998). lays claim to the double ancestry of Faulkner — without ever ceasing to say he hailed 10 See Kateb Yacine, Nedjma (Paris, 1956); 14 and Claude Simon, which is a way of claiming from Oxford, Mississippi. English translation the American’s paternity twice over;12 the by Richard Howard case of Pierre Bergounioux (born in 1949 And Bergounioux adds, in Jusqu’à Faulkner: (New York, 1961; repr. and native of the Corrèze, an isolated region ‘When we have finally attained the Charlottesville, 1991). 11 Cf. Kateb Yacine, Le of France’s Massif Central); and of Pierre present, by dint of forced marches, we will Poète comme un boxeur: Michon (born in 1945, native of the Creuse, recognize the works that bear the outline Entretiens 1958–1989 a region reputed to be the ideal-type of rural of [Faulkner’s] face because they free us (Paris, 1994). France). Bergounioux and Michon are today from the shackles of the past.’15 In other 12 Rachid Boudjedra, La Répudiation (Paris, 1969). recognized as the two greatest French prose- words, there are works that ‘mark their time’ 13 See among others writers of their generation. They have in because they change the formerly accepted Pierre Michon, Vies common their attempt to restore, in a very time, they reset the clock; and others that Minuscules (Paris, classical prose, their rural and popular past,13 situate themselves and are situated with 1984); Masters and Servants (San Francisco, to describe their region as paradoxically respect to this new time and which lay 1997); The Origin of ‘remote’ more in terms of time than of space; claim to their access to the literary present the World, trans. Wyatt and both have told how they were in a way by proclaiming their kinship with the latest Alexander Mason (San ‘liberated’ from their relegation to the ‘land ‘time-mark book’ (œuvre-date). Francisco, 2002); Pierre Bergounioux, Catherine of the past’ by Faulkner’s irruption into their Literary unification, through the (Paris, 1984); La Mort de lives as readers and writers. establishment of a shared time-measurement, Brune (Paris, 1996). Faulkner is what Michon calls ‘the father is therefore by no means synonymous with 14 Pierre Michon, ‘Le of the text’: progressive submission on the part of all Père du Texte’, in Trois Auteurs (Lagrasse, protagonists, and writers in particular, 1997), 80–85. Unless How can I confess that it is to Faulkner to a uniformization of literary practices otherwise indicated, the that I feel the closest? ... Well then, I and aesthetics. Unification does not mean passages quoted from affirm it ... my principal company on uniformization; does not signify reduction to French works have been translated by Nora Scott. earth was that of Faulkner. ... and it formal, generic, thematic oneness or uniform 15 Pierre Bergounioux, was in his shadow and guided by his and formless relegation to sameness. It is Jusqu’à Faulkner (Paris, hand, as it were, that I began to write. I often believed that internationalization is 2002), 55. read him at a late age. I was over thirty. synonymous with globalization, or in other I hadn’t written a line. I happened to words, generalization of a certain kind of read Absalom! Absalom!, which had narration, or editorial products stripped been reissued in paperback: there, from of their explicitly national features and the first pages, I found a father or a targeted at the international bestseller market. brother, something like the father of the Actually, the kind of internationalization I text ... Indeed, what Faulkner gave me mean, and which is characteristic only of was permission to hack my way into the most autonomous and best-endowed language as with an axe, enunciative regions of the Republic of Letters, that is to determination ... It is a violent freedom. say, the extension beyond the boundaries of He is the one who gives permission to national spaces, of a literary space having its
12 The Literary Greenwich Meridian
Kathy Prendergast, City Drawings Series (Lima), 1997–, pencil on paper. Courtesy Kerlin Gallery, www.fieldday.ieDublin.
16 Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Device’ and ‘The Relationship between Devices of Plot Construction and General Devices of Style’, in Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Champaign, 1990), 1–51. 17 I have borrowed the expression used by Quentin Skinner to explain the novelty of own operating laws, its own non-economic generalization of his conceptions of narrative his historical approach. He thus talks about economy and entirely devoted to the art of to the whole world of literature. The novel as ‘real history’ to evoke literature, is the contrary of the reduction it is written since Faulkner — in very different the commonsense of all narrative to the commercial novel zones and periods of ‘real history’17 — is meaning of history as the in its global version; it is a unification by much more an instrument of specific struggle succession of events, as opposed to the history struggle, through discussion about what against the dominant productions in each of ideas of which he is a is at issue, about form, about devices (to of the national spaces in which it appeared. proponent. Cf. Liberty cite Viktor Shklovsky16). Thus the global As we know, the international commercial before Liberalism reappropriation of the major narrative novel is far from tolerating such liberties (for (Cambridge, 1998), esp. ch. 3, ‘Freedom and the transformations realized by Faulkner in instance, forsaking the linear narrative, which Historian’, 101–20. the case of the novel does not result in the itself is a global commercial standard).
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Nevertheless, if we are to explain the organizes the whole space. But at the same 18 Harold Garfinkel, Studies difference between commercial globalization time as it is a foundation, an a priori form of in Ethnomethodology (Oxford, 1984, [1967]), and literary internationalization, something sensibility, as Kant says, or perhaps precisely esp. ch. 3. needs to be said about the bipolar structure because it is inseparable from the most basic 19 Clifford Geertz, Local of the international literary space. One of operations of the structure, literary time Knowledge: Further www.fieldday.iethe two poles, the relatively autonomous and its effects are seldom described or even Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New one, is the site of this internationalization perceived as such. From the standpoint of York, 1983), esp. ch. and this circulation of texts that write collective experience, it belongs to what 4, ‘Common Sense as a the specific history of the literature. The a long philosophical and anthropological Cultural System’, 73–93. other is the more heteronomous zone tradition — revived by, among others, where the texts that are subject to the law Harold Garfinkel18 and Clifford Geertz19 and standards of the market are written — has called ‘common sense’, that is, that and circulate and where the publishing which is so common (in both senses of the practices most dependent on commercial word) that it seems obvious that no one standards develop. This is where use of thinks to describe its workings. Time, as the most popular novelistic procedures is ‘common sense’, is so common that it is both generalized and rationalized; the effect is recognized (in practice) and unrecognized (as to simplify the translations by a process of an objective reality). Writers constantly refer denationalization in order to set in place a to this measure of time; it is an instrument global system of publication; this is where of evaluation, of anticipation; it provides certain forms of the most commercial brand the means to situate other people and things of World Literature appeared. This editorial/ and to situate oneself. In a word, it is one publishing and commercial pole has always of the implicit forms of knowledge that are existed; there have always been people to indispensable to writers for finding their manufacture and sell popular literature; way, developing critical tools and locating and of course they have never prevented reference points. And yet few recognize its the most independent protagonists of the existence. Its reality remains quasi-tacit: literary world from existing. The novelty revealing its existence and its mechanisms resides, it seems to me, in the unprecedented might demystify the workings of a world that expansion of the market and, above all, rests in great part on belief in enchantment. in the confusion maintained between As we shall see, this clock haunts equally globalized texts and the most autonomous those who feel ‘late’ in the competition and transnational texts. those who would impose themselves as the ‘avant-garde’, that is, as the bridgehead of modernity. In this case, the present can be Time-marks measured against other artistic practices and disciplines. Thus, one of the French avant- Literary time is not just one dimension of garde groups, the Sound Poetry, founded literature among others. We know that time, in the 1950s by Brion Gysin, Bernard like space, is what Kant calls a pure, or an Heidsieck, François Dufrêne and Henri a priori form of intuition; it is necessarily Chopin among others, arose from a strange a part of any form of thought, and allows ‘observation’: the ‘lateness’ of poetry. First and organizes our access to thought or to of all with respect to pictoral innovations: knowledge. In other words, time is more ‘Writing is fifty years behind painting,’ than a simple category of thought: it is the Brion Gysin declared at the time of his first very form of thought. ‘permutations’; and then with respect to the In the particular case of literary space, upheavals occuring in the world of music in time is constitutive of both specific modes the same years. Bernard Heidsieck reports of thought and internal representations; it having had the idea of sound poems as an
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20 Bernard Heidsieck, Nous active critic of intellectualist poetry, inspired yardstick by which subsequent works will be étions bien peu en … by the musical revolution occurring in Paris measured. The literary time-mark becomes Poésie sonore 1950– around Pierre Boulez, compared with which the model to which are compared (including 1980 (Paris, Onestar Press, 2001), pages not the poets’ ‘lateness’ seemed patent to him: for rejection or refutation, which is another numbered. kind of recognition) those writers who, www.fieldday.ie21 About this expression see ... we were scarcely more than a hundred, aware of this new measure, this innovation, also Pierre Bourdieu, The packed into the Petit Marigny literally claim it as a yardstick by which to measure Rules of Art, 154–59. 22 Ernst Cassirer, The to soak up the musical revolution that their own practice. The literary time-mark Philosophy of Symbolic could be heard there: an altogether other opens an entirely new aesthetic period that Forms, 3 vols. (New kind of music, unsuspected, was being would not have been possible without the Haven and London, played there: Viennese music, to be sure: appearance of this work, which is not to 1953–1957 [1923–29]), esp. vol. 1, ch. 2. Schönberg, Berg, Weber, but especially the say that the works compared with it are music of those kids of the time who went simple imitations or reproductions. It means by the name of Stockhausen, Nono, Bério, simply that some of those who recognize Boulez, by that of their master Messiaen, and celebrate this mutation begin to write and above all — incredible bombshells (or pass critical judgements or publish) with — by the names of Varèse and Cage. If respect precisely to this measure. Because of such a radical revolution was underway in this, the work that marks a date can be said music, it seemed to me a crying necessity to be at once inseparably ‘chronothetic’, a that the same should be occuring in time-maker, because it produces time; and poetry. Each of the concerts confirmed me ‘legal’ in the sense that it prescribes one of in this thinking, shouted to me that poetry the aesthetic legalities of the literary world. deserved better than these languorous I borrow this notion from Ernst Cassirer : states in which it was vegetating ...20 for the German philosopher, the ‘internal legality’ of a symbolic form is the specific Furthermore, when it is partially described, law that operates in it and in it alone.22 But this literary clock is rarely cast in temporal in the world of literature there is more than terms but rather in aesthetic terms. The one law. There are several measures of time reference of literary time-measurement is not competing for the monopoly of legality. the date as determined by ordinary linear That is why there are also several literary chronology, imposed by the Roman calendar; time-marks — to which writers or literary it is the emergence and then the collective protagonists are subjected. consecration of a text or a work that Certain literary time-marks exercise their overturns what had hitherto been recognized jurisdiction only in national literary spaces. as the current standard. It is the recognition, In other words, these are works that do not at the end of a long collective process, that refer to international literary time, but only a work, because of the innovations it brings to a particular national time. We do in effect to the art of narrative or poetry, marks a find, in the Republic of Letters, multiple non- date (fait date21). An event in the literary (or synchronous national literary times existing artistic) sphere is a work, or a declaration, side by side in the world literary space and or a manifesto that marks a date, that is to which continue and reproduce specific self- say, creates a reference point, a break. To enclosed aesthetics independently of the mark a date is to establish a reference point international timeline and mode of rivalry. on the timeline that history will transform This explains the existence and perpetuation into a date, but which is not in itself of ‘national classics’ that remain unknown at temporal. To mark a date is to transform the international level. the existence of a work, whose irruption And then there are works that, having been marks an unprecedented moment into time. consecrated by authorities that are themselves A work that marks a date becomes the international, become internationally ‘legal’
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from the standpoint of the specific law and develop a series of highly sophisticated 23 ‘A propos de Le Bruit et therefore exercise their dominion over a strategies. One of these is simply to declare la Fureur: La Temporalité chez Faulkner’, in the transnational territory. Here it must be noted oneself ‘modern’. Which, at least in part, Nouvelle Revue Française that the Greenwich meridian has the force of explains the persistence and the insistence of (July 1939); reprinted in temporal law only for those who recognize the term modernity in all literary movements Situations I (Paris, 1947), www.fieldday.ieit, that is, for those writers who accept and decrees claiming to innovate, from the 65–75. 24 Alain Robbe-Grillet, both its legality and the international clock, premises of Baudelairian modernity to the Pour un Nouveau Roman those aware of and interested in the latest very name of the journal founded by Sartre (Paris, 1963); For a New innovations and the latest consecrations. (Les Temps Modernes) via Rimbaud’s battle Novel: Essays on Fiction, cry ‘One must be absolutely modern’, or trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1965). again, as in Spanish ‘modernismo’ founded 25 Robbe-Grillet, For a New The Struggle for Modernity by Rubén Darío at the end of the nineteenth Novel, 44. century, or the Brazilian modernism of the 26 Robbe-Grillet, ‘On The specific literary present bears the name 1920s, without forgetting Italian Futurism Several Obsolete Notions’, in For a New ‘modernity’. To be ‘present’, to be recognized and even Velimir Khlebnikov’s Futurianism, Novel, 25–47. as existing for the literary world is to be and so on. The labels ‘Nouveau Roman’, 27 ‘Outdated’ might be a declared ‘modern’ at the moment under ‘Nouvelle Vague’ or even ‘post-modernism’ better translation. consideration. Declaration of modernity is are clearly the same kind of strategies. one of the hardest consecrations to obtain We see that Alain Robbe-Grillet, for for authors from the outlying zones of the instance, in the collection of articles that literary space. It is the object of the most served as his manifesto, For a New Novel,24 bitter and violent competition. In this way, is trying to promote the modernity specific to time itself becomes one of the principal the properly literary revolution he supports stakes of the struggles waged in the literary against the Sartrean novel that dominated the space. From the writers’ standpoint, French literary space in the 1950s. In one of existence, that is to say, visibility, depends the texts, dated 1957, he writes: ‘Whence the on the recognition they enjoy or do not embarrassment we feel in the “committed” enjoy as someone producing a work in novels which claim to be revolutionary accordance with the criteria of the present of because they treat the condition of the which they claim to be contemporaries. To workers and the problems of socialism. Their be contemporary, one must be modern; that literary form, which generally dates from is, one must be regarded as such, have the before 1848, makes them the most backward reputation of being modern, be designated of bourgeois novels.’25 To put it another way, as modern by those credited with the power to promote the Nouveau Roman, Robbe- to say and make others believe as much Grillet moves Sartre’s novels down a notch, — like Sartre, in particular, who established refers them back to the past, but a literary Faulkner as one of the century’s greatest past, that is to say, to devices that are more writers by a single article published in 1937 than a hundred years behind the times with in Les Temps Modernes.23 Modernity is respect to the specific present. Likewise, he an unstable construction by definition, a entitles one of his articles ‘Sur Quelques stake in a rivalry par excellence, because Notions Périmées’ (‘On Several Obsolete the modern is always new, subject to loss of Notions’).26 These notions for him, in 1957, status in the very name of its definition. The were: character, story, commitment, form only way to be truly modern, for a writer, and content. ‘Périmé’27 is a very interesting is to challenge the present, or the latest term because it belongs to the vocabularies aesthetic revolution as dated, by proposing a of both economics and time. It means at more-present present and thus becoming the once: ‘something that has lost its value’, in latest certified modern. the sense of a currency that is no longer in Pretenders to this title will have to use, and ‘something whose sell-by-date has
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Kathy Prendergast, City Drawings Series (Berlin), 1997–, pencil on paper. Courtesy Kerlin Gallery, www.fieldday.ieDublin.
28 Robbe-Grillet, For a New expired’. In other words, the notions that Two Short Digressions Novel, 28. Robbe-Grillet calls obsolete are alleged to 29 R. Mortier, L’Originalité: Une Nouvelle Catégorie be both worthless on the non-economic 1 — The literary space has not, of course, Esthétique au Siècle des market of literature and without temporal been temporalized uniquely with reference to Lumières (Genève, 1982). validity because they belong to the past. This the ‘modern’. In fact, this mode of aesthetic text should be carefully reread to see how renewal and change is characteristic of Robbe-Grillet makes use of all possible time the second half of the nineteenth and the metaphors in order to show that Sartre’s twentieth centuries. This way of counting system is defunct. Throughout the text, and of measuring time is in reality linked the New Novel is called: a modern story, to the changes that appeared in the world a modern novel, as opposed to the ‘dead of literature at the end of the eighteenth system’ characteristic of the Realist novel. century, at least in France, as Roland Mortier The novel of characters, Robbe-Grillet asserts showed in his book on the emergence of outright, belongs entirely to the past.28 the category of ‘originality’.29 Beginning By branding these novelistic categories sometime around 1850, the pace of the ‘outdated’, he uses a strategy frequently renewals, the upheavals, the claims, the found in the Republic of letters: he proclaims appearance of literary manifestos accelerated the archaic character of the author he hopes (e.g. for Romanticism, Symbolism, the to depose, the better himself to shine as the Parnassus group) taking, at the start of the new holder of the title ‘modern’. twentieth century, the shape of a ‘permanent revolution’, that is, of constitutive instability. The phenomenon known as ‘historical
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avant-gardes’ is the most patent outcome traditional literary history would have it, as 30 Cf. François Hartog, of this logic. In this system of relentless the result of a peaceful and ‘natural’ passage Régimes d’Historicité: Présentisme et competition, the quest for originality (that of generations. Finally, I agree with their Expériences du Temps is, the rising value of novelty, which, at least attempt, much more historicist in Tynianov (Paris, 2003). from Baudelaire on, is known as modernity) than in Shklovsky, to reinsert the works they 31 Yury Tynianov, ‘On www.fieldday.iehas become the fundamental condition study into what they call a series or a system, Literary Evolution’, in Ladislav Matejka and of artistic-literary legitimacy. Paris (in a series of works to which each text makes Krystyna Pomorska, competition with London) became, between implicit reference. In other words, and to put eds., Readings in Russian 1800 and 1960 more or less, as I tried to it differently, their major innovation was to Poetics: Formalist and show, the capital city of literature, that is the relate literary change not to political or social Structuralist Views (Cambridge, Mass., site of the most powerful and the broadest history but solely to literature itself. 1971), 68–78. consecrations. That is why the ‘modern’ It remains, nevertheless, that their vision 32 Boris Eikhenbaum, ‘The régime of historicity, to borrow a concept of change by successive gaps, by a continual Theory of the “Formal from the historian François Hartog,30 has sliding from debanalization to banalization, Method”’, in Matejka and Pomorska, eds., expanded to cover the near totality of the does not account for a number of important Readings in Russian literary world. Or to put it another way, literary phenomena. The historicity and the Poetics, 3–37. in the last two centuries, the struggle for practical effectiveness of the mechanisms of 33 Shklovsky, Theory of literary recognition has taken the shape of recognition have no place in their system, Prose, 20. competition for modernity in so far as it is and, above all, they can in no way account the very principle of literary legitimacy. for the existence and permanence of the 2 — This ongoing race for modernity classics. Yet we know that the literary world is clearly the main force driving change does not banalize all texts or refer them and innovation in the world of literature. all back to the past. On the contrary, the We can recognize, in this hypothesis, debanalizing power of some texts endures certain aspects of the thesis developed long after the ordinary ageing that affects by the Russian Formalists, who were not most works. And that is why, it seems to preoccupied with literary time but with the me, the Formalist view of literary change, question of change in literature, with ‘literary however innovative it may be, does not evolution’, to quote the title of a famous truly account for the specificity and the article by Yury Tynianov.31 They posited complexity of the temporal struggles within that each significant new work shows a what Tynianov calls each ‘literary system’. gap with respect to literature that Tynianov termed ‘automatized’. According to the Formalists, this gap was constituted by the The Literary Past debanalization or the defamiliarization of the literary language, genre or procedures. The specific past is another modality of Works that produce a new difference tend to literary time. In the world literary space replace — Boris Eikhenbaum says ‘substitute’ we find two kinds of texts that belong to themselves for32 — those that produced the the past. On the one hand are works that, earlier debanalization, which, having been having marked a date or having simply been diffused, became ‘automatized’. I subscribe declared to be ‘in the present’, that is to say, to Shklovsky’s famous precept: ‘A new contemporaneous with what is regarded as form makes its appearance not in order to the present at the time studied, are, owing express a new content, but rather, to replace to specific ageing mechanisms, banished an old form that has already outlived its to the past, where they gradually become artistic usefulness.’33 I would also follow the outdated, ‘automatized’ or banalized. In this Formalists when it comes to the modality event, their legality, their aesthetic law, is no of change in literature, which they see as a longer in force or, in other terms, their value break, a permanent revolution, and not, as no longer has authority. Reputed to have
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34 Georges Poulet, Studies ‘become obsolete’, they have faded into the American literary space. What is striking in Human Time (Oxford, past and have become a ‘dead letter’, another about Latin America, he writes, ‘is the 1979). literary way of expressing devalorization. way esthetically anachronistic works were 35 Antonio Candido, On Literature and Society, Considered to be ‘outdated’ as well are considered valid ... So, when naturalism ed. and trans. Howard S. works produced in areas of the literary was already only a survival of an outdated www.fieldday.ieBecker (Princeton, 1995), universe that are far from the Greenwich genre in Europe, among us it could still be an 126–29. meridian. When we take leave of the prime ingredient of legitimate literary formulas, such 36 Paul Nizon, L’Envers 35 du Manteau, translated meridian and look at the literary space as the social novel of the 1930s and 1940s.’ from German by J. C. as a whole, we can see, in effect, literary Paul Nizon, the Swiss-German writer Rambach (Arles, 1997), regions that paradoxically can be defined as who spent many years in Paris, penned 333. belonging to the past. This bipartition has to some fine words on what he considered 37 Pierre Bergounioux, Où est le Passé? Entretien do with the distance of these spaces from the to be the Swiss anachronism. About his avec Michel Gribinski meridian, in other words with the practices country, for example, he wrote that it was (Paris, 2007). and models that prevail in these regions ‘an anachronistic spiritual clearing ... A and which remain more or less distant from resin secreted into the heavy air, produced those used and valorized in the region of in a place sheltered from the wind.’36 The the meridian. This implies that a temporal word ‘resin’ is a perfect metaphor for a inequality constitutes or, to put it better, situation ‘stuck’ in an earlier state. True, structures the totality of the space. it is characteristic of the past (and not Typically, it is the writers themselves only the literary past) that it is frozen, that who have felt ‘late’ in this world, or who nothing happens there that has not already have experienced the effects of this specific happened, that nothing changes there. past, who have best described the forms of Consequently, literary anachronism is not literary immobilism of their native world. only the past, in the sense of a former state: In other words, they are the ones for whom it is more particularly a stasis, a state of the literary present is not obvious, is not part frozen conservation. The spaces that are far of the air they breathe; it is they who are from the present, the ‘anachronistic spiritual the most clear-sighted about the temporal clearings’, are immobilized in an earlier inequality of the literary world and who, state, ‘sheltered from the wind’, that is to having understood this, proceed to afford a say, sheltered from the incessant movement, few glimpses, most often in the derealized the perpetual renewal characteristic, as I mode of literature. And we find in many have tried to show, of the aesthetic present. authors highly detailed representations of No need to think of the places furthest their native belonging to the territorialized from the centres: we can find regions of the past. In literature, this past is formulated country from the past, chunks of the past, according to two principal modalities: either in the literary spaces reputed to be closest in the temporal form of the anachronism to the present, for example in France. To or in the spatial form of the province, or, live in the past is therefore one of the major as Georges Poulet put it in his Studies in themes of Bergounioux’s writing. He has Human Time: ‘On the anachronism of recently published a book entitled, precisely: duration is superposed its counterpart, an Where is the Past?37 In it he reflects on the anachronism of space.’34 territorialization of time, or rather on the localization of the past. Concerning his autobiographical enterprise, Bergounioux A — Anachronisms writes: ‘What led me to conduct [these] apparently disparate investigations, which Antonio Candido, the great Brazilian are nevertheless guided by a single principle, literary critic, spoke clearly of the aesthetic is the suddenness with which we have moved, anachronism of certain zones of the Latin my little compatriots and I, from the past,
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that is, the country we took for the present, 1990, entitled precisely: ‘In Search of the 38 Bergounioux, Où est the real, to present-day reality, whose tone Present’. In it he describes his personal and le Passé?, 35: ‘Ce qui m’a poussé à mener des is set by those central, enlightened, active poetic trajectory as the headlong quest for a enquêtes apparemment 38 places’; ‘this past recommended itself by literary present from which he learned early hétéroclites mais dont an opacity, an obstinacy that not only had on, as a Mexican, that he was structurally le principe est unique, www.fieldday.ietriumphed over the efforts of its inhabitants removed, and he explains his discovery, as a c’est la soudaineté avec laquelle nous avons passé, to bring some enlightenment but which stuck young boy, of a time other than the personal mes petits compatriotes et so firmly to their feet that it disqualified time of his childhood: moi, du passé, c’est-à-dire them even when they attempted to flee it, to du pays que nous avions rid themselves of it’;39 ‘the dreams offered I felt literally dislodged from the present. pris pour le présent, le réel, à la réalité actuelle, to us partook of the anachronism that was ... I felt that the world was splitting and qui est celle dont les lieux 40 an inseparable part of our particularity’; that I did not inhabit the present. My centraux, éclairés, actifs ‘we had the chronic impression of living present was disintegrating: real time donnent le ton.’ in the past and this impression ... was not was somewhere else ... My time ... was 39 Bergounioux, Où est le Passé?, 39: ‘ce passé se unfounded. There is no absolute time. a fictitious time. In spite of what my recommandait par une Duration always relates to a given place, to senses told me, the time from over there, opacité, une opiniâtreté the stage of historical development it has belonging to the others, was the real one, qui, non seulement, achieved, and we were several years, decades, the time of the real present. ... the modern avaient triomphé des efforts de ses habitants centuries — depending — behind those was outside and had to be imported.44 pour le clarifier mais places where life was being invented, ... the leur collaient si bien à la big cities, Paris. Earlier ages had crystallized Then, speaking of writing poetry, he adds: peau qu’il les disqualifiait in things and lingered there as though beyond encore lorsqu’ils prétendaient le fuir, s’en themselves.’41 [A]t that time I wrote without wondering débarrasser.’ Octavio Paz, too, evoked the question of why I was doing it. I was searching for 40 Pierre Bergounioux, anachronism connected with the objective the gateway to the present: I wanted to Kpélié (Charenton,1997), and subjective existence of a measure of belong to my time and to my century. A 43–45: ‘Les rêves qu’on nous proposait literary time. He did this in several texts: first little later this obsession became a fixed participaient de of all in his famous ‘Labyrinth of Solitude’ idea: I wanted to be a modern poet. My l’anachronisme, (published in 1950), in which we find, among search for modernity had begun.45 indissociable de notre many others, this passage of extraordinary particularité.’ 41 Pierre Bergounioux, violence against his compatriots: Practically all of the components of perception l’Héritage (Charenton, of those who feel themselves to be ‘belated’ 2002), 16: ‘On avait As people of the fringes, inhabitants when they enter the international space are l’impression chronique of the suburbs of history, we Latin present, it seems to me: the present located in d’habiter le passé et cette impression […] n’était Americans are uninvited guests who have space (with a gateway by which one enters pas infondée. Il n’existe sneaked in through the West’s back door, — a little later Paz talks about New York time pas de temps absolu. La intruders who have arrived at the feast or Paris time or London time)46; the necessity durée est toujours relative of modernity as the lights are about to of importing a modernity that is lacking so as à un endroit donné, au stade de développement be put out. We arrive late everywhere, to have some chance of existing as a writer; historique auquel il we were born when it was already late the temporal domination of the centres that est parvenu, et nous in history, we have no past or, if we have impose their tempo and their chronology; retardions de plusieurs one, we spit on its remains.42 and the rapid realization that one must not années, décennies, siècles — c’est selon — sur les only enter, but import, understand, seize this lieux où la vie s’inventait, This echoes almost word for word what time, that is, this aesthetic measure, in order ... les grandes villes, Bergounioux has to say about his compatriots: to have some chance of being recognized as a Paris. Des âges antérieurs ‘We are late-comers to history.’ 43 legitimate poet. Paz’s practical understanding avaient cristallisé dans les choses et s’attardaient Above all, Paz evokes the question of of this mechanism was so effective that his comme au-delà d’eux- time and the sense of being behind the times career was crowned by the Nobel Prize, which mêmes.’ in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in consecrated his recognition as a ‘modern’ poet.
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42 Octavio Paz, ‘Post- B — Provincialism were old maids, ... as the chill of the Scriptum’, The Labyrinth province gripped them, froze them, gently of Solitude, the Other The other, more unexpected, form in crushed them — and left them time, all Mexico and Other 51 Essays, trans. Yara Milos, which the literary past is cast is that of the the time they needed, to think it over. Rachel Phillips Belash, ‘province’. It is an essentially relative term: www.fieldday.ieLysander Kemp (New the province exists only with reference to Vargas Llosa, in turn, evoking the homology York, 1982), 185. the capital: everything that is not ‘from between Peru and Yoknapatawpha County, 43 Bergounioux, Où est le Passé?, 93. the capital’ is provincial. This bipartition, writes: 44 Octavio Paz, In Search of which is more than spatial, is not restricted the Present: 1990 Nobel to France: the strong opposition between Faulkner’s America is underdeveloped Lecture, trans, Anthony province and capital was exported to and primitive, filled with rough and Stanton (San Diego, 1990), 14–16. England, where ‘to be provincial’ has more uncultured, prejudiced and gallant people, 45 Paz, In Search of the or less the same connotations as the French capable of extraordinary meanness and Present, 16–17. expression; and it is found in Spain as nobility, but incapable of breaking free of 46 Paz, In Search of the well. In short, this bipartition has become their visceral provincialism which makes Present, 16. 47 T. S. Eliot, ‘What is a a category of thought and a criterion of them, from the moment they are born Classic?’, Selected Prose, opposition that also belongs to the category until their death, men of the periphery, ed. and introd. Frank of ‘common sense’. wild and old fashioned, pre-industrial ...52 Kermode (New York, It is clearly in this sense that we should 1975), 117. 48 Eliot, ‘What is a Classic?’, understand the distinction proposed by 115–31. T. S. Eliot in his famous 1944 address as Usage of the Classics 49 Eliot, ‘What is a Classic?’, president of London’s Virgil Society: ‘What is 130. a Classic?’, a reference to the title of another Once a literary work has been certified and 50 A town in the department of Indre, in central famous address, that of the Frenchman recognized as modern, writers and agents France. Sainte-Beuve, to which I will return. As we endowed with the power of consecration 51 Pierre Michon, ‘Le Temps know, in this text Eliot opposes ‘mature have still more ways to keep a work from est un Grand Maigre’, literatures’ that can stand on their own oblivion. This is Stage Two of recognition, in Trois Auteurs, 24–25. To ‘provincialize’, in tradition and which have, according to his as it were. After accession to modernity as a other words to declare expression, ‘a history behind [them]’,47 provisional present, a work can accede to the that a certain region to ‘provincial literatures’.48 The literary continuous present. But the only works to or production is province, according to Eliot, is a space-time attain this ultimate stage of consecration are ‘provincial’, is one of the most effective strategies that does not produce classics because it is those that achieve the status of ‘classics’. for discrediting (in lacking in tradition, and in its own history. This is often a long-drawn-out process, literature or elsewhere) Describing what he calls precisely literary at the end of which a work (or an a cumbersome rival. In provincialism, he says magnificently, ‘[it] is author — in this case the two are one) is the historical domain, 49 the success of Dipesh not a provincialism of space, but of time’. recognized by the most legitimate agents Chakrabarty’s book Literary provincialism, in Eliot’s terms, is what of consecration to be an absolute value, Provincializing Europe could be called a structural anachronism. an undisputed monument. A classic is (Princeton, 2000) shows Michon, too, describes the sensation of supposed to mark an unforgettable date the strategy is still in use and effective; and, the province he feels each time he passes in the specific history of the space; and at therefore, that the stakes through the little town of La Châtre:50 the same time it is regarded as a specific and weapons involved in authority, an uncontestable work. Which the intellectual struggle It is a provincial town the likes of which means that, unlike all other works that must are often linked to the specific time. no longer exist. ... The slow pace is still undergo continual competition, challenge 52 Vargas Llosa, ‘Faulkner there, nonetheless, the slow, unbearable and contestation concerning their value, in Laberinto’, 149. life. They are there, behind the clusters of the classic is exempt from fluctuations of wisteria, the poets who failed to become taste and judgement, from struggles for poets, the lions that became dogs, the evaluation, from all rivalries. The classic is, lovelorne who burned in vain until they by definition, removed from the arbitrary
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Kathy Prendergast, City Drawings Series (Moscow), 1997–, pencil on paper. Courtesy Kerlin www.fieldday.ieGallery, Dublin.
53 Charles-Augustin Sainte Beuve, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un Classique?’ [1850], in and uncertain index of literary values. In a belonging makes it, whatever may happen, Causeries du Lundi, 3 way, in the Republic of Letters the classic a ‘contemporary’. In an article written in vols. (Paris, 1874–76), stands as one of those works that is ineligible 1850, entitled ‘What is a Classic?’ and later vol. 3, 42: ‘Un vrai for competition, a very rare and highly revisited by Eliot, Sainte-Beuve writes: ‘A classique c’est un auteur qui a enrichi l’esprit sought after category. Because of this, the true classic is an author who has enriched humain, ... qui a parlé à classic is not and cannot be relegated to the human mind ... who has spoken to all tous dans un style à lui et the past. In other words, it has not been in a personal style which also proves to be qui se trouve aussi celui nor can it be surpassed, is not nor can it be that of everyone, in a new style devoid of de tout le monde, dans un style nouveau sans stripped of its status. It belongs to an eternal neologisms, a style both new and old, easily néologisme, nouveau literary present. Which is clearly nothing contemporaneous with all periods.’53 et antique, aisément other than the definition of immortality Much later, in 1960, and in a completely contemporain de tous les itself. This explains why many analysts, different intellectual world, Hans-Georg âges.’; emphasis added. 54 Hans-Georg Gadamer, in very different worlds of thought and at Gadamer too tackled the problem of Truth and Method, trans. very different times, have spoken of the defining the classic, in particular inTruth J. Weinsheimer and D. classics in the same paradoxical terms as and Method.54 In it, he seeks to show that, G. Marshall, 2nd rev. the ‘eternal contemporary’. Its belonging contrary to the claims of the social sciences edn. (New York, 1989), esp. second part, ch. 2- to the present having been declared (and (and history in particular), literature has no B-ii: ‘The Example of the unanimously accepted) once and for all, this history, or that history cannot account for Classical’, 285–89.
22 The Literary Greenwich Meridian
55 Alain Robbe-Grillet, the essential nature of literature. According Flaubert,’ he writes in a recent text to indicate Préface à une Vie to Gadamer, the very existence of the classics, his equality and his contemporaneousness d’Écrivain (Paris, 2005), their resistence to history, is proof of the with today’s most admired author in France 123. 56 Jorge Luis Borges, supposed incapacity of history to account for and the most renowned of the classical ‘History of Eternity’, literature and for its ‘essential nature’. This is nineteenth-century novelists55); then he claims www.fieldday.ieSelected Non-Fictions, ed. the major point on which historical criticism kinship with a series of more-or-less recently Eliot Weinberger, trans. is caught out, he believes. Thus at the close canonized writers who make up what could be Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine and Eliot of an argument totally different from Sainte- called the canon or the classics of modernity: Weinberger (London, Beuve’s, Gadamer writes, of the classic, that Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, Beckett. 2000). it is ‘[a work] contemporaneous with every And in so doing, he claims to be himself the present’ and further on, logically: it is a work contemporary of all these writers. Which that is ‘immediately accessible’, which directly gives him a good chance of being ‘classicized’. recalls Sainte-Beuve’s ‘easily’ (aisément). Moreover, he will go down in history, as A work ‘contemporaneous with all we know, with the label by which he is well periods’: this almost oxymoronic expression known: ‘pope of the Nouveau Roman’, which seems to me precisely what is at stake in the is, one must concede, an excellent start to his use and the manufacture of the ‘classics’. announced canonization … The primary characteristic, the miracle We see, through the different cases I of the classic, is its condition of eternal have exposed, that the literary ‘present’ is contemporary. However one defines present, the only temporal modality tolerated in the the classic is forever co-temporaneus, literary space. The only recognition, the only existing in the same time as those works validity, in other words, the only possible that are regarded as being ‘of the present’. form of legitimacy, is to belong, in one way It is therefore not merely immortal: it also or another, to the present. But what, then, belongs to an eternal present, that is to say, it can this perpetual contemporaneousness is recognized as existing in the same time as mean? I think that, among many other the moderns, but in a mode that exempts it things, it means, in accordance with the from the indecisive character of modernity. representations most deeply rooted in our It could be shown that the kinship between literary unconscious, that there is no such the claim to modernity and the aspiration to thing as time. That is why the temporal the status of classic is such that one of the structure of the literary space is highly most effective strategies and one widely used paradoxical, to say the least: one of its major by writers aiming for modernity is to claim a functions might be to perpetuate the denial of great classic as one of their contemporaries. literary history. Nevertheless, I by no means In effect, as ‘becoming a classic’ is a lengthy think we should conclude that any history process (since, generally speaking, the of literature is impossible. On the contrary, I older one is the more chances one has of believe that a true collective reflection about becoming a classic, and the older a classic, literary time could lead us to rethink, I mean the more indisputable it is), one solution to take seriously, a new form of literary is to declare oneself the contemporary of a history that would also be, to quote Jorge classic. If the classic is, whatever may come, Luis Borges, ‘a history of eternity’.56 contemporaneous with all periods, in other words, undisputed and indisputable, then Translated by Nora Scott. to declare oneself the contemporary of an eternal contemporary is an excellent strategy © Pascale Casanova. for creating the possibility of being considered both a contemporary and a classic. Robbe- This is a version of a lecture given at Yale Grillet is unbeatable at this game: instead University, in the French department, in of Balzac, he chose Flaubert (‘my friend December 2007.
23 Field Day review www.fieldday.ie
24 Ibsen in Exile Peer Gynt, or www.fieldday.iethe Difficulty of Becoming a Poet in Norway Toril Moi
1 ‘Blant samtlige mine ‘Among all my books, I consider bøger anser jeg Peer Gynt for den, der mindst egner Peer Gynt to be the least suited sig til at forståes udenfor de skandinaviske lande’ to be understood outside the ... ‘den norske natur og det norske folkeliv’ Scandinavian countries,’ Henrik ... ‘fortrolig med vor literatur og med vor Ibsen wrote in 1880 to Ludwig folkelige tænkemåde’ Passarges, a potential German ... ‘[kende] personer og karakterer deroppe. ... Er translator. To appreciate his play, ikke alt dette nødvendigt for at finde nogen smag Ibsen thought, it was necessary to i dette digt?’ Letter to Ludwig Passarges, the know ‘Norwegian nature and the first German translator life of the Norwegian people’, be of the play, 19 May 1880, in the Norwegian familiar with ‘our literature and Centenary Edition of Ibsen’s collected works: our popular way of thinking’, Hundreårsutgave: Henrik Ibsens samlede and also actually ‘know persons verke, eds. Francis Bull, and characters up there’. ‘Isn’t all Halvdan Koht and Didrik Arup Seip, 21 vols. this necessary to find this poem (Oslo, 1928–57), vol. 17, 399 [hereafter, HU]. [digt] to one’s taste?’ he asked Unless otherwise noted, 1 all translations from rhetorically. Norwegian and Danish are mine. Norwegians have generally agreed. For generations, Peer Gynt has enjoyed a unique status Erik Werenskjold (1855– in the Norwegian consciousness. 1938), detail of a portrait of Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906). It is consistently treated as the Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo, Norway. Photo: Getty Images. most essentially Norwegian of
Field Day Review 4 2008 25 Field Day review
Mark Rylance as Peer Gynt, with members of the cast as inmates in the insane asylum, in the Guthrie production of Peer Gynt, translated and adapted by Robert Bly from the original by Henrik Ibsen. Directed by Tim www.fieldday.ieCarroll, set and costume design by Laura Hopkins, lighting design by Stan Pressner. 12 January – 2 March 2008 on the Wurtele Thrust Stage at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Photo © Michal Daniel, 2007
works. In spite of its obvious anti- takes place at the edge of the hauntingly 2 See
26 Ibsen in Exile
6 Peer Gynt was translated until the 1890s.6 of Ibsen’s most widely performed plays into German several times For years Peer Gynt was not produced internationally. To date, only A Doll’s House, in the 1880s, but this is at all. This is not surprising, since Ibsen Hedda Gabler and Ghosts have accumulated the only exception to the 11 rule. See Bull, ‘Innledning’, originally conceived it as a closet drama, more productions. HU, vol. 6, 11. a play written to be read rather than Against Ibsen’s expectations, then, Peer www.fieldday.ie7 ‘... et stort musikalsk performed. Belonging to his monumental Gynt has turned out to appeal as much to tonemaleri, der antyder middle phase, Peer Gynt (1867) joins Ibsen’s foreigners as to Norwegians. When Peer Peer Gynts omflakken i den vide verden’, letter to two other revolutionary closet dramas, Brand peels the onion and likens it to himself, Edvard Grieg, HU, vol. (1866) and Emperor and Galilean (1873). the play’s existential dimensions are laid 17, 124–25. See also Toril Relatively quickly, however, Ibsen decided bare. All over the world, directors have Moi, Henrik Ibsen and that Peer Gynt might be performed after excelled in making audiences see that Peer the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy all. His change of mind came about in the Gynt is a drama about human existence (Oxford, 2006), 127–29. ‘gap period’ after he had finishedEmperor and the meaning of life. Like all of Ibsen’s 8 For information on early and Galilean and before he had managed to plays, moreover, it is sufficiently open- Scandinavian productions, write Pillars of Society (1877), the first of his ended to allow everyone to draw their own see Bull, ‘Innledning’, HU, vol. 6, 11. magnificent series of contemporary plays. In conclusions about its ‘message’: Peer Gynt 9 For a complete list of January 1874, Ibsen wrote to Grieg, asking appears to have something for everyone. the repertoire of the him to compose the music for the play, and Like Hamlet, Peer Gynt is inexhaustible, Théâtre de l’Œuvre, see outlined a remarkably pictorial plan for the and like Hamlet, it is daunting to any critic the exhibition catalogue Le Théâtre de l’Œuvre stage version. At that point, Ibsen appears who ventures to write about it, and to any 1893–1900: Naissance du to have thought of Peer Gynt as a series of director who takes on the monumental task Théâtre Moderne (Milano tableaux vivants. He also suggested that of making it come alive on stage. Christians and Paris, 2005), 151–53. almost the whole of Act 4 (the one act set and atheists, idealists and materialists, 10 Information on the 1896 Paris production of Peer fully outside Norway, in North Africa) could modernists and post-modernists have all Gynt is taken from the be replaced by a ‘great musical tone painting appropriated it for their own purposes. International Repertoire that suggests Peer Gynt’s wanderings in the Critics as well as directors have emphasized Database for Ibsen plays wide world’.7 a huge variety of themes: it has been (
27 Field Day review
It tells us that, had he remained in Norway, He barely escaped the usual punishment scholars agree that the Ibsen would never have become Ibsen. By for debtors, namely hard labour at the action is supposed to unfold in the first half of looking at what Peer Gynt has to say about Akershus fortress.16 He was at that time the nineteenth century Ibsen’s relationship to Norway, I hope to director of the Kristiania Norwegian Theatre (see, for example, Bull, make a contribution to a new tendency which had been struggling with serious ‘Innledning’, HU, vol. 6, www.fieldday.iein Ibsen studies, namely the attempt to financial difficulties for many years. On 1 24). 13 Tore Rem, ‘Nationalism rethink what Tore Rem, in a recent essay June 1862 it had to close, and Ibsen lost his or Internationalism? The 17 on the reception of Ibsen in Ireland, calls job. In 1862 and 1863, Ibsen repeatedly Early Irish Reception ‘the tension between the insider Ibsen and moved his family to ever cheaper lodgings of Ibsen’, Ibsen Studies, the outsider Ibsen, the writer within and in ever more unappealing locations, and 7, 2 (2007), 199. The work of scholars such without the nation, the nationalist versus was regularly sued for debt. He was also as Pascale Casanova, 13 the internationalist or cosmopolitan’. To developing a serious alcohol problem, and Kjetil Jakobsen, Elisabeth understand Ibsen’s relationship to Europe, was occasionally seen drunk in the streets. Oxfeldt and Tore Rem and the rest of the world, to decide whether Constantly scrounging for money, he more instantly comes to mind. See Pascale Casanova, Ibsen should be considered an internationalist than once considered giving up writing ‘La Production de or a cosmopolitan, it is also necessary to entirely. The alternative career he had in l’Universel Littéraire: Le understand his relationship to Norway. mind was painting, which was not reassuring “Grand Tour” d’Ibsen Ibsen finally felt free to comment on his to his wife, Suzannah. According to his en Europe’, in Eveline Pinto, ed., Penser l’Art situation as a Norwegian writer in Peer daughter-in-law, Bergliot (née Bjørnson), et la Culture avec les Gynt. It was to a great extent because of his this led to conflicts in the marriage: ‘It is no Sciences Sociales (Paris, departure from Norway in 1864 and the secret that he wanted to be a painter, but few 2002), 63–80; Kjetil unexpected and unprecedented success of people know that it cost Mrs. Ibsen many Jakobsen, Kritikk av den reine autonomi: Ibsen, Brand in 1866. efforts to get him to give it up. Indeed, she verden og de norske herself says that “I actually had to struggle intellektuelle (Oslo, with him”.’18 2004); Elisabeth Oxfeldt, Ibsen Leaves Norway In the summer of 1862, Ibsen received a Nordic Orientalism: Paris and the Cosmopolitan small state stipend to gather folktales in the Imagination 1800–1900 19 On 1 April 1864 Henrik Ibsen sailed from Norwegian mountains. His wanderings (Copenhagen, 2005); Christiania to Copenhagen.14 The 36-year- took him to the mountains around Vinstra, and Tore Rem, Henry old dramatist was heading south, to Rome, where for the first time he heard tales about Gibson/Henrik Ibsen: Den provinsielle the city that to him, as to every other Nordic a character called Peer Gynt. But mountain verdensdikteren (Oslo, writer and artist of the period, stood as the wanderings would not feed a family. In 2006). very symbol of the European tradition in February 1863, Stortinget, the Norwegian 14 Ivo de Figueiredo, art and culture. By contrast, Ibsen’s first parliament, voted to provide an annual Henrik Ibsen: Mennesket (Oslo, 2006), 270. (This biographer, Henrik Jæger, described mid- salary for life for Ibsen’s friend and rival, the is the first volume of nineteenth-century Christiania as a provincial poet and dramatist Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. A Figueiredo’s acclaimed outpost, at least when considered from an few weeks later, Ibsen’s application for the new Ibsen biography; artist’s point of view: ‘Surely many things can same honour was turned down. ‘Bjørnson, hereafter, Mennesket.) 15 Henrik Jæger, Henrik be said in praise of the Norwegian capital; clearly, was absolutely necessary to the Ibsen: A Critical but nobody in their right mind would call it a nation, whereas Henrik Ibsen was not,’ Biography, trans. William town where art and literature thrive.’15 Ivo de Figueiredo comments.20 However, Morton Payne (Chicago, Why did Ibsen leave in 1864? An the committee that turned down Ibsen’s 1901), 159. 16 This paragraph is based obvious answer to this question would application let it be known that it might on the detailed account be that his decision was a pragmatic one give him a travel grant instead. Ibsen of Ibsen’s finances at — he left because he could not make a immediately applied, claiming that he needed the time in Per Kristian decent living in Norway. After the birth of 600 Norwegian speciedaler for a year-long Heggelund Dahl, Streiflys: Fem Ibsen-studier (Oslo, his son Sigurd in 1859, Ibsen’s economic European dannelsesreise. The Norwegian 2001), 11–52. situation had gone from bad to worse. In word is a literal translation of the German 17 Figueiredo, Mennesket, 1861 alone he was sued for debt ten times. Bildungsreise, a journey of cultural 236. What was left of
28 Ibsen in Exile
Kristiania Norwegian education. In the summer of 1863, Stortinget novelist Knut Hamsun described as ‘that Theater (the theatre awarded Ibsen 400 speciedaler, less than he strange city which no one leaves before it wrote the capital’s name had applied for, but enough for him to begin has set its mark upon him’ for twenty-seven with a K long before it 21 24 was legally required, making plans to leave. years. Between 1864 and 1891, Ibsen to indicate its political In October 1863, Suzannah and Sigurd visited Norway only twice — in 1874 and www.fieldday.ienationalism) was taken left for Copenhagen, to stay with Suzannah’s 1885. When he moved back to Kristiania over by Christiania stepmother, the well-known writer (the spelling of the capital’s name was made Theater, which now became the only Magdalene Thoresen (1819–1903). Still, the more ‘Norwegian’ in 1876) in 1891, he had permanent theatre in the Italian journey was not yet a certainty. Ibsen become the most famous living dramatist capital. was beset with debts, and the grant was too in the world, the author of an unparalleled 18 Bergliot Ibsen, De tre: small to allow him to pay them off. Luckily series of plays, beginning with Brand and Erindringer om Henrik Ibsen, Suzannah Ibsen, that autumn he learned that his latest play, ending (so far) with Hedda Gabler. His work Sigurd Ibsen (Oslo, The Pretenders, a historical drama set inspired and sustained the new theatrical 1949), 40–41. in thirteenth-century Norway, had been avant-gardes then emerging in the great 19 Figueiredo, Mennesket, accepted by the Christiania Theater, the only cities of Europe. In 1898, George Bernard 238. 20 ‘Henrik Ibsen var ikke permanent theatre in town. Ibsen decided to Shaw declared that Ibsen’s impact on British uomgjengelig nødvendig stay in Norway that winter to help direct it. cultural life had been approximately the for nasjonen. Men det That The Pretenders was to be produced same as the effect of ‘three revolutions, six var altså Bjørnson.’ was welcome news indeed. Artistically, the crusades, a couple of foreign invasions, and Figueiredo, Mennesket, 25 253. early 1860s had been a decidedly mixed an earthquake’. 21 Information based on period for Ibsen. In 1862, he finished Figueiredo, Mennesket, Love’s Comedy, a brilliant, radical critique 253. of social norms for love and marriage. Italy and the Success of Brand 22 For more information on this play, see Moi, Henrik Far ahead of its time, Love’s Comedy was Ibsen and the Birth of excoriated by the critics and refused by the Ibsen arrived in Rome on 19 June 1864, Modernism, 178–87. Christiania Theater.22 In January 1864, and initially he spent a good deal of time 23 ‘[D]en fordrukne digter The Pretenders opened to strong reviews. exploring the city, often in the company Henrik Ibsen’, Francis Bull, Tradisjoner og The play was performed eight times that of the Hegelian art historian Lorenz minner (Oslo, 1946), spring which, by Christiania standards, was Dietrichson. In search of information about 195. a fine success. Nevertheless, Ibsen’s various Rome, its art, its traditions and its important 24 Knut Hamsun, Hunger, efforts to get this play, or indeed any of his sights, he borrowed a Danish translation of trans. Sverre Lyngstad (London, 1998), 3. plays, produced at the Royal Theatre in Madame de Staël’s 1807 novel Corinne, or 25 ‘... tre Revolutioner, Copenhagen failed. Italy.26 Soon he was full of ideas. The first, seks Korstog, et Par However, by March 1864 Ibsen had and the one that would take the longest to fremmede Invasioner settled his most pressing debts, and his friend complete, was to write a play about Julian og et Jordskælv’. Shaw was responding to the Bjørnson whipped up a ‘subscription’ to the Apostate. It would take almost ten years Copenhagen newspaper fund Ibsen’s trip. According to the literary before that idea was realized as the huge Politiken’s request for historian Francis Bull, an elderly gentleman double play Emperor and Galilean. Instead, some lines to celebrate interviewed by him in the early 1900s Ibsen began an early version of Brand, but Ibsen’s birthday. Responses from a range remarked that, in 1864, the Christiania work was slow and difficult, and by the of British writers were bourgeoisie was asked to contribute money summer of 1865 he was running out of published (in Danish) on so that the ‘drunken poet Henrik Ibsen’ money again. In an effort to economize, and 18 and 20 March 1898. could go abroad.23 As soon as the ice on the escape the city heat, the Ibsen family spent Quoted in Rem, Henry Gibson/Henrik Ibsen, 283. Christiania fjord thawed, Ibsen sailed south. the summer of 1865 in the village of Ariccia 26 See Daniel Haakonsen, As he looked back on Christiania from outside Rome. Henrik Ibsen: Mennesket the steamship that was taking him out to One day in June, Ibsen had an errand in og kunstneren (Oslo, sea, Ibsen was well known in Norway, but the city and took the opportunity to visit St. 2003 [1981]), 86. nowhere else. He could not have known that Peter’s. Then, he writes to Bjørnson, he had he was not to return to live in the town the a revelation: ‘I immediately realized a strong
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Isabell Monk O’Connor as Asa and Mark Rylance as Peer Gynt. www.fieldday.iePhoto © Michal Daniel, 2007
and clear form for what I have to say.’27 He Society for the Advancement of the Sciences 27 ‘... der gik det med went home, put his old draft (now known as in Trondheim, and in July, although no engang op for mig en stærk og klar Form for the ‘Epic Brand’) aside, and started intense application had been made, the government hvad jeg havde at sige’, work on a new version, a closet drama awarded him an additional travel grant. letter to Bjørnstjerne in five acts, with a contemporary setting. Ibsen’s unexpected financial and artistic Bjørson dated 12 Three months later, Brand was finished. success had immediate consequences. It September 1865, HU, vol. 16, 110. On 15 March 1866 the play was published was as if he wanted to signal to the world 28 See Figueiredo, in Copenhagen, and became an instant that he was transformed. First of all, he Mennesket, 315. sensation. While the leading Copenhagen shaved off his full beard, adopting instead critics, as well as Bjørnson, were rather the imposing whiskers he was to keep for hostile to this strange and unusual work, the rest of his life. He bought new, highly ordinary readers were absorbed, and bourgeois clothes: overnight the dishevelled challenged. Everywhere in Scandinavia, poet turned into a gentleman in a velvet people were passionately discussing Brand. jacket and elegant gloves. His friends The book was reprinted in May, and there barely recognized him. Most strikingly, he were three more printings in that year alone. radically changed his handwriting. Before For the first time in his life, Ibsen was 1866, Ibsen wrote in a forward slanting making serious money from his writing. scrawl; after the success of Brand, he Suddenly, everything was going his suddenly produced the pedantic, backward way. In May, Stortinget (the Norwegian leaning script of an accountant. parliament) agreed to give him a ‘poet’s The success of Brand and the salary’ (digtergasje) for life, similar to improvement in Ibsen’s finances also had that granted to Bjørnson.28 That month emotional and professional consequences. Ibsen also received a travel grant from the Ibsen had written nine plays before he
30 Ibsen in Exile
Mark Rylance as Peer Gynt. www.fieldday.iePhoto © Michal Daniel, 2007
29 ‘Men en Rejse, som den left Norway, but had never felt confident in Italy, he has seen the inauthenticity of jeg nu er ude paa, vender that he had a future as a writer. Writer, Norwegian public life, and — above all op og ned paa meget i et however, is not quite the right word. The — he has stopped fearing the judgement of Menneske, og for mig har dette været til det bedre.’ word Ibsen mostly uses, in his plays and in his countrymen: Letter to Magdalene his correspondence, is Digter, which, like Thoresen, dated Rome, 3 the German Dichter, is usually translated What has been decisive and significant December 1865, HU, vol. as ‘poet’. The word does not just mean for me, is that I arrived at a sufficient 16, 117–18. 30 ‘Hvad der har været someone who writes poetry, however, but, distance from our own preoccupations det afgjørende og more generally, someone who makes things to see that all the self-made lies in our betydningsfulde for up, someone who uses the imagination to so-called public life were hollow, and the mig er, at jeg kom i invent stories, images, ideas, and then gives personal phrasemongers pitiful. ... [F]or tilstrækkelig Frastand fra vort eget til at se them shape, whether in the form of poetry, down here I am not afraid of anything; Hulheden bagved alle plays, stories, or novels. at home I was afraid when I stood in the de selvgjorte Løgne i Finally, Ibsen felt assured that he was a oppressive [klamme] crowd, and felt their vort saakaldte offentlige poet, regardless of what the critics might say. ugly smiles behind my back.30 Liv og Jammerligheden i alt det personlige The success of Brand gave him confidence, Frasemageri. ... [T]hi energy and imaginative power. That his Ibsen celebrated Christmas 1866 in Rome hernede er jeg ikke ræd breakthrough came with the first thing he rather more opulently than usual. In early for nogen Ting; hjemme wrote after leaving Norway must have made January 1867, he reported that he was var jeg ræd naar jeg stod inde i den klamme Flok him think about the difference between already hard at work on a new play. In og havde Følelsen af writing in Norway and writing in Italy. May, he and his family left for the island deres stygge Smil bagved In December 1865, soon after finishing of Ischia in the Gulf of Naples, where he mig.’ Letter to Magdalene Brand, Ibsen sent a revealing letter worked away on a new closet drama until Thoresen, dated Rome, 3 December 1865 (HU, vol. to Magdalene Thoresen, in which he mid-August, when he was scared by a small 16, 118–19). encouraged her to come to Italy. To go earthquake and immediately sought refuge in so far away, Ibsen writes, has turned him a pensione in Sorrento. There he stayed until ‘upside down’, and the effects have definitely he sent the last act of Peer Gynt off to his been ‘for the better’.29 Now that he lives publisher, on 18 October 1867.
31 Field Day review
Three days before sending off the final PEER GYNT (uden at standse). Nej, jeg 31 ‘Jeg begriber mangegange pages of his play, Ibsen wrote to Thoresen to gjør ej! ikke hvorledes Du holder ud deroppe! Livet urge her to apply for a grant to travel to Italy: AASE. Naa, saa band paa, det er sandt! deroppe, saaledes som PEER GYNT. Hvorfor bande? det nu staar for mig Many times I just don’t understand how AASE. Tvi; du tør ej! har noget ubeskrivelig www.fieldday.ieyou can stand it up there! Life up there, Alt i hob er Tøv og tant! kjedende ved sig; det kjeder Aanden ud af as it now appears to me, has something PEER GYNT (staar). Det er sandt — ens Væsen, kjeder 33 indescribably boring about it; it bores the hvert evigt Ord! Dygtigheden ud af spirit out of one’s being, bores the ability ens Vilje; det er det out of one’s will; the curse of such small AASE: Peer, you’re lying! forbandende ved de smaa Forholde, at de gjør circumstances is that they make people’s PEER GYNT (without stopping): I am Sjælene smaa.’ Letter to 31 souls small. not! Magdalene Thoresen, AASE. Well, then, swear it’s true! dated Sorrento, 15 Ibsen’s comments on the destructive effects PEER GYNT. Why swear? October 1867 (HU, vol. 16, 188). (Ibsen may of boredom call to mind Hedda Gabler, AASE. Ah; you daren’t! It’s all rubbish! have just Norway in who complains that her only talent is to PEER GYNT (stops). It’s true, every mind, or both Denmark bore herself to death. Given the date of this word!34 and Norway, since his letter, we should perhaps think of Peer as stepmother was living in Copenhagen. Yet Ibsen Hedda’s cousin, as someone who, like her, These characters live in a world that has no himself never lived in suffers grievously under the pettiness of his category for fiction: if a story is not true, Denmark; what he knew circumstances, without having Hedda’s pride they assume it must be a lie. Peer shares the from experience was life and grandeur of soul. concepts of his world: he is not in a position in Norway.) 32 ‘Dette digt indeholder to claim poetry or fiction for himself. If his meget, som har sin mother and his so-called friends say that his foranledning i mit eget ‘Peer, You’re Lying’: Peer as Poet stories are lies, he will deny it by claiming ungdomsliv; til ‘Aase’ that they are the gospel truth. Since he is har, med fornødne overdrivelser, min egen Ibsen is the least autobiographical of in fact recycling old folktales by turning moder afgivet modellen.’ writers. The only significant exception to them into tales about himself, this is a self- Letter to Peter Hansen, this rule is Peer Gynt. Indeed, Ibsen himself defeating strategy. In such a world, a young dated Dresden, 28 acknowledged that he had drawn on his poet has no chance to become conscious of October 1870 (HU, vol. 16, 318). own experiences as a young man for the his own talents. 33 HU, vol. 6, 59. All early parts of the play: ‘This poem contains So, right at the outset of the play we Norwegian quotations much occasioned by my own youth; for are plunged into a society that has no from the play are from ‘Aase’ — with necessary exaggerations cognizance of — let alone respect for Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt: Et dramatisk Digt, HU, — my own mother furnished the model.’32 — the products of the imagination. In this vol. 6. There are parallels between the fathers, world, fiction — or rather digtning, poetry 34 Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt, too: Peer’s father, Jon Gynt, squandered his — cannot be understood as anything but trans. Michael Meyer considerable fortune, leaving his wife and lies. To have a lively imagination is simply (London, 1963), 29; punctuation slightly son in poverty; Ibsen’s own father, Knud a sin. In Act 5, when Peer returns as an old edited. Ibsen, was once a rich merchant in Skien, man to the village of his youth, the bailiff 35 HU, vol. 6, 208. but had to declare bankruptcy when Henrik calls the young Peer Gynt a ‘vederstyggelig was just seven years old. Digter’, a phrase that literally means In the first three acts, Peer is represented ‘an abominable poet’ or ‘an abominable as a talented but despised storyteller. The maker-up of stories’.35 In this context, the first lines of the play, so popular in Norway adjective is to be taken as an inherent part that many Norwegians know them by heart, of the noun. It is difficult to render this announce the theme: phrase, with its succinct disparagement of fiction, poetry, and the imagination, in AASE. Peer, du lyver! English. Michael Meyer has ‘a damned liar’;
32 Ibsen in Exile
Mark Rylance as Peer Gynt and Bill McCallum as the Head of the Asylum. www.fieldday.iePhoto © Michal Daniel, 2007
36 Ibsen, Peer Gynt, trans. Christopher Fry ‘an appalling story-teller’; as the psychoanalysts put it, by engaging in Meyer, 153; Henrik Peter Watts ‘a most shocking romancer’, and rash, violent and shocking actions, to show Ibsen, Peer Gynt: Play 36 in Five Acts, trans. John Northam ‘a terrible yarn-spinner’. them that he is worth something after all. Christopher Fry (Oxford, But one scene in Peer Gynt shows the power Ultimately, the consequences of his own 1970), 141; Henrik Ibsen, of fiction, when Peer eases his mother’s way rashness in running away with Ingrid, the Peer Gynt: A Dramatic to death by holding her in his arms and bride at Hægstad, forces him into exile. Poem, trans. Peter Watts (London, 1970), 188; imagining that they are reaching the gates of Peer, in short, comes across as something Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt: Paradise together. Because he loves her, and like Ibsen’s negative alter ego: a talented A Dramatic Poem, trans. because she believes in him, and in his love, poet who never wrote a line. That the play John Northam (Oslo, and because he is absolutely not telling this intends us to see Peer as someone who 1995), 143. Hereafter, Northam’s translations story to show off, his story truly comforts should have become a poet is made clear in will be cited as Northam. his dying mother. Act 5. After his encounter with the bailiff Peer’s relations with the other young and his other acquaintances from his youth people in the village echo Ibsen’s admission comes the scene in which Peer peels the that ‘at home I was afraid when I ... felt their onion and discovers that he has no core. ugly smiles behind my back’. Like Henrik, Then he catches a glimpse of Solveig’s cabin, Peer fears his fellows’ judgement, and drinks and hears her singing. Filled with horror to get the courage to face them. Finding no and remorse, he runs through the night, sympathy and no understanding, he acts out, stumbling across a barren, burnt-out plain.
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Mark Rylance as Peer Gynt, with Jim Lichtscheidl and Tyson Forbes as Trolls. www.fieldday.iePhoto © Michal Daniel, 2007
In his panic and fear he hears the voices of into rich sources of inspiration — provided 37 HU, vol. 6, 213. some balls of thread rolling on the ground: he no longer has to live in Norway. 38 Northam, 147, punctuation amended. Refusing to settle for easy solutions, Peer 39 HU, vol. 6, 214. Vi er Tanker; Gynt conveys a subtle understanding of 40 Northam, 148. du skulde tænkt os! — 37 the interplay between Peer’s character and his surroundings. While it is true that Peer We are thoughts; lacks existential courage and seriousness, You should have thought us! — 38 it is also true that his friends, even his own mother, never take him seriously. They all A little later he hears voices in the air: constantly challenge him to put on an act, to perform for them. (The best examples are Vi er Sange; the scenes at the wedding at Hægstad in Act Du skulde sunget os! — 39 1.) In so far as Ibsen at this time thinks of performance as theatrical, as an inauthentic We are songs; mask for the self, Peer — and his jeering You should have sung us! — 40 but eager listeners — are degraded by his performances. Peer spends his life claiming Peer Gynt, then, can be read as a nightmare to be himself, only to discover that he has about how Norway necessarily will destroy simply moved from one role to the next, from a young man with genuine literary talent. capitalist slave-trader to desert prophet, and On a different level, however, it can be read emperor of the madhouse in Cairo. In such as evidence that a truly great poet (Henrik a life, poetry in the Romantic and idealist as opposed to Peer) will manage to turn the sense of a realization of human freedom that circumstances that undermined Peer’s poetry takes the form of an uplifting vision of truth,
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Mark Rylance as Peer Gynt. www.fieldday.iePhoto © Michal Daniel, 2007
41 HU, vol. 6, 227. beauty and goodness can have no place. Given that the character of the Dovre Boss 42 Northam, 159. Ibsen, then, interweaves the theme of the is the very archetype of a character from impossibility of becoming a poet in Norway the old folktales treasured by the national with the play’s fundamental contrast Romantics who dominated Norwegian between being oneself (at være sig selv) and cultural life in the 1850s, these brief lines being selfish (at være sig selv nok). To be tell us that by 1867 Ibsen thinks that selfish is the motto of the trolls in the Hall national Romanticism is no longer capable of the Dovre Boss (Dovregubben; Northam’s of generating anything but hollowed-out translation), who are obvious caricatures theatricality. The final exit of the Dovre Boss of Norwegians and Norway. After escaping is Ibsen’s satirical farewell to his own long from the trolls, Peer carries their motto involvement with nationalism. with him; for the rest of his life, he takes his There is a delicious irony in the thought selfishness as evidence of his authenticity. that the real thing — the head troll, the In Act 5, Peer meets the ageing Dovre actual Dovre Boss himself — now has to Boss again. It turns out he is on his way to go on stage to perform what he is, namely join the theatre in Christiania: a ‘national type’. In Act 5, it is the scene in which the old Peer Gynt learns that his Jeg vil gaa til Komedien. younger self was considered an ‘abominable De søger i Bladet nationale Subjekter poet’ and most especially so in the story he — 41 tells in response to the name, that elaborates most profoundly, and most ironically, on I’ll try acting instead. the idea that Peer (and Ibsen) live in an age They’re asking for national types in the when people can no longer tell the difference paper — 42 between theatre and reality.
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The Devil Who did not Know How to Play LENSMANDEN. Yes, — everything 43 See Ibsen’s letter to to His Audience under the sun Bjørnson, dated Rome, October 1866; HU, vol. he’d cobble together as marvel’s he’d 16, 169–70. See also 45 Peer has returned to his home village as an done. Figueiredo, Mennesket, old man, arriving at the Hægstad farm just 319. www.fieldday.ieas the last property of the legendary Peer The name of poet or writer (Digter) makes 44 HU, vol. 6, 208. 45 Northam, 142–43. Gynt is being sold at a public auction (the Peer stop and reflect. At this moment, after 46 Peer ‘kommer nærmere; goods were originally acquired by the farmer symbolically stripping himself of his past, he der glider ligesom en at Hægstad after Aase’s death). The occasion for the first time begins to develop something fremmed Mine over has attracted a large crowd and caused much like serious self-reflection. An old man ham’ (HU, vol. 6, 209). Northam, 143. drinking and merriment. remarks that Peer Gynt has probably long 47 HU, vol. 6, 209–10. The auction imagery was particularly since been hanged in some foreign country. 48 Northam, 143–44. pregnant with meaning for Ibsen, for in Peer is about to leave, when suddenly, the summer of 1866 Bjørnson finally told without explanation, he stops and offers to him that in June 1864 all the furniture, tell the audience a tall tale (en Skrøne). There clothes and belongings (including personal are few stage directions in Peer Gynt, but here letters) belonging to him and Suzannah Ibsen feels the need to insert one: Peer ‘moves had been sold at an auction in Christiania closer, a strange expression comes over to cover a small part of his debts. Ibsen him’.46 Then follows a story about the devil’s was particularly furious at learning that performance on stage in San Francisco. While his private papers had been handed over the details of the story itself may be somewhat to complete strangers.43 No wonder, then, obscure to most Norwegians, the punchline that the auction scene in Peer Gynt is one has become proverbial; see facing page. It is of Peer’s most desperate moments. In a in the scene immediately following this story, sequence hovering on the edge between with its famous conclusion, that we find Peer dream and reality, Peer appears to offer sitting alone, peeling the onion in search of up for auction all the hopes, dreams and the kernel that does not exist. delusions he ever clung to in his life. He Why does Peer tell this story just after he behaves in such a wild fashion that the has learned that Peer Gynt is a poet? Why bailiff comes to calm him down. Peer asks does an ‘uneasy silence’ fall over the crowd him about the legendary Peer Gynt, whose after he has told it? In short, how does Peer property is being sold: ‘size up’ (the Norwegian word is beregne, to calculate, to measure) his audience here? PEER GYNT. ... Men sig mig, hvem var And, above all, what is he really talking Peer Gynt? about? I can think of five elements that come ... together to indicate some answers. LENSMANDEN. Aa, der siges at han var First, Peer tells this story fully conscious en vederstyggelig Digter! that he is putting on a performance. The PEER GYNT. En Digter —? ‘strange expression’ that comes over him LENSMANDEN. Ja, — alt, som var indicates that he is putting on a mask, stærkt og stort, the mask of an actor. In this respect, this det digtet han ihob at han havde gjort. 44 performance is wholly deliberate, and wholly calculating, in a way his storytelling as a PEER GYNT. ... But tell me, who was young man was not. There is here a split or Peer Gynt? a distance between Peer as actor and Peer ... as himself, a split that is the very basis for Mark Rylance as Peer Gynt BAILIFF. Oh, a terrible yarn-spinner— so self-knowledge, but which also tells us that peeling the onion. Photo © his repute is. there may be something theatrical about self- Michal Daniel, 2007 PEER GYNT. A spinner — ? knowledge itself, in so far as it encourages us
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I San Franzisco jeg grov efter Guld. In San Francisco I dug after gold. Hele Byen var af Gjøglere fuld. The city crammed, all the freaks it could hold. En kunde gnide paa Fiol med Tæerne; One scraped the fiddle — with his toes, if you please; en anden kunde danse spansk Halling paa Knæerne another danced sarabands, down on his knees; www.fieldday.ieen tredje, hørte jeg, gjorde Vers a third one recited in verse, so it’s said, mens hans Hjerneskal blev boret igjennem paatvers while having a drill pass clean through his head. Till Gjøgler-Stævnet kom ogsaa Fanden; The devil, too, joined this freakish band; — vilde prøve sin Lykke, som saa mangen anden. he wanted, like others, to try his hand. Hans Fag var det: paa en skuffende Vis His line was this: — in a lifelike stunt, at kunne grynte som en virkelig Gris. just like a genuine pig, he’d grunt. Hans Personlighed trak, skjønt han ej var kjendt. Though he wasn’t a name, his persona drew. Huset var fuldt og Forventningen spændt. The house was full, expectations grew. Frem traadte han i Kappe med svajende Fliger; He came on in a cape of swirling habit; man muss sich drappieren, som Tyskeren siger. man muss sich drapieren, as the Germans have it. Men ind under Kappen, — hvad ingen vidste, — But under the cloak — and quite unsuspected — havde han forstaaet en Gris at liste. he’s managed to sneak in a pig undetected. Og nu begyndte da Præstationen. And now commenced the presentation. Fanden, han kneb; og Grisen gav Tonen. The devil’s pinch; the pig’s remonstration. Det hele blev holdt som en Fantasi The whole thing produced as a fantasy over Grise-Tillværelsen, bunden og fri; — over porcine existence, imprisoned and free; till Slutning et Hvin, som ved Slagterens Stikk; — to end with, a shriek as the slaughterman slew; — hvorpaa Kunstneren bukked ærbødigt, og gik. — there the artist, respectfully bowing, withdrew. — Emnet blev af Fagmænd drøftet og dømt; Experts debated and judged several ways; Stemningen blev baade lastet og berømt; — the performance was greeted with censure and praise; — nogle fandt Røstens Udtrykk for tyndt; one thought the vocal expression lacked feel; andre fandt Dødsskriget altfor studeret; — another, the death-shriek too mannered, oppressive; — men alle var enige om: qva Grynt but all were agreed on one thing – that qua squeal, var Præstationen yderst outreret. — there the performance was wholly excessive. — Se, det fik Fanden fordi han var dum So that’s what he got for being so dense, og ikke beregned sit Publikum. and not sizing up his audience. (han hilser og gaar. Der falder en usikker Stillhed over (He takes his leave. An uneasy silence falls over the Mængden.)47 crowd.)48
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to look at ourselves, at our own performances, The entire story adds up to an elegant 49 See letter to Peter Hansen, as if we were looking at another. allegory of art, theatre and authenticity, of dated Dresden, 28 October 1870 (HU, vol. 16, 318). Second, he is now addressing the same audiences and critics, and of the relationship 50 See Jonas Barish, The audience as before, when he was young; between existence and aesthetics. The Antitheatrical Prejudice several members were present at the devil is said to be stupid (dum; ‘dense’ in (Berkeley, 1981). www.fieldday.ieHægstad wedding in Act 1. This audience Northam’s translation). Audiences and 51 Barish, Antitheatrical Prejudice, 327. represents Norway and the Norwegians, and critics, however, are equally stupid, for they 52 Quoted in Barish, their impact on Peer. completely fail to see through the devil’s Antitheatrical Prejudice, 326. Third, the story is an extended theatre trickery. The audience and the critics expect 53 See particularly ch. 6, on metaphor. It is about a mountebank who theatre; the devil gives them reality disguised Emperor and Galilean, in Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the acts for money, who draws great crowds, as theatre. Or rather, the devil almost gives Birth of Modernism. and who steps out on stage to perform his them reality: the pig’s final squeal is said routine. to be ‘as if knifed by the butcher’. Nothing Fourth, the story takes pleasure in indicates that the devil actually kills his satirizing Norwegian critics and their squealing pig there and then (there would aesthetic norms. The ‘experts’ conclude that have been blood). The experts, however, the real pig’s squeal was ‘wholly excessive’. are not interested in the reality of the pig’s The critics, Ibsen seems to say, refuse even squeal. By calling it excessive or outré, they to consider that there might be truth in the indicate, rather, that it violates their criteria performance, or, in other words, the critics for successful aesthetic utterances. In other seek to aestheticize away anything authentic words, an artist who takes risks, who does in a performance. The last thing they want something unusual, will be criticized to on stage is genuine existential angst. Critics death. There will be no understanding, just will theatricalize everything, and particularly the injunction to stay within the narrow theatre. (This begins to explain why Ibsen bounds of established taste. To give a needed to turn to the closet drama at this Norwegian audience the real thing — real stage of his career.) art — is to cast pearls before swine. Fifth, the devil’s performance can be There is much ‘self-anatomy’ here, as read as a self-conscious reference to the play Ibsen once acknowledged.49 Assessing his Peer Gynt. The devil performs a ‘fantasy own Gyntian existence, Peer realizes that he / over porcine existence, imprisoned and has never known how to distinguish between free’, ending with the last howl at the life and fantasy, theatre and authenticity. slaughterhouse. This is not a bad image of As a result, his whole life has been one Peer Gynt, which surely can be described as inauthentic performance (there is the onion a fantasy over human existence, imprisoned metaphor again). He has been no better and free, ending with the fear of death. than the devil’s audience, he realizes. By In Norwegian the parallel is even more telling this bitingly aggressive tale to his old obvious, since Ibsen places the word grynt ‘friends’, he accuses them too: they turned (grunt, squeal), so similar to Gynt, in a him into a superficial performer; he did not highly stressed position: even know that he had willingly complied. The story about the devil who failed men alle var enige om: qva Grynt properly to calculate his effects on his var Præstationen yderst outreret. — audience is also a critique of theatre as an art form. On this point, Ibsen remains quite but all were agreed on one thing — that Romantic. In his Antitheatrical Prejudice, qua squeal, Jonas Barish points out that Romanticism there the performance was wholly in general distrusted the theatre.50 The excessive. — Romantics wanted the ‘poetry of the heart’, absolute, radical authenticity, the
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54 ‘[Peer Gynt] ble skreven i outpourings of a human soul in its most egoism, vanity and cowardice made him laugh Syditalien, på Ischia og i private moments.51 For them, the very act out loud, Bjørnson reported, in an otherwise Sorrento. Saa langt borte of ‘playing’ a scene, rather than reading it somewhat mixed review.55 But the judgement fra den tilkommende læsekreds blir man inwardly, was enough to make it theatrical, Ibsen was eagerly waiting for was that of the hensynsløs.’ Letter to and thus inauthentic. ‘Eloquence is heard, leading Danish critic, Clemens Petersen. www.fieldday.iePeter Hansen, dated poetry is overheard,’ wrote John Stuart Petersen’s verdict was not favourable. Dresden, 28 October Mill.52 The Romantics, then, often turned A major proponent of the then dominant 1870 (HU, vol. 16, 318). 55 Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, to closet drama as an alternative to the idealist aesthetics, Petersen wrote that for Review of Peer Gynt, degrading theatricality of the actual stage. a work to be poetry (Poesi), or art, it ‘has Norsk Folkeblad In his early years outside Norway, Ibsen to offer a complete, determinate, clear and (Christiania), 23 used the closet drama as a kind of theatre assured representation of the Ideal’.56 In his November 1867. Consulted online at laboratory, as a place for critique and view, Peer Gynt was far too one-sided, too ibsen.net
39 www.fieldday.ie Radicalism, Visual Culture, and www.fieldday.ieSpectacle in the 1790s John Barrell
I
1 Politics for the People; Early in 1794, during the alarm or, a Salmagundy for Swine, 2 vols. (London, created by the war with the 1794–95), vol. 2, 52–54. new French Republic and the popular movement in Britain for universal manhood suffrage, Daniel Isaac Eaton’s periodical Politics for the People; or, A Salmagundy for Swine published a series of verses that claimed to describe some of the caricatures displayed in the window of a printseller in Coddletown, the imaginary rotten borough from which one of the periodical’s correspondents, Gregory Grunter, sends occasional reports.1 The printshop belongs to a man called ‘JACOBIN’, whose name strikes terror in the loyal burghers of the borough, and especially in its alarmist Fig. 1. Isaac Cruikshank, Oh Dear What can the Matter mayor, Gaffer Greybeard. The Be, S.W. Fores, 21 September caricatures Jacobin is selling 1793. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. include images of three enemies
Field Day Review 4 2008 41 Field Day review
Fig. 2. Anon., Billy’s Hobby Horse, J. Aitkin, 6 July 1795. Trustees of www.fieldday.iethe British Museum.
of parliamentary reform and keen supporters France, of the war against the French Republic. Isaac With ghastly smiles behind his gorgon Cruikshank’s satire Oh Dear What can the shield, Matter Be (fig. 1) is an attack on the duke of ST. OMER’s JESUIT, trembling, takes the Richmond, Master of the Ordnance, whom field, the opposition press blamed for failing His coat of mail, his carcase, and his to supply the British army with sufficient spear, artillery during the siege of Dunkirk. And all his pranks, the wretched SWINE William Dent’s Call of the House imagines must bear. Prime Minister William Pitt as a kind of corrupt Christ, scattering the loaves and This is Edmund Burke, once the enemy of fishes of patronage, or bribery, on his venal government corruption and the friend of supporters. A third satire is described as democratic revolution, now the defender representing ‘the Arch Apostate’. Richmond and beneficiary of state bribery and the man and Pitt, both formerly vigorous supporters who had orchestrated, so British radicals of parliamentary reform, have a fair claim to believed, the alliance of kings against France. this title, but the verses themselves leave no In the print devoted to him — and it is not doubt about who is intended: clear that Eaton has any one specific print in mind — Burke appears as an amalgam Arm’d cap-a-pee, with spectacles and of two characters he had assumed in lance, various recent caricatures: Don Quixote, or To kill the millions of OPPRESSED rather Don Dismallo, Knight of the Woeful
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Fig. 3. James Gillray, Presages of the Millenium, H. Humphrey, 4 June 1795. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale www.fieldday.ieUniversity.
2 To trace Burke’s Countenance, unaware that the age of Pitt’s ministry. After the foundation of the appearance in caricature chivalry was long gone; and the Jesuit priest, Association for the Preservation of Liberty in these two guises, see Nicholas Robinson, supposed Catholic, supposed friend of the and Property against Republicans and Edmund Burke: A Life in Catholic Church in France, and abettor of Levellers in late 1792, and the appearance, Caricature (New Haven the Prince of Wales’s clandestine and illegal early in 1793, of affiliated associations and London, 1996), marriage to the Catholic Mrs. Fitzherbert.2 throughout England, keen to hunt out index, under the entries: Burke ‘as Don Dismallo’, From 1793 until the end of the century sedition wherever they could find it, the very ‘as Don Quixote’, ‘as there were very few anti-government notion of a Jacobin printshop in London, Jesuit’. caricatures of the kind Eaton imagines let alone in a rotten borough where Eaton 3 David Alexander, Richard being published, almost none indeed that imagines it, is almost beyond imagining. Newton and English Caricature in the 1790s appear to emerge from a point further Before the great political polarization of (Manchester, 1998), 34. left on the political spectrum than that 1792, William Holland, whom The Times occupied by the Foxite Whigs. To some indeed described as a ‘Jacobin’ publisher,3 degree we have concealed from ourselves the ran a printshop in fashionable Oxford Street, overwhelmingly loyalist character of political where he published the satires produced graphic satire in the 1790s by our habit of by his brilliant teenage protégé Richard finding ambiguities in caricatures that do Newton. Holland was indicted in December not seem to have been noticed at the time, 1792 for selling Thomas Paine’s Address to as well as by the assumption that, because the Addressers, but apparently with the aim James Gillray, the leading caricaturist of of stopping him selling radical caricatures. the decade, was so hostile to Pitt, he must With the same aim, the Birmingham have been hostile too to the policies of publisher William Belcher was also
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LCS. In 1794, probably, there appeared Fig. 4. Anon., Farmer Looby Manuring the Land, no an anonymous, undated woodcut, Farmer publication details (1794). Looby Manuring the Land (fig. 4), which Trustees of the British Museum. Dorothy George describes as ‘a crude and cheap print probably sold for a penny’. It www.fieldday.iedepicts George III, breeches down, about to shit; the legend includes a wish that all tyrants should soon be made ploughmen. Probably in 1795 the strange caricature of the faceless, featureless king, Plan of Mud Island, off the Kingdom of Corsica (fig. 5), was published to celebrate the pointless accession to the British Empire of George’s newest realm, too barren to exploit, too costly to defend. The print sold no more than twenty copies before the plate was ‘privately purchased’, presumably by an outraged loyalist, and the image suppressed.7 There was a brief flowering of anti- government caricature in the last two months of 1795, a protest led by the relatively liberal Piccadilly printseller S. 4 Vic Gatrell, City of prosecuted for publishing Paine’s Address.4 W. Fores against the infamous Two Bills Laughter: Sex and Satire The pornographer John Aitkin, who with introduced in November, and in particular in Eighteenth-Century London (London, 2006), the brothers John and James Roach had against the increase in the penalties for 493–94. taken over the publication of Harris’s List of seditious libel set out in the Treasonable 5 Courier, 10 June Covent-Garden Ladies, the long-established Practices Bill. But thereafter, except for a 1795; True Briton, 10 guide to the more expensive prostitutes brief return to political caricature by Newton November 1795. The circumstances of the working in London, was prosecuted and before his death in 1798, there is once again suppression of Harris’s fined in 1795 for publishing the list, with the almost nothing. In short, what Eaton’s List are described by effect, if not the intention, of putting a stop caricatures in verse purport to describe, a Hallie Rubenhold, The to the radical caricatures he had published, series of anti-government and anti-loyalist Covent Garden Ladies (Stroud, 2006), 309–13, very occasionally, in the preceding years.5 As caricatures exhibited in a Jacobin printshop according to whom (309) a small final act of defiance he produced in window, to the consternation of men in Aitkin died before the July Billy’s Hobby Horse (fig. 2), just after power and authority, is a fantasy. They prosecution of James the open-air general meeting of the London describe caricatures that have ceased to Roach in February 1795. In fact, he was not Corresponding Society at St. George’s Fields be produced, they write what cannot be sentenced until November depicted in the right distance, with Pitt engraved, conjuring up satires in verse as if of that year. driving George III as John Bull as a broken to supply their absence from the shops. 6 British Museum, no.8655 down packhorse loaded with the weight When at the end of the eighteenth century in Dorothy George, Catalogue of Political and of taxes imposed to pay for the war. This satirical prints are described as if seen in Personal Satires Preserved was a moderately offensive literalization of printshop windows, the point is always in the Department of Gillray’s famous Presages of the Millenium that there they are available to be seen by a Prints and Drawings (fig. 3) of the previous month, in which Pitt promiscuous public, but one chiefly made in the British Museum, vol. 7 (London: British rode the king in the figurative shape of the up of those who cannot afford to buy them Museum, 1942). 6 white horse of Hanover. But apart from (fig. 6); and this is usually regarded as a 7 George, Catalogue, vol. the prints published by Holland and Aitken, serious social and political problem, ‘a great 7, 115–16. there is almost nothing by way of radical and public nuisance’, as the periodical the 8 Ranger, 15 (5 April 1794), 170. culture published during the heyday of the Ranger put it in 1794.8 During the brief
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Fig. 5. Anon., Plan of Mud Island, off the Kingdom of Corsica, no publication details (1794). www.fieldday.ieTrustees of the British Museum.
Fig. 6. Anon., Caricature Shop, P. Roberts, September 1801. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.
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flowering of anti-government caricature at that achieving its aim would require the 9 True Briton, 23 December the end of 1795, it became the turn of the invention of a new, popular, political culture. 1795. For more on this topic, see Gatrell, City of Treasury-funded newspaper, the True Briton, The plebeian societies that developed in Laughter, 210–12. to worry that in printshop windows ‘the London, Sheffield, Edinburgh and elsewhere 10 Anon., Terentia, A Novel. most seditious Publications’ were now being in the 1790s understood this to be their task By the Author of The www.fieldday.ie‘exhibited to the gaping multitude’.9 ‘As to too, hence the decision of the LCS that for Platonic Guardian, &c., 2 vols. (London, 1791), vol. these here print shops,’ says a character in every meeting of its affiliated divisions held 1, 69. a novel of the early 1790s, ‘I see no manner to discuss specific proposals and policies, 11 Vicesimus Knox, ‘On of use they are of, except to make people they were to hold another at which political the Effect of Caricatures spend their time in gaping at what does not texts were read aloud and discussed, with Exhibited at the Windows of Printsellers’, in his Winter belong to them.’10 Versions of this anxiety everyone present obliged to contribute. Evenings; or, Lucubrations are frequently found in the late eighteenth Hence, too, the remarkable number and on Life and Letters, 2 vols., century. Sometimes the prints that seem to variety of radical publications produced by 3rd edn. (London, 1795), cause most anxiety are those that threaten to plebeian publishers in London, especially vol. 1, 140. corrupt by their sexual content, sometimes in 1794 and 1795: pamphlets, periodicals, by their politics. The radical essayist and poetry, songs, satires of every kind, and so schoolmaster Vicesimus Knox even goes on. Some of the output of these publishers so far as to suggest that among the causes was recycled from more polite sources, but of the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots in 1780 by 1795 a significant proportion of popular was the exhibition of caricatures of leading radical publications appears to have been politicians in shop windows, where they written by plebeian authors. must ‘diminish and destroy that reverence, The variety of these publications which is always due to legal authority, and shows that the popular radical movement, established rank’.11 This is exactly Eaton’s especially in London and Sheffield, was idea in Politics for the People: a wish also thoroughly committed to exploring that the popular radical movement could, the means of propaganda at its disposal. through caricature, through the printshop The Committee of Secrecy of the House of window, reach this plebeian public on Commons, reporting on the evidence that the street, and teach it to despise, not to had been collected following the arrests admire, its masters. The wish is presumably and the seizures of papers in May and June entertained for the very reason that strikes 1794, which led to the treason trials of later anxiety in so many writers: the fact that that year, became fascinated by what it saw caricatures can communicate to the illiterate, as the dangerous resourcefulness of radical as seditious pamphlets cannot, and the propaganda. Some of that fascination is fact that visual imagery was supposed to no doubt to be put down to the alarmism communicate with an immediacy beyond which, for many loyalists, hugely magnified that of language, and thus was more liable to the threat posed by the movement. The inspire an immediate response. committee no doubt exaggerated the In fact, however, the popular societies propensity to enthusiasm among those to working for a radical reform of parliament whom this propaganda was addressed, and in the 1790s produced very little significant so exaggerated also its likely effect, but it visual political culture. This is surprising for was not wrong to insist upon the ingenuity all sorts of reasons, which means this essay with which the movement attempted to win will have nothing very tidy or decisive to adherents. The movement, the committee say about why it may have turned out that reported, used ‘every possible artifice’ to way. The movement for universal manhood disseminate its principles. ‘Some of these suffrage was fostered in the 1780s by the means’, it told the Commons, Society for Constitutional Information, whose very name suggests that it was aware may at first sight be considered as too
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12 The Parliamentary trivial to be mentioned on an occasion between the popular radical movement in History of England, 36 of this importance, but they appear to the 1790s and other political movements vols. (London: 1806–20), your Committee in a very different light, and societies in the late eighteenth century vol. 32, col. 708. 13 The number of the when they recollect that an essential part that the former made no attempt to give supposedly seditious issue of such a plan as has been in agitation, themselves or their beliefs any visual identity, www.fieldday.ieof Wilkes’s periodical The was to seduce and corrupt the thoughtless except for a few like John Thelwall who, North Briton. and uninformed, and to make use of the with no employers or customers to propitiate, 14 Arthur H. Cash, John Wilkes: The Scandalous channels of communication best adapted could at least wear their hair cropped as a Father of Civil Liberty to this purpose. The appearance of visible badge of principle. The members of (New Haven and insignificance and levity, which belongs polite political clubs of course could afford London, 2006), 119, 219. at first sight to this part of the system, is, to wear uniforms, custom-made buttons, 15 Cash, John Wilkes, 160, 210, 212, 222. in truth, only an additional proof of the coloured cockades, as the popular societies 16 Gatrell, City of Laughter, aim and industry with which it has been could not. But think how ubiquitous in the 485. pursued. The measures employed for this 1760s were images of the radical John Wilkes purpose appear to have been deliberately or the number 4513 on everyday objects: on prepared, and every contrivance used tobacco papers, ballads, prints, broadsides, to mix them (in the shape most likely to buttons, buckles, snuffboxes, brooches, captivate attention) with the ordinary earthenware or porcelain mugs, teapots and occupations and amusements of those on punchbowls.14 Think of the use made of the whom they were intended to operate. visual by the plebeian Wilkites of the 1760s who wore blue cockades and carried old These measures include lectures ‘calculated boots on demonstrations to symbolize the from their very extravagance to catch the ministry of Lord Bute, and petticoats to stand attention of the audience’ on ‘every topic for the alleged petticoat government of the ... that could inflame their minds’; ‘violent’ Dowager Princess of Wales, or who simply handbills, covering ‘every point that could chalked the number 45 on every door so that excite discontent’, secretly but widely even the innumerate soon learned the ciphers circulated; political satires in the form of that added up to ‘Wilkes and Liberty’.15 mock playbills; songs, seditious toasts, There is no obvious equivalent attempt by and ‘a studied selection of the tunes which the radical societies of the 1790s to convey have been most in use in France since the meanings and spread ideas by visual means. revolution’. By all these means the popular We cannot put this down entirely to reform societies are accused of ‘endeavouring government or loyalist repression. As Vic to render deliberate incitements to every Gatrell has pointed out, it was far harder to species of treason familiar to the minds of bring a charge of seditious libel against those the people’.12 who sought to convey unwelcome political ‘Every artifice’, ‘every contrivance’, meanings by images than it was to prosecute ‘every topic’; ‘every point’, ‘every species of the publishers of political pamphlets.16 To treason’: the report is concerned to suggest prosecute seditious libels, the law officers that the propaganda effort of the popular had to state precisely what they took the reform societies is as comprehensive as meaning of the supposed libel to be, and to could possibly be imagined. It is so carried convince the jury that their reading of it was away by its rhetoric that, even as it points correct. Even when everyone understood out the danger inherent in the kind of perfectly well the meaning of an image, a irreverent levity that caused Knox such picture, a symbol, there was an irreducible anxiety in political caricatures, it does not indeterminacy about the visual, which made notice that the societies have nowhere been paraphrase or ekphrasis always inadequate, found making any marked use of visual and made the defence that the image had been propaganda. It reveals a remarkable contrast misunderstood always available. The written
47 Field Day review www.fieldday.ie
word was regarded as far less indeterminate of the century, there was an extraordinary Fig. 7. Four tokens by Spence referring and so far easier to prosecute, and yet explosion of copper token coinage to his token coinage: from top to the radical movement in its heyday was throughout Britain. The main reason for bottom, Lord George Gordon (D & H 696); boxers and a coining press responsible for an astonishingly high volume this was the shortage of low-denomination (D & H 740); a turnstile (D & H 715; of print publications — so many in 1795 that specie: virtually none had been minted Spence’s shop was in Little Turnstile the attorney general was forced to admit that since the 1750s. Some manufacturers took near Lincoln’s Inn); a highlander and the publication of seditious libels was far too advantage of this situation by manufacturing a coining press (D & H 742). Notice the contrast between the uncirculated prevalent to be controlled by legal means. tokens, and selling them in bulk at about and circulated condition of nos. 740 70 per cent of their face value to whoever and 742. would circulate them.18 Until 1797, when II the government commissioned Matthew Fig. 8. The radicals acquitted in the treason trials: from top to bottom, Boulton to make a new copper coinage, this Thomas Hardy (D & H 1025); There is arguably one obvious exception was perfectly legal, and in the remote parts John Horne Tooke and ‘Pandora’s to the claim that the reform societies, for of the kingdom tokens probably continued breeches’ (D & H 841); Tooke again all the urgency of their propaganda effort, in circulation for some years after that. (D & H 1046); John Thelwall and Minerva (D & H 866). for all their apparent need to communicate Some tokens bore the names of businesses, with the less than fully literate, did not were probably given as wages to employees, Fig. 9. Tokens referring to seek to disseminate the reform agenda by and were ‘payable’ — redeemable for current political trials and to the London visual means: the token coinage issued by coin; most were not payable but were still Corresponding Society: from top to bottom, Daniel Isaac Eaton’s game Thomas Spence, the Newcastle-born writer widely accepted. These were followed by cock (D & H 203); Eaton, with game and propagandist who in the 1790s was tokens issued by shopkeepers, which became cock and swine (D & H 301); Thomas living in London and was a member of the fashionable in the early 1790s. These were Erskine & Vicary Gibbs (D & H 1011); LCS.17 From the mid-1780s or so to the end not usually payable and were intended rather the fable of the bundle of sticks and the dove of peace (D & H 286).
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as advertisements or durable substitutes is at least one medal showing the head of 17 The best general accounts and catalogues of the for trade cards, but the shortage of specie Thomas Erskine, lead counsel for the defence political tokens and certainly led to some of these being circulated in those trials, and another purporting to catalogues of the 1790s as well. By the middle of the 1790s, many show Erskine together with Vicary Gibbs, are: R. Dalton and S. H. thousand different copper tokens had been his junior in the trials. The reverses of these Hamer, The Provincial www.fieldday.ieToken-Coinage of the produced, and they were being avidly medals usually bear information relating 18th Century (London, collected,19 which stimulated yet further to the treason trials, often the names of the 1967 [1910–17]); production, including tokens bearing loyalist jurors to whom the medals were probably Laurence Brown, A or radical political propaganda, sometimes presented (figs. 8 and 9). Catalogue of British Historical Medals even loyalist propaganda on one side and These radical portrait-medals, for obvious 1760–1960, Vol. I, The radical on the other. The craze for token- reasons, were nothing like as desirable to Accession of George III collecting was fed by the publication of collectors as the other variety of political to the Death of William numerous descriptive catalogues produced token issued by Spence, halfpennies and IV (London, 1980); R. C. Bell, Political and between 1794 and 1798, including one by farthings bearing designs, sometimes satirical Commemorative Pieces Spence,20 and by numerous articles on the like caricatures, or with political messages Simulating Tradesmen’s phenomenon of tokens and token-collecting dressed up as folk wisdom or animal fables, Tokens 1770–1802, 2nd in the Gentleman’s Magazine and four or with a brief, often punchy, legend explaining edn. (Felixstowe, 1988); 21 and Arthur W. Waters, five other magazines. Non-payable tokens the political point. Marcus Wood has Notes Gleaned from began to be produced in great quantity, discussed these very effectively in his Radical Contemporary Literature, entirely to be sold to collectors. For a year Satire and Print Culture.23 &c., Respecting the or so, this was Spence’s main line of business Among serious collectors of tokens, Spence Issuers of the Eighteenth Century Tokens Struck (fig. 7), his most reliable source of income, quickly acquired a bad name. This was partly, for the County of and he was describing himself as ‘T. Spence, of course, on account of the political content Middlesex (Leamington Dealer in Coins’,22 though by early 1797 his of his tokens. To collect them, one antiquary Spa, 1906) and Notes money difficulties forced him to sell his dies declared, was to drink ‘from the very ditch on Eighteenth Century 24 Tokens (London, 1954). to another large scale manufacturer of tokens of this dirty traffic’. Spence’s tokens, 18 Waters, Notes on for collectors, Peter Skidmore. thundered another, were ‘contemptible in Eighteenth Century Radical tokens were usually the size of execution, and infamous in representation; ... Tokens, v. a penny, halfpenny or farthing, and it is beyond the revolutions of ages, and the decay 19 According to C. Shephard, ‘The convenient to think of them as of two kinds, of empires, they will carry the marks of his enthusiasm was the most though the kinds overlap. There were, to infamy to the final dissolution of the world’.25 prevalent and regular begin with, a few penny- and halfpenny-sized The engraver Charles Pye, who issued a in the latter part of the coins known by collectors as ‘medalets’, collection of engravings of tokens for the use year 1794’, see ‘Essays on the Provincial Half- small medals struck in large editions in of collectors, found them ‘so infamously base, Pennies. Essay II. — The imitation of those issued to celebrate military that ... they are a disgrace to the age we live History of the Modern and naval victories, for example, except that in, and such as I don’t think proper to admit Provincial Half-Pennies’, these commemorated the victories of the into my collection’. He had compiled his Gentleman’s Magazine, 68 (February 1798), 120. reform movement in the courts. Of those catalogue with the help of Sarah Banks, the 20 See [Thomas Spence], acquitted in the great show trials for treason sister of Sir Joseph Banks, and if he shared The Coin Collector’s and sedition in 1793 and 1794, for instance, the Bankses’ ultra-loyalist politics, he could Companion (London, there are four different medalets for the hardly have tolerated Spence’s. 26 1795); Charles Pye, Provincial Copper Coins polite radical John Horne Tooke, and three Writers on token-collecting were or Tokens (London and for Thomas Hardy, founder of the LCS, and desperate to regulate the production of Birmingham, 1795), two for Eaton. None of these is now thought tokens so that they could imagine some end [Samuel Birchall], An to have been issued by Spence, but he did to their pursuit, and their chief objection Alphabetical List of Provincial Copper- produce medalets of John Thelwall and of to Spence was his practice of continually Coins of Tokens (Leeds, himself, commemorating their acquittals varying the combination of dies on the 1796); James Conder, and release from custody following the reverse and the obverse of his tokens. The An Arrangement of collapse of the 1794 treason trials. There medalet or token he produced of his own Provincial Coins, Tokens,
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head, for example, is known with eighteen The correspondent is clearly confused and Medalets (Ipswich, different dies on the reverse, and almost by what Spence was about. Knowing him 1798); [T. Prattent and M. Denton], The every token he made is known with a variety to be what loyalists liked to call ‘a violent Virtuoso’s Companion of reverses. Pye, James Conder and many democrat’, he wants to believe that Spence is and Coin Collector’s others accused him of mixing ‘the obverses at the centre of a vast propaganda network, Guide, 8 vols. (London, www.fieldday.ieand reverses ... on purpose to make variety’, preparing to spread sedition by circulating 1795–97); and The Virtuoso’s Guide in so as ‘to impose upon the publick’.27 Other his tokens by the thousand throughout the Collecting Provincial token manufacturers did this too, but if kingdom. He knows, however, that Spence Copper Coins (London, it was an offence, Spence was the worst is really in business for some quite other 1795). On the first page offender, interchanging his numerous dies, purpose. The tokens in Spence’s shop were of their unpaginated Introduction, Dalton and as a correspondent of the Gentleman’s selling at prices many times higher than their Hamer, Provincial Token- Magazine put it, ‘almost beyond the powers notional face value; his farthings at twelve Coinage of the 18th of calculation’.28 or sixteen times their face value. They were Century, also mention Wood argues that by this practice, in obviously not for circulation either as coin Christopher Williams, A Descriptive List of which ‘almost any combination for the or as propaganda, and this writer is the only the Provincial Copper obverse and reverse of a token was both one in the 1790s who pretends that they are, Coins (London, 1795), possible and effective ... Spence promulgated if only for a moment. He knows they were but I have not seen this his ideas through an ever varying series of being made to feed the insatiable desire of and cannot find it in any library catalogue. juxtapositions’.29 This may be too much collectors, and the primary effect, perhaps 21 See the following articles a literary critic’s view of things. We can even the primary purpose, of their radical in the Gentleman’s try to persuade ourselves that the endless messages was to attract publicity and the Magazine: R. Y[oung], combining of dies was at the very heart of attention of collectors. 66 (September 1796), 752–55; Charles Pye, Spence’s politicizing project: that he was Spence’s tokens are usually discussed 66 (December 1796), inviting those who found a token in their as if they circulated in shops, taverns and 991–92; ‘Civis’ (= James change to make out a relation between street markets, spreading the radical word Wright, FASS), 67 its two sides, and thus to learn to think to the uncommitted poor. Wood claims (January 1797), 31–34; Young, 67 (April 1797), for themselves about politics by making that Spence’s tokens were circulating in 267–70; ‘Civis’, 67 hitherto unperceived connections. It seems Hastings, Birmingham, Newcastle, in (January 1797), 270–71; more likely that the bewildering variety of Worcestershire, in Munster,31 but apart C. Sh[ephard], ‘Essays combinations issuing from Spence’s shop from in Newcastle, where Spence’s brother on the Provincial Half- Pennies’: ‘Essay I’, 68 taught those who came across these tokens certainly sold them, this seems to be based (January 1798), 10–13; to discount the idea that the two sides were on a misunderstanding. What happened ‘Essay II’, 68 (February meant to be related to each other at all. was that, after he sold them to Skidmore, 1798), 119–22; ‘Essay The most interesting but also the most impressions from Spence’s dies turn up on III’, 68 (March 1798), 212–15; ‘Essay IV’, puzzling contemporary comment on tokens manufactured in, or simply depicting, 68 (September 1798), Spence’s tokens was made by a contributor provincial locations. This belief, however, 741–43; ‘Essay V’, to the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1797, who in the wide circulation of his tokens has 68 (October 1798), described visiting Spence’s shop on Little meant that too much has been made of their 829–32; ‘Essay VI’, 69 (March 1799), 206–09. Turnstile, where he saw propaganda value. It is perfectly clear that There are articles on the commemorative medalets by Spence and token-collecting in the many many thousands of different others, of Hardy, Tooke, Thelwall and so Monthly Magazine in tokens lying in heaps, and selling at on, and of Erskine and Gibbs, were designed December 1796, 867; February 1797, 110; what struck me to be very great prices. for general circulation. They frequently March 1797, 177; May These, therefore, could not be considered turn up very well rubbed and worn, and 1797, 351; June 1797, as struck for limited sale. I confess, have clearly been used like general trade 441; September 1797, considering the number I saw struck, and tokens as a substitute for current coin. It is 183, and no doubt many thereafter. what the subjects of them were, I thought most unusual, on the other hand, to come myself justified in supposing that it was the across circulated examples of the much intention to circulate them very widely.30 more inventive side of Spence’s practice, the
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22 He describes himself halfpenny and farthing tokens with designs could be processions, conjuring shows with thus on the title page like caricatures or with political messages Pitt as conjurer, art exhibitions and so on of The Coin Collector’s dressed up as animal fables. Some were no — they were advertised in a way that often Companion. 23 Marcus Wood, Radical doubt thrown by Spence to children in the represented Pitt’s government as attempting Satire and Print Culture street, as Francis Place, the LCS member to rule by overawing its subjects with the www.fieldday.ie1790–1822 (Oxford, and first historian of the society tells us,32 spectacle of power and privilege. And 1994), 68–82. in the expectation that they would quickly the point, of course, is that once you see 24 Gentleman’s Magazine, 66 (September 1796), be spent and circulated, but the bulk seem politics as spectacle, it ceases to overawe: 754. to have disappeared in mint condition it is recognized as just another show, and 25 Gentleman’s Magazine, into the cabinets of gentleman and lady not a very good one either; one that is fake, 68 (October 1798), 830. collectors, who may have enjoyed a mild tawdry, and ridiculous. These playbills 26 Pye, ‘Advertisement’, Provincial Copper Coins alarmist thrill on seeing their message usually began life as satires contributed to or Tokens, unpaginated. — may even, like one of the correspondents the columns of Foxite or radical newspapers, 27 Gentleman’s Magazine, to the Gentleman’s Magazine, have claimed but it was when they were reprinted by 66 (December 1795), to find them infamous, disgraceful — but jobbing radical printers, in the same format 991, and see Conder, Arrangement of probably did not feel in much danger of as the advertising playbills stuck up in the Provincial Coins, Tokens, being radicalized by them. Safely laid out in street, that they became such an inventive and Medalets, second drawers, such ‘sedition pieces’, as the Scots form of propaganda and one with strong page of the unpaginated collector James Wright put it, ‘can produce visual appeal. The most famous of them ‘Address to the Public’. 28 Gentleman’s Magazine, no effect more important than that of was a bill advertising the first of a series of 68 (February 1798), 122. licentious caricatures, which excite laughter, imaginary magic shows supposed to be put 29 Wood, Radical Satire and or incur contempt’.33 If we measure them on by Pitt in the House of Commons, except Print Culture, 71. by their likely effectiveness rather than by that Pitt has become Gulielmo Pittachio 30 Gentleman’s Magazine, 67 (April 1797), 269. their marvellous wit and invention, Spence’s (fig. 10), and has adapted some of his tricks 31 Wood, Radical Satire and tokens, fascinating as they are, were not an from the real-life celebrated Italian illusionist Print Culture, 69. important contribution to the creation of a Giuseppe Pinetti.35 Using every font in the 32 Francis Place Papers, visual radical propaganda. printer’s shop in the manner of a real playbill British Library Add. MS 27808, fos. 182–85. and decorated with stock woodblocks, 33 Gentleman’s Magazine, this advertisement is ready to take its place 67 (April 1797), 32. III among the real advertisements stuck up on 34 The section that the dead walls of London and wait to draw follows derives from the Introduction Another variety of propaganda with strong the kind of crowd that gathered in front of and notes to John visual impact and appeal is the mock printshop windows. Barrell, ed., Exhibition playbill, a satirical genre that the Committee The first Pittachio advertisement was Extraordinary!! Radical of Secrecy listed as among the most written by the poet Robert Merry, and a Broadsides of the Mid 1790s (Nottingham, apparently trivial but in fact dangerously number of others of those that originally 2001). resourceful examples of the reform societies’ appeared in newspapers seem to emanate 35 Barrell, Exhibition, x, attempts to corrupt the uncommitted and from the circle around Richard Brinsley 9–12. ignorant. The first of these, which may in Sheridan at Westminster and Drury 36 Barrell, Exhibition, xiv. fact have been an example of loyalist black Lane.36 Though the printers who turned propaganda, appeared in 1793, but the these newspaper columns into broadside heyday of the radical mock playbill came advertisements probably did so without after the committee’s report, from the end of the permission of the original authors and 1794 to the middle of the following year.34 editors, the mock playbills do represent an The point of the playbills was to interesting collaboration of a sort between represent politics, as conducted by Pitt and polite authors and plebeian printers. The his government, as a theatrical spectacle. most inventive of these printers was the Though the events they pretended to radical Methodist poet and bookseller advertise were not always plays — they Richard Lee, who looked beyond the
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37 For Lee, see John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason and Fantasies of Regicide 1793–1796 (Oxford, 2000), 604–22, and www.fieldday.ie(especially) Jon Mee, ‘The Strange Career of Richard “Citizen” Lee: Poetry, Popular Radicalism and Enthusiasm in the 1790s’, in Timothy Morton and Nigel Smith, eds., Radicalism in British Literary Culture, 1659– 1830 (Cambridge, 2002), 151–66. 38 Barrell, Exhibition, 64–67.
Fig. 10. [Robert Merry], Wonderful Exhibition!!!, London 1794/5. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, John Johnson Collection.
Fig. 11. Grand Order of Procession, London, Richard Lee [1795]. All Rights Reserved. The British Library Board.
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polite Whigs for the material of his mock advertisements.37 Lee’s most remarkable contribution to this style of textual/visual propaganda was two wonderful mock advertisements announcing imaginary www.fieldday.iespectacles of revolution and counter- revolution. He may perhaps have written as well as designed these himself, for they seem to appear in no previous publication. The first, Grand Order of Procession (fig. 11), provides a satirical prospect of the final triumph of the counter-revolution in France; it offers itself as an All Fools’ Day joke, and it may well have appeared on, or in time for, 1 April 1795.38 The satire imagines the final restoration of the Bourbon king in the person of little Louis Capet, the eleven-year- old former dauphin, now Louis XVII, who enters Paris in triumph, sitting on the bony knee of William Pitt, with everyone and everything most corrupt about the ancien régime returning in triumph with him. The contrast between the tiny king and the huge font used to proclaim him ‘MONARCH’ is typical of Lee’s mischievous touch. The procession, with its emblematic figures, and portable texts, paintings, transparencies, and other images, suggests one of the great pageants that were staged in Paris after the Revolution, in a style cheerfully inappropriate to the resurgent ancien régime. The second of this pair — An Entire Change of Performances? (fig. 12) — provides a carnivalesque view of the final triumph of the revolution in Britain, a riotous satire in which the ‘Swinish Multitude’, British sans-culottes, stage a revolution in London, seizing the government from Pitt and the theatre from Pittachio. In most of the other mock playbills, the vulgar are imagined as the audience at the theatre of politics, an active ‘popular’ or even ‘public’ opinion that will hiss Pitt from office, but in the expectation that they will then cheer Fox to the stage; will applaud, huzza, be enthralled by the spectacle of power passing from the Pittites to the Foxites, from one set of hereditary aristocrats and polite career politicians to
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Fig. 12. An entire Change of Performances? London, Richard Lee [1795]. All Rights Reserved. www.fieldday.ieThe British Library Board.
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39 Barrell, Exhibition, 68–69. another; and will overlook the fact that and peace with France, Lee was cheerfully 40 See William Hamilton the Foxites offer them at most only a very looking forward to bloody revolution on Reid, The Rise and moderate political reform. By contrast, An the streets of London and the execution of Dissolution of the Infidel Societies in this Entire Change of Performances? is the only George III and his ministers. Lee was both Metropolis (London, advertisement that represents the swinish too hard line and too pious for the leaders www.fieldday.ie1800), 6. multitude as actors as well as audience in the of the LCS, and though he styled himself imagined revolution. They have learned the the printer to the society, he was apparently arts of revolution from the people of Paris expelled in 1795 for refusing to sell Paine’s and will storm the Tower of London as the Age of Reason and Constantin François de Parisians stormed the Bastille, will turn the Volney’s Ruins.40 He escaped prosecution king’s palace into their own quarters (‘A only because the government, following its PIG-STYE’) and force their snouts into the defeat in the treason trials, chose to avoid Treasury (‘HOG TROUGH’) previously confronting the radical movement in the reserved for feeding the ravenous appetites courts of law for most of 1795. Eventually, of pensioners and placemen. The swine will however, late in the year, he was arrested for seize the crown and turn it into a ‘CAP OF selling a handbill that recommended king- LIBERTY’; that is, they will proclaim a killing. He escaped and fled to Philadelphia, republic and will hang the worst criminals but with his arrest, and the imminent threat of the previous regime. Finally, they turn of new legislation directed against radical their attention to the corrupt and criminal booksellers, the production and sale of these Houses of Parliament, try the members, and playbills came to an end. hang them, French-style, from lamp posts The mock advertisements mobilize in the street outside. The dance concluding a language with which any reader of the entertainment is performed by female newspapers, anyone indeed walking swine, ‘PIGS IN PATTENS’, whose feet the streets of London, would have been will make an appropriately rough music thoroughly familiar. Advertisements for to end this carnival of revolution. Once plays, pantomimes and other shows, often again, Lee has had about as much fun as in the form of small playbills but with less you can have with a collection of fonts and typographical pizzazz, were printed on the a single frame, offering us immediate visual front page of most newspapers, frequently pleasure as well as the pleasure of imagining in the most prominent place: the left-hand the future spectacle he describes. The font column. Playbills were stuck up on every changes with bewildering, staccato intensity, dead wall in London and in every major as one revolutionary act leads to another. town in the country. By its sheer ubiquity, Unusually in these broadsides, the engraved the language of theatre advertising could vignettes seem not selected from stock but address both the polite and the vulgar much entirely appropriate to the text: the warlike more effectively than the language, or rather oak and peaceful olive entwined round a the languages, of formal political debate, lance bearing the cap of liberty, and, below, which differed widely according to the class the insignia of king, Church, and judicial identity of author and supposed audience. punishment in the form of an executioner’s The layout and typography of playbills were axe, all smashed or overthrown.39 equally familiar, immediately recognizable: This was probably not, however, an they were the most conspicuous, attention- attempt at creating a visual culture that seeking, visually enjoyable advertisements the reform societies would choose to be around, and if radicals succeeded in associated with: Lee was distinctly off- pasting them up alongside other, genuine message. While the societies were attempting advertisements, it must have doubled the to insist that they were demanding little pleasure they already offered by their wit more than universal manhood suffrage and design. They no doubt succeeded
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Fig. 13. T. Holloway after Thomas Banks, Thomas Muir, no publication details, cropped copy. Private collection.
Fig. 14. S. W. Reynolds after C. www.fieldday.ieSmith, Joseph Gerrald, London, S. W. Reynolds, 25 November 1795. Private collection.
sometimes: in his lines on street advertising outweighed any damage they threatened to 41 William Wordsworth, in the London of the 1790s William the established order. And as with tokens, The Prelude (1805), Book 7, 213–14. Wordsworth writes of ‘advertisements of the collectors influenced the production giant size’ pasted to ‘dead walls’, one of of what they were collecting, and some which, he suggests, ‘is peradventure one in radical printers, notably George Riebau, masquerade’.41 It is probable that this was the publisher of the prophecies of Richard one of these political mock advertisements. Brothers, the nephew of Almighty God, Wordsworth was living in Lincoln’s Inn in turned every newspaper satire they could early 1795, in the months when almost all of find into broadsides, which had no real these bills were produced. connection with advertising and little visual Still, as an attempt to provide the popular appeal, but which provided collectors with reform movement with a propaganda that something more to collect. had visual appeal and impact, the mock playbills did not perhaps amount to much. They were produced for a few months only, IV and though their imagined destination was as street advertising, there cannot have A few of the medalets of Hardy, Tooke, been many radicals brave enough to risk Thelwall and others (fig. 8) were made pasting them up in public. They suffered by Spence, more by Peter Kempson of the fate, too, of Spence’s tokens, in that Birmingham, some by other manufacturers; they were clearly regarded as collectables. It others still were probably commissioned by sometimes looks as though London in 1795 the LCS, some struck as private speculations, was like Paris in 1968, with the distributors but they all seem to have been intended for of radical propaganda outnumbered two general circulation as well as for keepsakes to one by eager collectors, for whom the and souvenirs. These were the tokens that curiosity value of these plebeian publications spread the radical message in the street;
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Fig. 15. [Henry Richter], Thomas Hardy, B. Crosby, 1 November 1794.
Fig. 16. Ridley [after Henry Richter], John Thelwall, B. www.fieldday.ieCrosby, 11 December 1794.
42 See Hardy, ‘Memoir of these were the images by which the radicals make a relief portrait, nowadays known only Thomas Hardy’ (1832), chose that the reform movement should be by a contemporary engraving by Thomas in David Vincent, represented. They portray the leaders of Holloway (fig. 13), with appropriately ed., Testaments of Radicalism: Memoirs of the societies as men of virtue and gravitas; heroic verses chosen from James Thomson’s Working-Class Politicians because they commemorate acquittals, they Seasons by the poet Anna Barbauld.43 1790–1885 (London, show them not as trying to overthrow the Another of the Scottish martyrs on board 1977), 70. constitution but as trusting firmly that juries the Surprize, Joseph Gerrald, was engraved 43 Christina Bewley, Muir of Huntershill (Oxford, of freeborn Englishmen will vindicate their by S. W. Reynolds wearing his hair loose 1981), 107. character and conduct. The small amount and unpowdered as he famously had done 44 Horace, Odes III, 3, lines of visual propaganda that the societies at his Edinburgh trial (fig. 14); the original 1–4, but line 2 is omitted themselves appear to have approved and painting was by C. Smith, ‘painter to the on the print; Lord Byron, The Poetical Works of even sometimes sponsored was almost all of Great Mogul’, as he called himself, and Lord Byron (London, this kind: serious, ennobling portraits of the publisher of the newspaper closest to the 1945), 5. heroes or martyrs of the radical cause. LCS, the Telegraph. The print bears a motto When Hardy, a few weeks before his in Latin adapted from Horace, lines which arrest, went down to Portsmouth to say Byron would later translate as: ‘The man of a final goodbye to his close friend and firm and noble soul / No factious clamours colleague Maurice Margarot and the can control; / No threat’ning tyrant’s other reformers who had been sentenced darkling brow / Can swerve him from his in Edinburgh to be transported to New just intent’.44 South Wales, he found Thomas Banks, the When the leaders of the LCS, Hardy, republican sculptor, Royal Academician and Thelwall and John Richter, were in the member of the Society for Constitutional Tower awaiting their trials for high treason, Information, on board the transport ship they were visited by Richter’s brother Henry, the Surprize.42 He was taking a cast of the a professional artist, who made portraits head of the Scots reformer Thomas Muir to of them to be published in the radical
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Fig. 17. Richard Newton, Soulagement en Prison, watercolour study for a lost aquatint. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole www.fieldday.ieLibrary, Yale University.
Fig. 18. William Hogarth, A Midnight Modern Conversation, pub. Hogarth, 1732–33. Private collection.
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Fig. 19. Richard Newton, Promenade in the State Side of Newgate, William Holland, 5 October 1793, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Gift of the Trier-Fodor Foundation, 1989. www.fieldday.ie© AGO.
45 See Claudette Hould, periodical the Register of the Times, and for most testing and uncivilized circumstances’. Stéphane Roy, Annie separate sale and circulation (figs. 15 and Soulagement (fig. 17) intriguingly anticipates Jourdan and Rolf Reichardt, La Révolution 16). They show men dignified and steadfast a number of heart-wrenching nineteenth- par la Gravure: Les of purpose, with Thelwall in particular, hair century images of the Girondins, some Tableaux Historiques de cropped and holding a scroll, looking like gloomy, some spirited, some self-consciously la Révolution Française a hero of the Roman Republic transplanted heroic, sharing their last supper in prison on (Vizille, 2002); for some 46 useful remarks on the into eighteenth-century London. The the eve of their execution. These British history of this manner of plain style of these images was typical of reformers, however, spared the prospect of portraiture, see Marcia portrait-heads that illustrated many of the imminent martyrdom, are all good humour Pointon, Hanging the periodicals of the 1790s, but it may have and good cheer. The image most obviously Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in been influenced too by the feuilles volantes, recalls William Hogarth’s definitive picture Eighteenth-Century if any had been blown over to Britain, which of impolite sociability, the drunken debauch England (New Haven and the previous year had begun to be issued A Midnight Modern Conversation (fig. 18): London, 1993), 65–66. in Paris by François Bonneville and which Newton’s point, however, is to show that the 46 Perhaps most famously Henri-Félix-Emmanuel would later be collected under the name political prisoners caught up in Pitt’s ‘terror’ Philippoteaux’s painting Portraits des Personnages Célèbres de la exhibit the very opposite of the appallingly Le Dernier Banquet des Révolution, the unassuming forerunner of impolite behaviour of Hogarth’s drunks. Girondins, first exhibited the more elaborate portraits published in The Promenade (fig. 19) derives from its at the Paris Salon, 1850, now in the Musée de la the more famous Tableaux Historiques de la own first version, A Peep into the State Side, 45 Révolution Française at Révolution Française. a jovial caricature of the kind an artist is Vizille; see Philippe Bordes The primary efforts by way of radical allowed to make of his friends for circulation and Alain Chevalier, portraiture were Newton’s pair of group- amongst themselves. When the scene got Catalogue des Peintures, Sculptures et Dessins portraits of 1793, Promenade in the State enlarged, repopulated and reworked, all that (Vizille, 1996), 151–53, Side of Newgate and Soulagement en Prison. was left of the caricature were the cheerful which illustrates other These are not in the heroic vein appropriate smiles, now slightly muted, the expressions examples of the subject. to men facing transportation or a trial on a of men too schooled in philosophy and capital charge: as Ian McCalman has argued, politeness to allow the injustice of their lot these images depict ‘British Jacobin civility, to dampen their spirits. It is hard to agree, symbolically representing the fine manners however, with McCalman’s description of and morals of radical philosophes under the these images as ‘radical counterpropaganda’.
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Fig. 20. Tokens and caricatures by Thomas Spence. Top to bottom, left to right: a laden ass, (D & H 716–23); a man on all fours (D & H 1099–1105); The Contrast and The Civil Citizen, www.fieldday.ieboth pub. Spence, 1796.
Who would buy them? How would they for tokens and published them as small 47 For more on the prices circulate? As a half-guinea subscription- prints just a few inches square (fig. 20). of caricature, see Gatrell, City of Laughter, 244–45. print, the Soulagement was probably not To illustrate a song, Lee published one on sale to the public at all; the Promenade, caricature, A Cure for National Grievances priced at seven shillings and sixpence, (fig. 21), obviously an amateur effort that appears in Newton’s famous watercolour of he may well have etched himself. These Holland’s shop, hung high on the walls. It little images arguably do most of the job of was presumably available for purchase, but explaining why, when textual political satire its sale must have been entirely among the was the stock-in-trade of the booksellers friends and relations of those it depicted, most closely associated with the popular plus perhaps one or two Home Office spies. radical movement, there was so little radical If these images were propaganda, their job caricature. Plebeian radical publishers was to boost morale, to lift the spirits of the could afford neither the services of faithful, not to win converts to the radical professional caricaturists, nor the expenses cause, and the same is presumably true of of printmaking, because, at retail prices of all the portraits, except those on the copper two shillings and upwards, the members of, tokens. and sympathizers with, the popular radical With these portraits in mind, it is worth movement could not have afforded the returning to the question of the dearth of finished product.47 Lee’s usual price for his radical caricature in the 1790s. Both Lee textual satires was one penny, so for two and Spence tried their hand at caricatures shillings they could have bought twenty-four of a sort. Spence etched a few of his designs copies of A Cure for National Grievances
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48 Gatrell, City of Laughter, or twenty-four mock playbills, or the same 493. number of Lee’s standard-issue, eight-page 49 On the LCS, satirical pamphlets. respectability and caricature, see Gatrell, Perhaps, as Gatrell has suggested, more City of Laughter, could have been attempted in the way of www.fieldday.ie579–80. Notice, however, radical caricature ‘had there been a greater that Francis Place, will to take risks’.48 But it may be a mistake whom Gatrell uses as the prime representative of to assume that radicals in general would radical entrepreneurial have chosen to produce propaganda in the respectability, wrote in form of graphic satire if only they had had 1835 that Gillray and the will or the money to do so. Perhaps Thomas Rowlandson were among the artists some would — Lee possibly, or Eaton, who had helped raise or the literary blackmailer Charles Pigott art to the flourishing — but it is by no means certain, at least condition he believed it before 1796 when the LCS lost the bulk of was in by 1835: see the Francis Place Papers, its membership, that the majority of popular British Library Add. MS. radicals in London, least of all the majority 27,828, vol. 40: iv, fos. of activists, would have wanted such a thing. 163–64. It is doubtful that radicals who controlled 50 Thomas Holcroft, A Narrative of Facts, their own image as carefully as they did, in Relating to a Prosecution order to assert their ownership of the high for High Treason ground of heroic public virtue and rational (London, 1795), 13; civility, would have wished to be associated John Thomson Callender, The Political Progress with images that represented their opponents of Britain (Philadelphia, in the same humiliating visual vocabulary as 1795), 86; Daniel Stuart, loyalist caricatures used for the opponents Peace and Reform, of the government or for the French.49 A against War and Corruption, 4th edn. good number of radical writers — Thomas (London, 1795), 119n. Holcroft, James Thomson Callender, Daniel 51 John Gale Jones, Sketch Stuart — write with disgust about loyalist of a Political Tour caricatures of the Foxite Whigs,50 and would through Rochester, Chatham, Maidstone, no doubt have thought that to degrade one’s Gravesend, &c. (London, opponents by such means was at the same 1796), 19. time to degrade oneself. It was one thing to enjoy caricatures that represented Pitt or his drinking companion and cabinet colleague Henry Dundas, or even the king, as arrogant, drunk or foolish, as John Gale Jones among the LCS leaders admits to doing.51 It would have been quite another for the popular radical movement to become associated with the production of such impolite images.
Fig. 21. Richard Lee [?], A Cure for National Grievances [London, Richard Lee, 1795]. Trustees of the British Museum.
61 Field Day review www.fieldday.ie
62 Afterworld The Gothic Travels www.fieldday.ieof John Gamble (1770–1831) Breandán Mac Suibhne
Human reason is not, as some fondly suppose, a stream that bears us straight forward, but a ceaseless tide, which has ebbed and flowed from the beginning, and shall, in all probability, until time shall be no more. John Gamble1
1 John Gamble, Views of September 1810 was a fine Society and Manners in the North of Ireland, month and one Sunday morning in a Series of Letters Written in the Year 1818 Dr. John Gamble shook off (London, 1819), 376. 2 The following account the dust of Newtownstewart, is abridged from Anon. County Tyrone, and hit the [John Gamble], Sketches of History, Politics and road for Strabane.2 Born in Manners, Taken in Dublin, and the North of 1770, Gamble had been reared Ireland, in the Autumn of 1810 (London, 1811), in Strabane. He had been 246–50; the italics and direct quotations are educated locally and then at the Gamble’s. University of Edinburgh, from where, on graduating in 1793, he had moved to London to pursue a medical career. He had accepted a commission in the British army and seen action in Photo: Dorling Kindersley/ Getty Images. the Netherlands in 1799; he
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had also served in the South Atlantic, were crying. The man turned his head away 3 A. Albert Campbell, spending three inactive years on ‘the dreary from Gamble as if embarrassed to be seen Notes on the Literary History of Strabane rock of St. Helena’.3 And now he was crying, but the girl did not turn her face. ‘In (Omagh, 1902), 28–35, going home, not to settle, but to spend the a woman’s tears,’ Gamble wrote, ‘there is a provides a succinct summer months in hopes of recovering from softness that seeks sympathy — in a man’s biographical sketch. Also www.fieldday.iea bout of illness. Gamble did not care for there is a sternness that rejects it’. see George O’Brien, ‘The First Ulster Author: John Newtownstewart. It was, he was prepared Gamble asked the woman if they travelled Gamble (1770–1831)’, to admit, an attractive village, but there far, meaning if they had far to go. Éire-Ireland, 21, 3 was ‘more cunning and trick’, he would ‘I do not,’ she said. ‘He does.’ (1986), 131–41, and write, ‘more envy and jealousy, more heart- ‘Do, Peggy darling,’ interjected the young Jack Gamble, ‘A Literary History of Strabane’, in burnings and dissensions, more hatred man, his Scotch twang intimating that they Jim Bradley, John Dooher and malice, more mean, pitiful and paltry were Presbyterians, ‘do, turn now; ye ha and Michael Kennedy, contentions [in such little country villages] … gone far enough — we man part, and isn’t it eds., The Fair River [than] in the largest town in Christendom’.4 best to have it our?’6 Valley: Strabane through the Ages (Belfast, 2000), In truth, the reason the doctor did not ‘I’ll just gang the length of that auld tree, 250–66. C. J. Woods care for Newtownstewart was that its on the tap of the hill — many a sorrowful kindly showed me a draft Churchmen (and some of its Presbyterians) parting has been at it, and we’el put ours to of his entry on Gamble had embraced Orangeism and John Gamble the number.’ in the forthcoming Dictionary of Irish was no Orangeman.5 ‘The best of friends must sometimes part,’ Biography. For extracts And so late that fine Sunday morning, said Gamble, ‘you will soon, I trust, have a and commentaries, Gamble left this town he had never liked to happy meeting.’ see W. J. McCormack, walk the eight miles to Strabane; he noted ‘Never, never, Surr, in this leefe,’ shot ‘Language, Class and Gender (1780–1830)’, tellingly that, ‘The people were going to back the woman, ‘when we pert now, my in Seamus Deane, ed., meeting, as a place of Presbyterian worship hert tells me it is for ever — ah! Man, man, The Field Day Anthology is called, and to church, as I was turning my gin ye had na been prude, gin ye had trusted of Irish Writing, 3 vols. back on them.’ Some distance out the road to providence, and staid at hame — what (Derry, 1991), vol. 1, 1106–15, and Stephen he was overtaken by a boy driving a car with though we could na get the ferm — what Regan, ed., Irish Writing: a chest and some furniture on it. Walking though we could na live in a stane house An Anthology of Irish behind the car were a good-looking young — they could na keep us out of a scraw one Writing in English, man and a woman. Their eyes were red and — I would have wrought for ye, and slaved 1789–1939 (Oxford, 2004), 57–61, 474–75. their faces inflamed and Gamble thought late and early — and gin we could na ha got Rolf Loeber and Magda they had been drinking or quarrelling. Both bread — we could have died together.’ Loeber, with Anne Mullin Burnham, A Guide to Irish Fiction, 1650–1900 (Dublin, 2006), 482–83, Gamble’s travel narratives are Anon. [John Gamble], Sketches of History, Politics and Manners, lists his various works. Taken in Dublin, and the North of Ireland, in the Autumn of 1810 (London: C. Cradock and W. Joy, 4 Sketches, 240–41. 1811); John Gamble, A View of Society and Manners in the North of Ireland in the Summer and Autumn Gamble was not an of 1812 (London: C. Cradock and W. Joy, 1813), and idem, Views of Society and Manners in the admirer of Omagh either: ‘Omagh (pronounced North of Ireland, in a Series of Letters Written in the Year 1818 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Omay, as being softer) Orme, and Brown, 1819). In 1826 Baldwin, Cradock and Joy published a ‘new edition’ of Sketches, is the assize town of the anonymous 1810 volume, under Gamble’s name. Although ostensibly a reprint, it silently the county of Tyrone; a incorporates three chapters from A View, his account of his 1812 visit; compare A View, 310–36, and dignity it owes more to its central situation than Sketches, 2nd edn., 317–45. And see below, n. 7, for a significant excision. Gamble also published a to any other advantage pamphlet — ‘A Protestant Dissenter’, Brief Observations on the Present State of Ireland; Designed as it possesses. There is a a Supplement to a Work Lately Published, Entitled, Sketches of History, Politics, and Manners, Taken degree of gloom about in Dublin, and the North of Ireland, Principally Addressed to the English Nation (Dublin: Thomas it which it is more easy to feel than to describe. Courtney, 1811) — some passages of which had already appeared in Sketches; others reappeared, If I were confined to a slightly emended, as the Conclusion of A View, 377–99, and in Views. Phrases from his travel country town, I should narratives also echo in his various works of fiction; see below, n. 95. not chuse Omagh for my
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prison.’ See Sketches, ‘Dinna Peggy,’ said the man, ‘dinna break Moved by the conversation, and aware 226–27; also see 225 my hert, it has enough to bear already; dinna that the couple seemed exhausted by hunger where he describes the make me shame myself.’ He again turned as well as emotion, Gamble brought them town as dirty, its streets irregular and the houses his head to conceal his tears. ‘It is a braave into a little public house at the side of the grotesque, and 231 country I’m ganging to, woman. There’s nae road. He got them some oat-bread and www.fieldday.iewhere a fiddler in the inn hard landlords nor prude vicars there to tak butter, and whiskey and water. It would plays ‘not so well as Mr. the poor man’s mite. I war’nt ye, I winna be absurd, he impressed on the distraught Ware, but well enough for Omagh’. ‘Mr. Ware’ be slothful, and whene’er I earn the price of woman, for her to even think of going was possibly William your passage, I’ll send it our, and then wha to America without making the proper Ware, organist of St. will pert us?’ preparations. Her lover was an active young Anne’s Church, Belfast, ‘You are going to America, I presume,’ man and he would soon earn enough money from 1776 to 1825; since Gamble’s youth, his name said Gamble. to take her over decently. The couple grew had been synonymous in ‘Yes, Surr, please God — this is no more composed and, leaving the public the north of Ireland with country for a poor man to leeve in — I house, they parted with deep but less frantic musical excellence. thought for a wee bit of land — but it nae sorrow. Gamble walked on a few paces, but 5 Arriving in Newtownstewart, he had matter — God forgive them that wronged the young man soon caught up with him. recalled how ‘some time me, is the worst that I wish them.’ ‘See what a beautiful day this is?’ the since’ when there was ‘You have been wronged then.’ doctor remarked; ‘the sun shines on your a yeomanry review in ‘A, Surr, it is nae to seek that I could say setting off.’ the town, the corps, by then almost universally — but we winna talk o’ that now, for I wish ‘Let him shine on her I left behind,’ he composed of Orangemen, to gang in peace with all men. I would na replied, ‘and he may spare his beems to me had defied their officers’ hae cared for myself — a know that man is — mony and mony a time we ha seen him orders and marched born to trouble, as the sparks fly upwards; set, from the hawthorn bush, in my father’s through Strabane. Here, he was referring to a and wee God’s help, I dinna fear either garden; but that’s over now, as well as every controversial march in hertship or difficulty — but that poor lassie thing else.’ August 1808. He had — she was aa to me in the world — and to ‘It is not over, I hope,’ responded Gamble. earlier, when at Omagh, pert with her is a sore tug — I man own it ‘You will, I trust, have as happy hours, as given details of a fatal riot by Orange yeomen — but it was my fate, and I could na get our you now have sorrowful ones; but if you in 1809 that resulted it.’ should not, remember that affliction is the in five fatalities. In He began to whistle, for fear he should common lot, and that you have no right both instances, he is cry. to expect to escape it.’ No doubt thinking highly critical of the Orangemen. See Sketches, The woman walked by his side, of the conversation that had passed in the 228–29, 241–43. apparently unconscious of what he was public house, he continued: ‘You have 6 The Scotch twang saying. She moved mechanically forward, for health and you have youth. You have the was not exclusively the large drops that every instant gathered testimony of a good conscience; you have Presbyterian. Gamble elsewhere renders the in her eyes, and fell on the ground as she the approbation of your own mind, for speech of Catholics walked, must have prevented her from manfully acting your part in life. Of these in the same dialect. seeing. your enemies cannot deprive you. They will However, a discussion of ‘Now, Peggy, honey,’ said the young man, follow you to America, and gladden the emigration prompted by the encounter suggests ‘we are at the tap o’ the hill — the road is wilderness where you may chance to reside. that the young man was rugged, ye hae a lang way hame, and ye hae They will sweeten the rude morsel that Presbyterian. na me too.’ By now he was crying again. labour procures you. They will lull you to ‘I will never, never, leave ye,’ she said, sleep in the torrent’s roar while greatness, starting from her trance, and grabbing him that wants them, will find its costly viands by the arms. ‘I will never leave ye. I will go insipid, and seek vain repose on its gilded barefoot our the world — I will beg with ye, couches, and beds of down. You think the sterve with ye, dee with ye — one ship will rich are to be envied. I tell you they are carry us, one grave will houlde us — nothing more to be pitied than you. They have the but death now shall pert us.’ lassitude, intemperance and vice — of ill-
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health, that folly engenders, of vice that book was also controversial. Legal action 7 For the controversial gives no enjoyment, and of the greatest of all by William Conyngham Plunket, a lawyer passage, see Sketches, 74–77; compare with wants, that of having something to do. Leave who had acted as a crown prosecutor in the Sketches, 2nd edn., 84– them their diseases and riches; take you trial of the republican leader Robert Emmet, 85, and the favourable your poverty and health. Leave them their forced booksellers to withdraw it from sale; presentation of Plunket www.fieldday.iesensuality and gluttony, and drunkenness; Gamble had alluded to Emmet’s reputed in Views, 76–77, where his election as MP for take you temperance and content. Leave denunciation of Plunket as ‘that viper my Trinity is described. them their close apartments, their midnight father warmed in his bosom’, which had Plunket was later the revels, their burning tapers, their gilded already been the subject of a successful case target of Orange obloquy canopies, their luxuriant carpets; take you against the radical printer William Cobbett.7 when he prosecuted those involved in the ‘bottle the air which breathes so sweetly on you, Gamble, however, produced two other books riot’ of 1822. There is these birds which sing around us — this on his trips home to Strabane, one visit in a local connection here; immense apartment of the universe — this 1812, the other in 1818, when it appears he Plunket’s wife, Katharine green and verdant earth, which heaven itself returned to stay.8 He also wrote a pamphlet, McCausland (1761– 1821), was a daughter has fitted up for the gratification of man.’ published in 1811, that argued for Catholic of John McCausland And Gamble having said his piece, they Emancipation, and several works of fiction, (1735–1804) of shook hands and parted. all either set in ‘the North of Ireland’ or Strabane, MP for County involving characters from it: Sarsfield; or, Donegal, 1768–76. On the suppression of the • Wanderings of Youth. An Irish Tale, 3 vols. book, see McCormack, (1814), Howard. A Novel, 2 vols. (1815), ‘Language, Class and This chance encounter on the road Northern Irish Tales, 2 vols. (1818) and Gender’, 1106, 1113 n. to Strabane intrigues, not least as the Charlton; or, Scenes in the North of Ireland. 11, and Maeve Ryan, ‘“The Reptile that had conversation in the roadside tavern, which A Tale, 3 vols. (1823; 2nd edn., 1827).9 Stung Me”: William might fully explain the tear-stained young For a modern reader, Gamble’s ‘tales’ Plunket and the Trial man’s departure, is left open to conjecture. and novels (with the exception of Charlton) of Robert Emmet’, He is leaving because he can not get a farm. suffer from the weaknesses of much early in Anne Dolan et al., eds., Reinterpreting He might have got a farm, but he was a man nineteenth-century fiction — overwrought Emmet: Essays on the of conscience, a proud man; his enemies are language, types rather than characters, Life and Legacy of wealthy, lazy men, rectors and landlords. predictable plots. But his books about Robert Emmet (Dublin, And he is leaving at a time when the Orange his journeys home are a different matter. 2007), 77–101, esp. 83. Gilbert and Hodges, the Order, the tool of rectors and landlords, was In all three of them, he introduces a Dublin company at the in its pomp. So there is the ghost of politics memorable set of characters, including his centre of the dispute, — youth, love and integrity against power, fellow travellers — drunken sailors on the were respectable but wealth and bigotry. Liverpool coach, other drunks singing and occasionally audacious printers and booksellers, Gamble published his description of snoring and a woman chewing garlic who publishing, in 1810, this encounter in his Sketches of History, shared the Derry mail with him, a lonely Thomas Moore’s Letter Politics and Manners, Taken in Dublin, country boy who accompanies him through to the Catholics of and the North of Ireland, in the Autumn the mountain districts of west Tyrone — as Dublin, which like Gamble’s work, had first of 1810; it appeared in London in 1811. well as people met on the roads, people like appeared in London, and The book was a success, in part because the tear-stained couple on the road from William Cooper’s letters it was well written but more particularly Newtownstewart, a gigantic prostitute who to the exiled republican because it appeared at a time when Ireland, accosted him on the street in Drogheda, and William Sampson. most especially ‘the North of Ireland’, was the Monaghan beggar who, when proffered making news in England on account of a a penny, replied ‘I canna tak it, gentlefolks spike in intercommunal violence, caused always gie me siller.’10 There are also his by Orange marches intended to provoke friends and close acquaintances, notably a reaction that would cause aspersions to a dying Presbyterian minister with whom be cast on Catholics’ insistence that they he passed a few days at Toome, a former were eligible for full citizenship. Gamble’s patient whose dying niece he tended in a
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The title-page of the second edition of Gamble’s Sketches www.fieldday.ie(1811).
8 Views, 58, gives the impression he had no intention of returning to England. However, the Preface to Charlton; or, Scenes in the North of Ireland. A Tale, 3 vols. (1823; 2nd edn., 1827), vol. 1, v, suggests he returned on a short visit but happened to stay. 9 While Gamble’s tours have occasionally been cited, his ‘tales’ have attracted little attention. For an exception, see the acute reading of his work in both genres in O’Brien, ‘First Ulster Author’. 10 Sketches, 3–4 (sailors), 138–40 (prostitute), 143–46 (garlic-eater), 156 (beggar), and A View, 336–37 (boy). 11 Views, 274–78 (dying girl); A View, 209–57 (minister), 306–10 (spinners). Listening to the spinners leads Gamble into a discussion of the controversy over the relative merits of the settings of Irish tunes by Edward Bunting and, house between Castlederg and Ardstraw was emphatically a Dissenter partisan for Thomas Moore’s — he chastized his friend for discussing the — ‘Presbyterianism as it now exists in the Melodies, by Sir John Stevenson; he finds both girl’s funeral with her — and servant girls North of Ireland, is beyond all others the wanting. who sang in Irish at their spinning wheels in religion of reason’ — but a partisan who 12 Sketches, 251; the italics a house near Aghyaran as he pretended to was not a bigot.12 His fondly remembered are Gamble’s, warning sleep by the fire.11 nanny was a Catholic, he socialized and against the Old Light turn in Presbyterianism. And then there is Gamble himself. He engaged intellectually with Catholics
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(discussing politics with them, attending An Irishman’s house, like Polyphemus’s 13 Views, 208–09 (nanny); A Mass, visiting the pilgrimage island in den, is of easy access; the difficulty is in View, 326–36, and Views, 396–98 (cry and wake). Lough Derg and befriending a priest), getting out of it.17 In the latter passage, appreciated their culture (including the Irish he describes the ‘cry’ as language, Irish music, and, remarkably, the [In the North of Ireland], excessive heat is consisting ‘but of a few www.fieldday.iemuch-derided ‘Irish Wake’ and ‘Irish Cry’) as rare as adultery.18 words, and the music only of a few bars’, which, he and, if at times patronizing about their argues, demonstrates the political direction, he wrote with passion Extravagance is no more a Presbyterian’s magic effects that can be of their historical ‘sufferings’ and argued vice than distrust in Providence.19 wrought by the simplest trenchantly for Catholic Emancipation.13 and least complicated means. He insists that There is a brutal honesty in his discussions And Gamble was most definitely a ‘the Irish Cry will be of the Catholics’ position. In 1812, when drinker. In 1810, the most drunken of his cherished, and its affecting a man named Sullivan, with whom he trips, the journey from Dublin to Strabane cadences admired, as breakfasted at an inn in Larne, informed involved ‘large potations’ of wine and punch long as plaintive melody is relished or understood’ him (before Gamble had swallowed his first in Drogheda, where, being on the Boyne, he (italics added) and sniffily cup of tea) that, despite his surname, he drank the ‘Glorious and Immortal Memory’ dismisses the ‘hymns in was a Protestant, descended from a French of King William, a toast he describes as the Latin language, set Huguenot, Gamble wondered: ‘How must ‘an excuse for drunkenness upwards of a to the Gregorian music’, which many priests were the native Irish have been treated in their century’. At Drogheda, he got the Derry then promoting, as having ancient land, when it is thought degradation mail, which stopped to change horses in an allegro movement even to be descended from them[?]’14 And Carrickmacross. Although it was only ‘about with more of the step of later that same year, when he was in the seven in the morning’, Gamble was offered dancing than of death. Here, he is quoting predominantly Catholic mountains of west ‘a drop of something warm, just to keep the without acknowledgement Tyrone, he remarked that ‘in ancient times damp out of my stomach this cold morning’; from Alexander Ross, [the mountains] were the asylum of those he declined. The mail stopped again to allow ‘Parish of Dungiven’, in unfortunate people, and they were not the passengers to breakfast at a ‘well-kept’ William Shaw Mason, comp., A Statistical dispossessed of them, probably because no inn in Castleblayney. Here, Gamble remarks Account, or Parochial other people would live in them’. The image on how he preferred travelling by coach in Survey of Ireland, 3 vols. here is stark, its effect startling: ‘Into these Ireland than in England, as ‘an Irish coach (Dublin, 1814–19), vol. mountains, [they] were driven and pent up stops longer for meals, and is more tedious 1 [1814], 283–348 (319). On the Irish language, like sheep, and left upon black bog, and in changing horses than an English one’: see A View, 307–10, and, dun heath, and barren rock to mourn over also, 358–59, where he their fallen greatness, their fertile vales, their You are not obliged to devour your food mentions an old priest flocks and their fields.’15 And on another like a cannibal, and at length to run away having told him it was ‘the best language in the occasion, near Ballygawley, expressing like a debtor pursued by bailiffs. You world for a man to make irritation at travellers who attribute the are allowed a decent time for dinner; love in’. On Catholics’ ‘torpor and listlessness’ of the Catholic poor and should the goodness of the wine political direction, see to ‘inherent, and constitutional laziness’, induce you to wish to extend it for a few Brief Observations, 11–12, where he deplores the effect of his imagery is more startling minutes, the guard is seldom inexorable. their leaders for keeping still: ‘It is not laziness … in the common His majesty’s mail can wait, you may alive a flame ‘which in acceptation of the word; it is melancholy, finish your meal at leisure. the end may consume it is hopelessness, it is despondency. It is a themselves’. 14 A View, 82–83. singular recollection of ancient sufferings Later, he drank whiskey (although wine 15 A View, 303, 318–19. and humiliations. It is the heart-sinking of was on the table) in Monaghan with some 16 Sketches, 222–23. the prisoner, to whom the act of cleaning Clones Methodists and then half a pint of 17 Sketches, 143. himself becomes at length a burthen.’16 excellent wine — ‘I would never wish to drink 18 Sketches, 75. Adultery was known in Louth: see Gamble, it should be said, was also better wine, nor did I ever, in a coffee house in Sketches, 132. something of a wit. All three books are London, drink any so good’ — in a disordered 19 A View, 277. replete with wry one-liners: establishment in Rockcorry, a ‘poor little
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20 Such accidents were place, containing about a dozen indifferent best relish for whiskey punch I am acquainted not uncommon. A few houses’; ‘drinking’, he had remarked drily with’; he describes how ‘I quaffed the latter months earlier, the driver on entering the town, ‘must be highly prized off in full streams, as if they had issued of a hack chaise and one of the gentlemen here; for out of the dozen, five or six were from Mount Helicon’. He spent the night in inside were killed when public ones’. At this stage, Gamble, who had Newtownstewart and the next day he drank www.fieldday.ieit overturned at Douglass got off the coach at Monaghan, was making with the departing emigrant and his girlfriend Bridge, not far from a major diversion to visit the mother of a in the roadside tavern. In Strabane itself, where the guard on Gamble’s coach perished. deceased friend, another doctor, in Cootehill, where he was to spend the next few weeks, he See London-Derry a town of which he had little to say but that was frequently invited to ‘dinner and evening Journal [hereafter, LJ], 6 the shambles was remarkably neat and that parties’, where ‘every person was at liberty March 1810. ‘drunkenness’ was becoming increasingly to drink as he pleased’, but Gamble saw no 21 The quotations on drinking are from common among the young. On leaving ‘disposition to excess’. The wine on the table, Sketches, 115–16 Cootehill, he spent a night at the house of Tenerife, Sherry, and Port, was scarcely ever (Drogheda), 146 a relatively casual acquaintance; they had a touched, he wrote; ‘Wine is taken without (Carrickmacross), 147 ‘drop of the cratur’ on arrival and, after dinner pleasure, but the approach of the punch is (Castleblayney), 159–61 (Monaghan), 163–64 washed down with a bottle of ‘excellent wine’ hailed with rapture, as it makes its appearance (recalling Castleblayney), (his drunken host cut his hand trying to carve immediately after the cloth is removed.’ 167–68 (Rockcorry), 172 the goose), they ‘continued drinking and ‘Punch,’ he adds, as if by this stage the reader (Cootehill), 192, 194, conversing to a late hour’. The following day, needs to be told, ‘is the national liquor.’21 198 (farmer’s house), 204 (Crossroads), 211 he walked five miles to Crossroads, where he (near Aughnacloy), had breakfast in a public house but (to his • 212–14 (Aughnacloy), relief) no alcohol, before walking to Emyvale; 214 (Ballygawley), there, he was offered a seat by a gentleman’s Gamble’s ostensible purpose in these books 225 (Omagh), 240 (Newtownstewart), 278 servant driving a jaunting car, who, letting him is ‘to make better known to the inhabitants (Strabane). off a mile outside Aughnacloy, agreed with of England, a people deserving to be known’, 22 A View, v. Parts of this his suggestion that they ‘must not part with the approach being to relate — ‘by hasty description of his style dry lips’ and joined him for some whiskey sketch, by short tale, and brief dialogue’ are repeated in Sketches, 2nd edn., v. in a house at the side of the road. Gamble — his journeys home and the recollections walked into Aughnacloy, opting to wait for and speculations provoked by things he sees the Derry mail in the lesser of the town’s and hears.22 They are forms of travel writing two inns, where he ate fish, roast lamb and but they are not the jottings of an outsider. sweetmeats and downed a pint of port. The Rather, they are the work of someone reared mail, when it arrived, was full of noisy drunks, in the country he describes and familiar so he had to walk to Ballygawley. There he with the people and places he visits. And yet got accommodation in the village’s only inn; several years have passed since he was last it was ‘shabby looking’ from without but like there. More especially, then, Gamble’s books ‘a little Eden within’ and the whiskey was like are the reflections of a returned exile, a man ‘nectar’. The next morning, he walked a few who goes home after a long absence and miles before flagging down the Derry mail. finds, as the returned emigrant always finds, En route, the guard, who was playing the that familiar as the home-place may be, he clarinet on the roof, fell from the coach and has changed and it has changed and he no died on the spot; the driver and passengers longer fits in; he may get back to a place, but took the corpse into a cabin at the side of not to a place in time: the road before proceeding.20 At Omagh, Gamble visited the Abercorn Arms, where he I should never advise him who quits dined with the landlord, a Mr. Jenkins, and in early life the place of his birth, to enjoyed at least a tumbler of whiskey, before come back in mature age in expectation taking a night coach to Newtownstewart, of enjoyment; if he does, and has where his supper was ‘bacon and eggs … the but ordinary sensibility, he will be
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disappointed. If such a hope has been the ghost of former days — the remembered 23 Views, 168. And compare his solace in a strange land, I pity him, past and the outline of the might-have- A View, 276–77: ‘I know nothing more for it will fail him the moment his heel been — cast a lengthening shadow over the calculated to draw forth touches his native earth. The scenes of his never imagined but actual present, so 1798, more sad and mournful youth he may return to, but his youthful the year in which the future imagined by a reflection, than a return, www.fieldday.iejoys, like his youthful years, will return generation finally disappeared, became for after a long absence, to the place where we no more; like luminous vapours which Gamble the point on which time had turned passed our youthful mislead the benighted traveller, they shine and still turns; it became, for him, the reason days. … different habits, on him from afar, only to plunge him as that home is not what home was supposed different manners, and he approaches in darker gloom.23 to have become. different degrees of communication with the Gamble’s presentation of 1798 as world, will hardly allow For this reason, and because, in addition, history’s pivot — as distinct from the Union [the returned emigrant] Gamble has not been in Ireland since 1798, of 1801 — can be read as provincialism: to feel much friendship the year of the United Irishmen’s great the loss of the Irish parliament (‘Three or to experience much gratification.’ rising, the journey books are preoccupied hundred Bacchannals whose sun daily set 24 Views, 168, 193. with the political imaginary. The ‘ghost of in claret’) was more grievously felt in the 25 Sketches, 58. Also see Brief former days’, as he puts it in the third book, capital than in the country.25 However, it is Observations, 14–15. haunted him on each of his trips home; better seen as an expression of his concern 26 A View, v. 27 Sketches, 279. Likewise, things reminded him of the past but also for ‘society and manners’, that is people discussing the effects the future as it had been imagined in the — ‘human passions, human actions, and of Orangeism (253), he past. Strabane, as he saw it, in the 1810s human beings, with all their imperfections refers to ‘the diseased — commercially (depressed, especially in on their heads’ — and culture, more state of public feeling’. 28 Marianne Elliott, The 1818), culturally (moribund; life there is ‘like especially sociability. ‘Men and women,’ Catholics of Ulster: A a grass-grown lake, which stagnates by its he writes, ‘are of more importance than History (Harmondsworth, own stillness’) and politically (sectarian, if pillars or columns.’26 In all three books, 2000), 198, thinks not as sectarian as Newtownstewart) — bore he grieves for the decline of ‘society’ since differently, arguing that ‘John Gamble’s little resemblance to what it had been in his the Rising — ‘There is no community of invaluable tour of 1810 27 youth in the 1780s or, more importantly, feeling in Ireland …’ — drawing attention … shows that the old to what he and others had then imagined it to the most subtle signs of diminished traditions of hospitality would become in the new century.24 And as interaction between Catholics and and deference had not been eroded by the bitter experiences of the 1790s …’ Elsewhere (335–36), One of the more curious aspects of Gamble’s drinking is that he frequently presents himself as being she writes that ‘The more abstemious than those around him, remarking of an acquaintance in Armagh in 1818 (Views, impression [in Gamble’s various tours] is of roads 352), that ‘he is no more a drinker than myself’. But the evidence of his intake suggests otherwise. full of human traffic, Moreover, he has a telltale tendency to philosophize on alcohol, musing on its relationship to of walkers invariably health (A View, 314–15), connecting heavy drinking to climate (Views, 291–92) and seeing a cycle seeking companionship, of oppression, drinking and violence in Irish society (Brief Observations, 18). And Gamble also has of hospitality to excess.’ However, George O’Brien a drinker’s preoccupation with the quality of what he consumes. However, this foible serves one has read Gamble in of the key purposes of his books: his repeated insistence on the ‘excellence’ of the drink in Ireland similar terms to myself. (particularly in such unstoried places as Rockcorry and Aughnacloy) — like his insistence on the See ‘First Ulster Author’, quality of Irish inns (Sketches, 147–48, 163–64), coaches and so forth — becomes a put-down 140, where he observes that ‘Both [Gamble’s] of English travellers who compared all things in the country unfavourably with those available in travel books and novels England. In that context, Gamble’s commenting (Views , 366) that in Belfast, ‘You might fancy yourself are suffused with a in Liverpool or Glasgow, only that the accent is a little too English for the one, and a great deal too sense of aftermath Scotch for the other …’ is a more nuanced remark than some commentators have allowed. This and marginality, of psychological trauma and sentence is quoted in Paul Bew, The Politics of Enmity: Ireland, 1789–2006 (Oxford, 2007), 565, but cultural withering.’ not the preceding one: ‘As to the town itself, it is a great commercial one, and commercial towns 29 Gamble’s comments on are nearly the same all the world over.’ the changing attitude to
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inns were prompted by Protestants.28 He notes, for instance, that the emergence of a more Roman (less Irish) his observing that Pat Protestant travellers used to prefer Catholic Catholicism in the same years. It is the Lynn’s inn, which had innkeepers ‘on account of their greater wider social and cultural consequences of once been considered the ‘best kept house’ subserviency and civility’ but were now religious enthusiasm, then, that concern in Belfast, had recently increasingly favouring their co-religionists him.31 On his first trip home, he reported www.fieldday.ielost something of its with their custom. Likewise, he remarks on that a travelling psalm-singer appointed reputation; see A View, Protestants’ wonder that the ‘lower-classes by the bishop of Derry had caused the 62–63. He explains, ‘I should suppose, from of Catholics’ now ‘give offence by what traditional popular songs ‘Grammachree’, the name (for a zealous is called their rudeness and sulkiness’ (he ‘Granua Uile’, and ‘The Blue Bells of Protestant would as soon himself sees little cause for wonder — ‘The Scotland’ to be neglected around Strabane, call his son Judas as man employed in bending the tough elm as young and old, men and women, ‘people Pat) that Mr. Lynn is a Catholic.’ into a bow, need not be astonished when who had voices and others who had none’, 30 A View, 299–301 it flies back in his face’).29 The erosion of flocked to learn hymns.32 He is relieved to (absence of players). Also a common cultural life that, he avers, had find that ‘rage’ is dying down, remarking see Views, 350 (absence existed in his youth is a recurrent theme. that it is being replaced now by card- of musicians). 31 On Methodism, see In 1812 he comments, ‘with regret’ and playing, another ‘frenzy’. Ultimately, the Sketches, 2–3 (addiction); some surprise, that he had travelled 150 most obvious expression of diminished 160–61 (‘fanaticism’); miles since arriving in Ireland and ‘I have sociability — the degradation of society and 237–38 (preachers not even heard of a party of strolling and manners — was overt and particularly like quack-doctors). Also see A View, 343–44, and players, or even a single mountebank, casual sectarianism. He repeatedly appears Views, 51, 137–47. horse-rider, juggler, or puppet-showman, shocked by bigotry. He has no time for 32 Sketches, 255. The psalm- in any town, great or small, I have passed Orangeism: an Orange song with the singer, a Mr. McVity, through’.30 And he is suspicious of the new refrain ‘And to H[ell] with the breed for conducted classes in both the cathedral and meeting enthusiasm for religion — be it focused ever’ appals him, for instance, and he is house in Derry, as well on church, chapel or meeting — seeing in insulted to be offered a bunch of Orange as in Strabane: see LJ, it a divisive, disabling force. Methodism, lilies by a street-trader, replying, ‘I am 12 September 1809. For enjoying a surge in popularity in the wake no party man, nor do I ever wear party Gamble’s appreciation of 33 the ‘noisy bawling’ that of the Rising, he views with a mixture of colours’. Likewise, a Catholic herdsman typically passed for singing fascination and repulsion, representing it damning Presbyterians as a ‘black-hearted at Presbyterian meetings, as an addiction, but he also frowns upon breed’ disconcerts him (although he can see A View, 364. the Old Light turn in Presbyterianism and understand the man’s bitterness at how 33 Sketches, 128; A View, 36.
Although Gamble (contra Marianne Elliott’s comments) was insistent on the decline of sociability since the Rising, he had no illusions about its limits before it. On his tour of 1810, for instance, he describes how, in the north of Ireland, Scotchmen had only taken possession of the valleys and fertile spots, leaving the natives the bogs and mountains, adding ‘By degrees, as fear abated and rancour subsided, [the Catholic] crept slowly down, and the lowly [P]resbyterian, who was now become of consequence enough to have another to do for him, what he was once happy to do himself, allowed him to labour the land which he once possessed, and when his spirit was fairly broke to his fortunes, treated his humble hewer of wood, and drawer of water, with something that resembled kindness. He still, however, regarded him with distrust; he rarely admitted him into the house where he slept, and when he did, a large door, double locked, separated their apartments: “Never trust an Eerishman, gude troth he’s a foul chap — gin ye tak him in at your boosom, he’el be oot at your sleeve.” The [P]resbyterian farmer often spoke thus, many generations after he had become an Irishman himself.’ See Sketches, 153–54; this passage is repeated in Views, iii–iv, as far as ‘… resembled kindness’. Although the concern in this essay is Gamble’s attitude to the recent past, spectres from Protestant folk history — stories about 1641, references to travellers crossing Glenshane in caravans for fear of rapparees and the like — appear in all three narratives.
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‘they’ had been quick to ‘sell the pass upon a wake and funeral, worked as a doctor, 34 A View, 116–17; italics in us’ at Ballynahinch).34 listened to stories of banshees, and ghosts original. 35 Sketches, 166–93 Conversely, occasions when Gamble and wraths (‘a shadowy representation of a (‘fleshpots of Cootehill’); 35 meets the old sociability are described living person’), and talked about politics. A View, 120–208 in detail and at length and, it seems, The weeks in the backhills moved (republican), 210–13 www.fieldday.ieexperienced on an emotional level. The Gamble. ‘Simple and warm-hearted people!’ (Covenanter), 301–43, esp. 303 (Aghyaran). honest and open, rational and heartfelt he wrote. ‘Because I had in a light work 36 A View, 319–20, referring discussion with the distraught couple on the written a few lines in your favour — because to Brief Observations. road from Newtownstewart in 1810 is an I had done you a faint kind of justice, how 37 Views, 398. exemplary incident, as is the time he spent expressive were your feelings, how warm 38 While Gamble’s early efforts at fiction were that summer with his late friend’s mother was your gratitude, and how sincere were clumsy, the style of his 36 in Cootehill, ‘talking of times that are long your thanks.’ On another occasion, journey books (thick past, and of persons I had once known taking leave of a Frenchman whom he description of ‘ordinary’ well’; so too are a few days spent near had befriended in Ballymoney and with people, the use of dialect and what might be Ballymena in 1812 with a former United whom he had visited the Giant’s Causeway seen as the romancing Irishman, reading books and talking politics, on the north Antrim coast, he remarked of a destroyed world) telling stories and drinking whiskey; an that ‘parting with those whose society has anticipated that of Walter argument about religion and titles with an pleased, and whom in all likelihood we shall Scott’s Waverley novels (1814–27), and that old Covenanter he meets on the road from never again behold, is the tearing of a part of of his final and most 37 Ballymena to Toome — the man explained life’s scaffolding away’. And it is perhaps accomplished novel, his refusal to refer to his landlord by here, in the savouring of the shade of the Charlton, might be anything other than his first name by asking old sociability and in the mourning of its considered to mimic it. Although an admirer ‘wha ever said Mr. Mat[t]hew, or Mr. Luke, passing — rather than in the discussion of of Scott (A View, 357; or Mr. John?’ — and a couple of weeks ‘public affairs’ or the arguments for Catholic Views, 397–98), Gamble he passed in the predominantly Catholic Emancipation or the memory of the dead thought that his own mountain districts around Aghyaran, where — that Gamble’s books are most decisively ‘most perfect impartiality towards my different ‘Life, like the mountains which sustain it, political.38 characters, to whatever like the wind which howls over them, like sect or party they belong’ the mists which ever rest upon them, and • distinguished Charlton now come down in thick and drizzling rain, from Scott’s work: see Charlton, vol. 1, v–vi. For is solemn and lugubrious’; there, he ate with James Clarence Mangan was a poet and a Gamble on Moore, see A the herdsmen and servant girls, smoked their drinker and a drug-abuser and he was an View, 306–10; also see tobacco and drank their whiskey, attended admirer of John Gamble: the Tyrone-man’s Views, 79, and 92, where at Tara he quotes Moore’s ‘The Harp that Once Through Tara’s Halls’ There are many hints on Gamble’s family history in his books. For instance, he mentions (Views, as he recalls the battle 223–24) that his grandfather had lived close to Castlegore and he relates (Views, 277–78) a there in 1798. The phrase conversation with a former patient between Derg and Ardstraw who alludes to the author having ‘gone and for ever’, used by Moore in a melody been related to Lairds, including ‘Mr. Laird, the clergyman of Donaghmore’. Francis Laird (d. 1742) composed in October was Presbyterian minister of Donoughmore in 1709–42. In 1747, the Synod of Ulster removed his 1814 to evoke the son, William Laird (1721–91), then minister of Ray (Manorcunningham), to the Rosemary Street fading hope of freedom, congregation in Belfast. The Ray congregation took umbrage at the ‘high-handed procedure’ and was a borrowing from Walter Scott’s The Lady refused to admit another minister from the Synod, allying themselves with the Secession Synod. of the Lake (1810); The former patient also mentions that Gamble’s ‘old grandmother’ was a Henderson and that in his account of his both his father and his ‘old uncle Sproulle’ won the Lottery. This uncle, a later reference (Views, 1812 journey, Gamble 409) indicates, was a doctor who attended John Macnaghton, a gentleman murderer, prior to his quotes Scott’s verse and compares it to an Irish- execution in 1761; hence, he was John Sproull (his preferred spelling), a well-regarded Strabane language lament: see A surgeon and a member of the committee that oversaw Crawford’s Strabane Academy; see View, 335–36. Regulations, 3. Some of these connections are discussed in Campbell, Notes, 29–30.
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The title page of Gamble’s A www.fieldday.ieView (1813).
39 The quotation is from a letter to Charles Gavan Duffy, suggesting republication of Gamble’s Northern Irish Tales and Charles Robert Maturin’s Milesian Chief (London, 1812). Mangan continued: ‘His narratives are all domestic and exceedingly melancholy. Which county of Ulster gave him birth I wist not, but in one of his tales he apostrophises the Mourne as his own river — and in truth he seems to have drunk royally of its waves, for he is very, very mourne-ful.’ Quoted in D. J. O’Donoghue, The Life and Writings of James Clarence Mangan (Edinburgh, 1897), 145. The defining discussion ‘domestic and exceedingly melancholy’ the emigrant’s return to an alien home-place: of Mangan is David Lloyd, Nationalism and narratives, he told a friend, had made John Gamble was going blind. Always Minor Literature: James a ‘powerful impression on me when I ‘remarkably short-sighted’, he suffered Clarence Mangan and luxuriated (à la Wert[h]er) in my teens’.39 ‘frequent attacks’ of ‘almost total blindness’ the Emergence of Irish The style and subjects that so impressed and he was resigned to permanently losing Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley, 1987); the Mangan — ‘the mingled gloom and levity’, his sight. A Preface to his account of 1812 essential addendum is as Gamble himself describes it, the sense of offers a pointed defence of his everyday Seamus Deane, Strange being alone or lonely at home, the flitting subjects, his sudden shifts from sombre to Country: Modernity from what he sees to what he remembers light-hearted concerns and his ostensibly and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 and from what he remembers to what he casual intermixing of incident, anecdote and (Oxford, 1997), 122–39. fears — stemmed from a source other than apprehension. His flickering eyesight is the
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Gamble’s route in 1810. Larger dots indicate places where he Inishowen spent a night or more. www.fieldday.ieLoughLoughFoyleFoyle DERRY ANTRIM DONEGAL 1810 Strabane
Aghyaran Newtownstewart
TYRONE Lough Omagh Neagh Lwr Lough Erne Ballygawley
FERMANAGH Aughnacloy ARMAGH DOWN Emyvale MONAGHAN Upr Lough Monaghan Castleshane Erne
Castleblayney Rockcorry Cootehill LEITRIM CAVAN 0 40 km Carrickmacross LOUTH Ardee
Cullen N LONGFORD Oldbridge Cottington’s seat Drogheda Hill of Donore Balbriggan MEATH Man-o-War
DUBLIN 0 0 0 10100 300 50 Phoenix Park College Green Palmerstown Ringsend Chapelizod Metres OD Bully’s Acre Pigeon House Dublin
bottom line, ‘an apology … which I dare say darkness, may well throw the mind off its 40 A View, v–viii. Also see will be thought a sufficient one’: balance, and cause joy and sadness, mirth Preface to Charlton, vol. 1, v–xi. and melancholy, to struggle together, and Even at the best … I can take little share contend for mastery, like the elemental in the business or the amusements of life, particles of chaos.40 and while feeble is the light that shines on the present, I have the past to remember, But here the doctor protests too much. and the future to apprehend. Inevitable The apparently meaningless physical and blindness, like all other inevitable mental meanderings as he tries to get home misfortunes, may be borne … But neither are deceptive. All three narratives are based to be wholly blind nor entirely to see, on extensive background reading as well to vibrate as it were between light and as chance encounters and casual meetings
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Gamble’s route in 1812; originally bound for Newry, his ship had been wrecked on the Dublin coast. 1812 www.fieldday.ie Inishowen ANTRIM DERRY White Cross Dungiven BroughshaneBroughshane DONEGAL Shane’s Ballymena Hill Larne Strabane DonemanaghDonemanagh Glenshane Rose Hill Aghyaran Toome C—— V—— Rash Ivy Brook/ Carrickfergus Baronscourt ’VioletViolet Bank’Bank Castlederg Belfast Lough TYRONE Neagh Lwr Lisburn Lough Erne Hillsborough Dromore FERMANAGH Tanderagee Banbridge DOWN ARMAGH Loughbrickland 41 Gamble’s journey books Upr are replete with passages Lough Erne Newry taken silently from works MONAGHAN by other authors, on which see above, n. 13. Also see his listing of the art collection of the LEITRIM Dundalk 0 40 km earl bishop of Derry, in CAVAN LOUTH A View, 295–96, culled from George Vaughan N Sampson, Statistical Dunleer Survey of the County of LONGFORD Londonderry … (Dublin, Drogheda 1802), 420–23. The MEATH Balbriggan influence of Sampson’s Skerries e A Memoir, Explanatory n oy . B of the Chart and Survey R of the County of 0 DUBLIN London-Derry, Ireland 0 10 300 500 (London, 1814), esp. 184–94, 332–59, is also Metres OD very much in evidence in the 1818 volume, Views: the discussion of the ‘character’ of the and all three make pointed interventions alone, but in the future, and in the past, and three ethno-religious groups (particularly in contemporary political and cultural while they have hope to brighten, [they] have Catholic character, debates.41 They are deliberate works, recollection to darken their path’.42 which both describe as carefully structured to make a case (the case Hope guttering in dark recollection ‘monarchical’), concern is often in the structure) — most obviously might well describe John Gamble’s own that Catholics were replacing Protestants on about the need for Catholic Emancipation ‘manner’, but a Gothic aspect in his journey the land, and conviction — but also, it appears, to illuminate, by books — not least the representation of that power falling to cumulative impressions ‘rather than by living people in ghostly terms — owes Catholics would have formal dissertation’, the connection between less to that melancholy sensibility than disastrous consequences, are all strikingly similar. ‘society and manners’ and politics and to to the particular condition of post-1798 42 A View, v, 318. show that people ‘do not live in the present Ireland, most especially the condition of
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Dr. William Crawford’s two volume A History of Ireland (1783). Crawford, the local Presbyterian minister, had been Gamble’s teacher in the 1780s. He quotes without acknowledgment www.fieldday.iefrom Crawford’s book on his tour of 1812 and includes a poignant account of Crawford’s departure form Strabane in his account of 1818 visit; see below, 102 and 109–10.
his home-place.43 Republican rebellion instance, public houses, as Gamble himself 43 Here, Gamble’s and the state’s repression of it (a process intimates, had changed in the opening years home-place should be intensified by infringements on the right of the new century. The Catholic publicans understood to mean, in the first instance, north- to bear arms, freedom of assembly and whom Protestants had once preferred for west Ulster but also, the freedom of the press in the five years their meekness had, by their very presence, in a secondary sense, prior to 1798) had combined with wider exercised considerable influence on society Presbyterian Ulster. (though not all unconnected) social and and manners — why gratuitously offend 44 The state’s assault on the press had begun in cultural developments — such as the rise the inoffensive; why be unreasonable to earnest in the mid-1780s; of evangelicalism — to corrode many of reasonable men? — promoting ‘conversation see Brian Inglis, Freedom the institutions which, in earlier decades, in mixed company’, a space where people of of the Press in Ireland, had sustained reasoned discourse.44 For diverse backgrounds could ‘unite’ — as ‘the 1784–1841 (London, 1954).
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The Derry edition of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, Pt. 1, which was published anonymously by George Douglas. A ‘cheap edition’, it was subsidized by raffling a portrait of George Washington. www.fieldday.ieThe portrait had been brought to Derry by the artist, Charles Peale Polk, who had hoped to sell it to Frederick Augustus Hervey, Bishop of Derry. Hervey was away from home, but a group of city radicals acquired the painting; Robert Moore, a prominent member of this group, won the raffle.
45 The number of occasions on which Gamble was taken aback by a stranger opening a conversation with a sectarian comment is itself evidence of this tendency. 46 Besides public houses and public prints, institutions important to the public sphere that changed in character included barbershops, town and parish meetings, clubs and societies, not least Masonic lodges, and the Presbyterian Synod. The transformation of Northern masonry is the subject of a fine study, Petri Mirala’s Freemasonry in Ulster, 1733–1813 (Dublin, 2007). 47 In Derry, where the late eighteenth century had seen the publication (by Douglas) of volumes of several hundred people’, ‘the Irish people’, and ultimately published in Derry and Strabane in the pages, the longest book republicans. Now, with Catholics and two decades after the Rising than had been published in the first two 47 decades of the 1800s Protestants inclining to drink with their published in the twenty years prior to it. was a 168 page builder’s own ‘breed’, there was greater latitude for Moreover, where once printers had published manual; only one other sectarian expression in public houses and a on diverse topics — history, politics, science book printed in the city greater propensity for overt animosity to the — now evangelical tracts dominated their in 1800–20 had more than 100 pages, the rest ‘other’ to be the hook for conversation and lists. Gone was the day when a regional less than fifty. The book the basis for identification.45 printer would insist, as George Douglas of trade was stronger in The public prints too had changed.46 If Derry had done in 1782, that there were Strabane, but the output not fewer books, certainly shorter books ‘no texts in scripture so neglected not to was heavily evangelical. and more books of inferior quality were have received “explications” … over and
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Left: The only history book published in Strabane in the first two decades of the nineteenth-century: an edition of a schoolbook by the English www.fieldday.ieevangelical Sarah Trimmer. Right: A collection of sermons by William Dickey, seceding clergyman of Carnone. Protestant sermons and devotional literature dominated the lists of Strabane printers in the years that Gamble returned to the town.
48 LJ, 19 March 1782; italics in original. Douglas was responding to a reader’s suggestion that a corner of his ‘political paper’ be given over to explaining neglected religious texts. 49 On Douglas’s career in Ireland America, see Breandán Mac Suibhne, ‘Politicization and Paramilitarism: Northwest and Southwest Ulster, 1796–98’, in Thomas Bartlett, et al., eds., 1798: A Bicentennial Perspective (Dublin, 2003), 243–78. Citing government oppression, Douglas had relinquished editorial duties in 1786 but resumed them two years later. At this time, John Alexander, printer of the Strabane Journal [hereafter, SJ], had offered his newspaper for sale, but he failed to find a buyer and continued as over again.’48 But if such ‘explications’ were in 1772 and built into the main regional editor until at least 1790: now printers’ stock-in-trade, different men paper, had passed into the hands of men see SJ, 30 April 1787, and LJ, 21 September 1790, were now the printers. After over a decade who proved themselves strong supporters where he is mentioned protesting at government’s harassment of of the constitution in Church and state in in an advertisement. the free press, Douglas himself had sold up the crisis years of 1797–99. Later, when the James Elliot was editor in 1796 and emigrated to the United States, prospect of revolution was ‘gone and for of it by the mid-1790s and was still editing where he settled in Baltimore, Maryland; ever’, William McCorkell, the new editor it in 1801: see SJ, 17 other prominent regional printers — notably of the Journal, would countenance Catholic August 1795; 2 March the Bellews of Strabane — also went out of Emancipation, but a suspicion of Catholics’ 1801. The changes in the business in these same years.49 The London- intentions and an acceptance of the state’s ownership and editorial lines of the regional press Derry Journal, which Douglas had established professed neutrality still restrained his had parallels elsewhere
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in Ulster, with both the Belfast Newsletter and Newry Chronicle being sold in the mid-1790s. 50 For McCorkell’s ‘editorial principles’ see www.fieldday.ieLJ, 5 December 1809, and 12 June 1810. For his hostility to the populist Catholic leaders (‘hair-brained orators’, ‘briefless counsellors’, ‘the Theatrical Orators of Fish-shamble Street’) who came to prominence in the 1810s, see LJ, 23 June 1813, where he argues that they were doing more harm than good to the Catholic cause, and LJ, 10 May 1814, for his insistence on the liberality of Derry Protestants. On Orange marches, compare LJ, 7 August 1810, and 25 September 1810, where he blames ‘both sides’ for the rioting that they provoked, and LJ, 16 July 1822, where he argues that they should be abandoned as they gave offence to Catholics. 51 On Douglas’s notion of the function of the journalist, see LJ, 8 March 1785, where a tax increase provoked the outburst: ‘So — the tax on advertisements is augmented still further — a penny stamp on every sheet of paper, and 1s. 4d. on every ten lines of advertisements! — But these News Printers are a troublesome set, and must be silenced some way or liberalism, his editorial line collapsing into an desire not demand.50 Hence, while Douglas other — They publish County meetings, and anaemic centrism. For example, McCorkell had conceived the business of a newspaper Volunteer meetings and would readily concede that Orange marches to be monitoring ‘great men’ and providing Parliamentary Intelligence were intended to give offence, but he would ‘the people’ with a platform to make the case — they are ever talking almost always add the weak-kneed rider for reform, it was now the excluded, those of Parliamentary Reform, and of Liberty and all that that Catholics should not be so quick to take anticipating power, not those in power, who — they tell tales about offence. And through the 1810s, he would were to be watched most carefully.51 certain great men, nay, time and again point out to his Catholic And so it was that, in the 1810s, men they sometimes discover readers that they lived in a tolerant place, and women who had devoted the 1780s and the evil deeds of certain great men! — Therefore, which was a way of saying that they should 1790s to the pursuit of a political project down with the Press!’ know their place — hope but not expect, that had failed found, in this degraded
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public sphere, that their activities in those cause of freedom and humanity — this 52 In time, children would decades were no longer worthy of an honest cause he maintained with all the order of deny the reality of their parents’ lives. reckoning, certainly not a fit subject for the a patriot till his last breath. If the most For a late example, see 52 public prints. And when that which had inflexible integrity, in scenes peculiarly Thomas Ainge Devyr, defined the youth and, in many cases, the calamitous and distressing, and the The Odd Book of the www.fieldday.iemiddle age of such people — that which most extended philanthropy, embracing Nineteenth Century … (New York, 1882), 86. had defined their lives — was ignored, it man as a brother, where he met him, Devyr (c. 1805–87), the was almost as if they themselves had never united to those interesting and pleasant son of a Donegal Town really lived.53 Only seldom in the first manners which flow from the warmest republican, was involved decades of the century did an obituary in sensibilities and charities of the heart, in radical politics in Ireland and England the regional press even hint at a respectable constitute the principles of an honest before settling in the person having been a rebel or a republican man and the graces of a gentleman United States in the early in former days. Those few that did were — this character justly belongs to the 1840s. In Ireland on for men who died abroad, suggesting that deceased. ‘He was an Israelite, indeed, in holiday in 1860, he met ‘three clever educated their politics was not only not of this time, whom there is no guile.’56 gentlemen at Derry but also not of this place: the past was in — whose father was a different country.54 But such hints were But at home, the single sentence that known to my father when rare; when a rebel died, even when he died appeared in the Journal rang hollow: ‘Died. both were servant boys. When I spoke of this they abroad, the tendency was to hide the truth … In Baltimore, Mr. Robert Moore, for shrank from the record as in a meaningless half-telling. Robert Moore many years a Respectable Merchant, of if their father were their (1752–1807), a wealthy ironmonger of this City.’57 Here, the book closed on the disgrace — that clever, Bishop Street, Derry, was ubiquitous in actual past, and a great lie — that ‘the whole energetic man — who founded for them, the public affairs in the north-west from the Protestant community’ had been loyal — respectability which they 58 1770s through until the late 1790s. He was began to become history. Refused ink, the were thus striving to a Volunteer officer, who was delegated to republican account of what had happened guard from the supposed the Dungannon convention in 1782. He was in the late eighteenth century became a contamination of his name.’ Devyr comments the chairman and treasurer of Derry’s poor- matter for the fireside and the hours of on his own family’s house and infirmary, a founding member darkness. Accordingly, the things that were politics but also see LJ, of the city’s Chamber of Commerce, and best remembered when Gamble returned 28 May 1793, reporting a representative of his congregation at the to Strabane in 1810, in 1812 and in 1818 Derry republican Robert Moore had presided at a Presbyterian Synod (1787, 1789). And by were songs, and the stories that were told meeting in Devyr’s Hotel, the mid-1790s, he was a key figure in the often concerned rebels who had departed Donegal Town. provincial leadership of the United Irishmen. for America, passing out of this world and 53 See the discussion Forced to go into exile in September 1798, into another, or they were ghost stories of grievable and ungrievable, real and Moore died in Baltimore, Maryland, in — endeavours to explain what was, in the unreal lives in Judith 1807; there at the end were Douglas, the light of day, inexplicable; to say what could Butler, ‘Violence, Derry printer, and John Glendy (1755– not be said, that those who were denied their Mourning, Politics’, in 1832), formerly Presbyterian minister of past had in fact lived. Hence, while Gamble’s her Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Maghera, south Derry, who, like Moore, had drinking, descriptions of everyday life and Violence (London, 2004), 55 been a Volunteer and a United Irishman. depictions of Catholics and Presbyterians 19–49. The Baltimore papers — and those of — well written, eminently quotable, easily 54 For instance, the Philadelphia, New York, Boston and other cherry-picked — draw a certain type of Strabane Morning Post, 4 May 1824, carried cities — noticed his death and the reason he researcher, a reader follows a half-blind the following obituary, had left home: man into the spectral afterworld of failed presumably lifted from revolution, where memory (a ‘true story’) an American paper: ‘Died Died — On Thursday the 18th inst. in rebukes history (a barefaced fiction) and the … At Mountpleasant, Kentucky, of typhus the 55th year of his age, Mr. Robert living meet the dead. fever, on the 7th of Moore, a native of Ireland, and one August last, Mr. Samuel of her exiled sons, who suffered in the Molyneaux, aged 63,
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The National Bank, formerly Parliament House, from Grafton Street, c. 1807. Attrib. to J. Bluck, (fl. 1791–1819), after a drawing by James Roberts (1725–99). National Library of www.fieldday.ieIreland.
formerly a respectable farmer of British, Killead, near Antrim. He was one of the Volunteers of 82, the principles of those patriots he never abandoned. He ever was an enthusiastic friend of freedom, and this was the chief cause of his emigrating to a land of liberty. His wife died two days before him.’ 55 Moore’s civic and political involvements are sketched in my ‘Politicization and Paramilitarism’, 243–78. On his business career in the United States, see Richard Moore- Colyer, ‘The Moores of Londonderry and Baltimore: A Study in Scotch-Irish Eighteenth- Century Emigration’, Familia, 19 (2003), 11–40, esp. 15–25. 56 Democratic Press, 22 June 1807, quoting the Baltimore American; this obituary was also carried in New York’s Public Advertiser, 22 June 1807. Other notices of his death Ghosts of Former Days wriggled-eyed bastard’ — with diners appeared in Boston’s Columbian Centinel, 27 shouting across the room at acquaintances June 1807, which noted The 1798 Rising is first mentioned early in in other boxes (‘all eating, all speaking, he was from Derry, and Gamble’s account of 1810, shortly after he and, except myself, nobody listening’) and the Salem Register, 29 has landed in Dublin. Determined not to Gamble, enjoying the general and what June 1807, where he was described as a ‘worthy drink whiskey on his first day in Ireland, he he saw as very Irish conviviality, downed Emigrant from Ireland.’ visited a few acquaintances in the afternoon a bottle of ‘excellent’ wine (‘more than I 57 LJ, 18 August 1807. but dined alone that evening in a box in intended on going in’).59 He spent much 58 The process was largely the Ormond Tavern on Capel Street. The of the next few days in the company of an complete by the mid- 1840s: see Robert tavern was raucous — enlivened further unnamed friend, drinking a ‘great deal’ at Simpson, The Annals of by somebody calling a waiter a ‘damned dinners and on excursions around the city
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and its suburbs; one of their first trips was death. He threw up medicine for the bar, Derry … (Londonderry, an abortive search for Strongbow’s house.60 but before he could complete his legal 1847), 224, where the author goes through The friend, a former regimental surgeon, studies a small fortune was left him, and considerable contortions had been a fellow student in Edinburgh in he returned to Ireland. Here, Gamble uses to assert that Derry had the early 1790s.61 Although a mere sixteen a theatrical metaphor that insinuates an been loyal in ‘1797–8–9’. www.fieldday.ieor seventeen years had passed since they element of unreality or artifice that will Simpson argues that while ‘the rebellion of had graduated, Gamble remarks that only suffuse many of his discussions of the Rising; 1798’ was said to have two others from a group of twenty-five close ‘the stage was now erected on which so been ‘hatched’ by ‘the friends from college days were still living; many thousand were doomed to perish; he descendants of the first twenty-one, in other words, were dead. Some flattered himself, no doubt, with being able Colonists of Ulster’, meaning Presbyterians, had drowned, others had died of yellow to play a distinguished part, and was among ‘it can be positively fever and others had fallen in duels. One the foremost who appeared on its reeking asserted that the had committed suicide — a man who had boards’. He describes his capture and how, Citizens of Londonderry insulted him at a dance refusing his challenge at his trial and execution, he conducted were not either directly or indirectly, (as his father, a church organist, was not a himself with a ‘calm intrepidity and dignity, materially implicated ‘gentleman’), he had rushed into the ballroom tempered with mildness, which commanded in the concoction, or in in a frenzy and blown his own brains out. the admiration and esteem of the spectators’; furthering the progress of And another of the group had been executed he refuses to credit a report that Colclough that rebellion’. 59 Sketches, 18–19. aged twenty-six for his part in the Rising had disgraced himself on the scaffold by 60 Sketches, 26, 36–37. in Wexford. Gamble writes at some length asking for a glass of wine to toast the king. 61 List of the Graduates about this man, John Henry Colclough (he To the extent that there is a moral in the tale in Medicine in the only gives his surname), describing him in it is about vanity.62 University of Edinburgh from MDCCV to some detail and in terms that flit between By the time Gamble leaves Dublin for MDCCCLXVI affection, admiration and admonishment. Strabane a few days later, he has seen John (Edinburgh, 1867) He remembers him as ‘a young man of Philpot Curran, the republican lawyer returns medical students considerable talents and great gentleness of whose daughter Sarah had been involved by year of graduation, nationality and manners’, but vain and ambitious; ‘vanity with Robert Emmet, and he has been specialism; for example, and ambition, more than conviction’, ‘lucky enough’ to see Henry Grattan, the in 1793: Joannes Gamble avers, ‘have made many young men politician associated with the achievement Gamble, Hibernus. De republicans. He who thinks himself qualified of legislative independence in 1782, on Rheumatismo. However, positively identifying to govern does not like to obey …’ Dame Street. He has also experienced the Gamble’s friend is ‘Mr. Colclough’ had been a Catholic absurdity of what then passed for politics in difficult, as several and Gamble remembers that though he Ireland. Gamble prefaces his account of this doctors practising in thought it ‘degrading as a philosopher and absurdity with a description of horror in a Dublin in the 1810s had been at college in a republican, to wear the shackles of so graveyard; he follows it with a description Edinburgh in the late contracted a religion’, he used to be seen of the horrors on the streets of Dublin in 1780s and early 1790s. stealing privately to the only Catholic 1798; the same word, Golgotha, in both Gamble refers to him as chapel in Edinburgh. He also recalls a descriptions, frames the discussion. He and ‘Dr. P——‘, says that he has been a regimental meeting of a students’ debating society his friend, the doctor, had walked through surgeon in Ireland which had considered the motion ‘Was the barracks squares of the north inner city for several years, and it a justifiable act on the part of Brutus (‘The Barracks are esteemed the largest and indicates that he was and the other conspirators [to assassinate most commodious in Europe’), the Phoenix at a controversial duel in Wexford in 1807, Caesar]?’. Colclough had taken the side of Park and Chapelizod out to Palmerstown to all of which may help ‘the great martyr of freedom’, meaning the attend the village fair. The approach roads to to identify him. John republican Brutus, in a ‘long and brilliant the village were thick with people, ‘mostly of Crampton, a physician speech, which was greatly admired and the lower class’, and seated on the roadside attached to Dr. Stevens’s Hospital, had graduated rapturously applauded by all who heard were beggars who ‘exhibited the most with Gamble and was still it’. For Gamble, that applause set him disgusting sores to excite compassion’. The living in 1810, but he was on the course that would lead him to his fair itself was boisterous; the two doctors not Dr. P——. Crampton
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later became King’s drank ‘excellent’ wine in one of the many lieutenant, with their attendants and some Professor of Materia tents but opted to return to the city just as other company.64 Medica in Trinity. See R. the fighting was breaking out.63 On their B. McDowell and D. A. Webb, Trinity College way back to Dublin, they cut through the The constituent parts of this episode Dublin, 1592–1952: Hospital Fields; this was ‘the burial place of — the absence of civility (at the fair), www.fieldday.ieAn Academic History, the lower-class: of the poor, the artizan, and the barbarity of neglecting the dead, the 2nd edn. (Dublin, 2004 the stranger; of the unfortunate who ends his reference to the Irish king’s grave and the [1982]), 531. 62 Sketches, 28–30. days in an hospital, the wretch who perishes sudden appearance of the British king’s Ironically, the duel on the highway, and the criminal who dies representative with his train of attendants Gamble’s college friend by the executioner; the outcast who had no — appear to be prefatory to a political attended in 1807 resulted friend, the wanderer who had no habitation commentary. Gamble does not explicitly in the death of a member of Colclough’s extended …’ Their ostensible object, besides making offer one, concluding the chapter by family, John Colclough. a short cut, was to the see the reputed grave imagining the dead paupers, prisoners and See Sketches, 39–43. of Brian Boru, the high king who had, in outcasts rising from their graves to rebuke Although he did not Patriots’ imagining of the Irish past, expelled the great and the good with mortality: complete his medical studies, John Henry invaders at the Battle of Clontarf (1014). Colclough had, with What they find is a shambles: Imagination could scarcely have formed a Gamble, been a member greater contrast than this gay and gallant of the Edinburgh-based We walked over their mouldering remains, party, to the quiet and silent group we Hibernian Medical Society; see Laws and which a little earth loosely scattered just had quitted; yet they were once active Regulations of the hardly concealed from our view: in some and animated, though not so splendid as Hibernian Medical places it did not conceal them. Whether these are; who, in a few years, perhaps a Society. Instituted from the carelessness of interment, or the few months, will be mute likewise in their December 14, 1786 (Edinburgh, 1791), 21. ravages of animals, the graves of several turn. Oh! could the wand of enchantment 63 Sketches, 33–36 (Curran; were open, and the coffins exposed; touch the slumbering bones, and raise Grattan); Sketches, 38– through the broken boards of which before them these inhabitants of the grave; 39, 43–47 (Palmerstown). we saw their decaying bodies in every could they gaze on their fleshless arms, 64 Sketches, 47–48. Brian Boru was reputed to progressive state of putrefaction; in some their putrid lips, their hollow cheeks, their have been buried in the knees were falling from their sockets, eyeless sockets, where the worm has now the Hospital Fields, and the eyes melting in their eye-balls, taken its abode; could they behold as in popularly Bully’s Acre: the worms crept along their fingers, and a magic glass, the reflection of what all see Dublin Penny Journal, 25 August 1832. the body and face was one great mass that lives must be, how would they start It is more likely that he of corruption: in others an unshapen affrighted and dismayed; how would was buried in Armagh. heap of bones and ashes only remained. their mirth and gaiety vanish, their pomp Robert Emmet was also We turned in horror from a spectacle so and consequence subside; how would the supposed to have been interred in Bully’s Acre. hideous and revolting; from a sight so frivolous pursuits, the transient pleasures, Thomas Gamble, rector dreadful and disgusting, so mortifying and the restless wishes, and busy cares, of this of St. Michan’s Church, shocking to mortality; nor can I conceive fleeting scene sink into the insignificance ministered to Emmet on how such a violation of decency could be they deserve.65 the eve of his execution and was said to have permitted. I did not even stop to look at arranged for the body the tomb of Brian Barome, monarch of Still, while Gamble here refrained from to be removed from that all Ireland, who was killed by the Danes making a direct political comment, politics burial ground to his at the battle of Clontarf, and is said to past and present come to the fore as he own church. A native of Galway, he had no be buried there. I fled with precipitation proceeds towards his lodgings and finds known connection with from this Golgotha, where the air is ghosts of that other Golgotha — 1798 John. contaminated with the exhalations of — stalking his imagination. Having just 65 Sketches, 48. death, nor did I seem to myself to breathe closed one chapter with the sight of the freely till I was some distance from it. A lord lieutenant, he opens the following little further we met the lord and lady one by reflecting on the office — ‘He is
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always now an English nobleman of high opinions only which emits eloquence, and 66 Sketches, 49–56; the rank: there are no instances of a Scotchman there can be little of argument where almost quotations are from pages 49, 52, 54. Charles being appointed, and I believe but one or all are of one mind’. Its most conspicuous Lennox (1764–1819), two of an Irishman’ — and recalls some member, the rabble-rousing Henry Gifford, duke of Richmond, the men who have held it. He praises Lord he reports to be a prejudiced man who lord lieutenant seen by www.fieldday.ieOrmond (1610–88), who resisted ultra- expressed himself with more ‘vehemence and Gamble, held office from 1807 through 1813. Protestants’ demands for punitive measures force than is usual among English orators’. 67 Sketches, 57. Also see against Catholics in the late 1670s and early He then mocks Dublin loyalists generally as Sketches, 126–30. 1680s, and Lord Chesterfield (1694–1773), ‘poor hen-hearted creatures who go about 68 Sketches, 59–61. a scholar and wit who relaxed the Penal croaking about plots, and pikes, and the Laws against Catholics in the mid-1700s. church, and papists’; they include ‘gossipping The rest, with few exceptions, he dismisses [sic] people’ who recount frightful tales of as ‘grave and formal courtiers, who wore nocturnal meetings ‘that have no existence bag-wigs and swords, turned on their toes, but in their own imaginations’ and timorous danced minuets, and laughed as seldom ones who frighten themselves and endeavour as they thought.’ The current incumbent, to frighten others with outlandish rumours he observes, seems determined to drink of an imminent rebellion. There is no himself into favour (‘he is what is called a prospect whatsoever of another rebellion, five bottle man’), but in general people are Gamble argues: ‘Government knows it, and rightly indifferent to lords lieutenant: ‘a every rational man who thinks must know lord lieutenant of Ireland has no more to do it likewise …’ The ‘horrors’ and ‘terrors’ of with the measures of government, than the 1798 — most especially the experience of postman with the incendiary letter he is the martial law — would deter ‘every humane bearer of.’66 and thinking man’ from insurrection: people Walking through the city streets, he sees were sickened and frightened, prepared to caricatures of John Foster, the chancellor of accept an imperfect constitution rather than the exchequer, on old walls and gateways, face worse oppression: ‘sometimes hanging, and sometimes roasting’. Foster was held responsible for an A suppressed rebellion (as it is increase in taxes and the Common Council proverbially expressed) strengthens of Dublin (the Corporation) had just passed government — it cuts off the active and a motion ordering that his portrait be the ambitious, it frighten[s] the timorous, removed from their meeting room; when it sickens the humane, and for a time one alderman proposed that it should be lays the people prostrate at the feet of kicked by every member, ‘another genius’ government. Reconciled to lesser evils by said it should be kicked by every man in the the recollection of greater [evils], legal nation.67 Gamble sniffs at this ‘playing at subjection, or even oppression, is scarcely football with pictures’ — he has earlier noted felt by those who have just escaped from that Grattan’s portrait suffered a similar the insolence of military dominion; the fate — and he writes scathingly of what fury of lawless and unbridled will.68 had become, by the proroguing of the Irish parliament with the Act of Union, the most For his own part, Gamble insists that he important representative body in Ireland. would live content under the most despotic Being almost exclusively loyalist, it contained government ‘rather than run the risk of no difference of opinion and there being making it better by a rebellion of even half no difference of opinion, there was neither [1798’s] terrors’. Here, he recalls having reason nor eloquence in its debates: ‘There been ‘a very young man’ in Dublin at the are few good speakers in the Common time of the Rising, when the city was a scene Council of Dublin — it is the collision of of unrelieved terror:
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69 Sketches, 61–62. … was I to live to a patriarchal age, I whose family in St. Johnston, a few miles 70 Sketches, 62–65. And shall not forget the impression it made from Strabane, would have been known compare A View, 343– on me; nor the gloomy sepulchral to him. He also remarks on the slow death 44. appearance Dublin presented — when all of Edward Fitzgerald, describing him as a business and pleasure were suspended, man esteemed for his ‘courage and military www.fieldday.iewhen every man was a tyrant or a conduct, his honour, humanity and candour’; slave; a rebel that was suspected, a spy he cites William Cobbett’s high regard for that suspected, or an executioner that him and quotes Mark Antony’s speech over punished; when malice and hatred, terror the body of Brutus, the republican who, and doubt, fear and distrust, were on on principle, kills his dearest friend, in every face, and all the tender charities of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: nature withered and perished before the poisoned breath of party; which made no His life was gentle; and the elements allowance for error, had no recollection of So mixt in him, that nature might stand up, friendship, felt no gratitude for kindness, And say to all the world, ‘This was a man!’70 no sympathy for age, sex, sickness, or sorrow — when almost every house The year 1798 and its aftershock, 1803, was a barrack, every public building a continue to unsettle Gamble’s narrative prison, and every street a golgotha, or as he travels north. A few miles outside a shambles, on the lamp posts of which Drogheda he notes that the residence of some wretched fellow creature was daily the Cottington family was ‘attacked and suspended; who, while his limbs quivered nearly carried by the rebels in 1798’, and he in the agonies of death, was the subject of inspects the battery on ‘Castle-mount’ (that brutal joke and unfeeling exultation.69 is, Millmount) to which he attributes the town remaining ‘tolerably quiet’ during the And yet, while deploring rebellion, Rising, though ‘the number of disaffected Gamble is ambivalent about the Rising itself. was supposed to be very great’. He also He remarks that ‘though there is so much discusses the billeting of a large number of to lament and reprobate’ in the memory predominantly Protestant yeomanry corps on of 1798, ‘there is something likewise to the town during the Rising; ‘they all drank admire’. The recollection of ‘magnanimity, and caroused, swallowed wine, and whisky unshaken fortitude, and contempt of death’ in pail fulls, and, in their zeal for the good on both sides, he hopes, can obliterate the old cause, I fear committed a number of bad memory of ‘savage excesses and midnight actions’. And he describes with pity how, murders’ by the republicans, and the when some rebels who broke out of Wexford ‘vindictive and unrelenting vengeance, the and fled north arrived in the vicinity of the floggings and torturings’ of government. He town, the yeomen marched out and attacked proceeds to praise the Irish parliament for the ‘unfortunate wretches’; the courage of continuing its sittings ‘undaunted’ during the the yeomen, he adds, ‘would have entitled Rising and for rejecting the proposition of its them to the highest praise, had it been more violent members ‘to order the prisoners oftener than it was connected to humanity’. to military tribunals, and instant execution’. Later, passing through Castleblayney, he But he also praises the valour of the gives a scathing account of Andrew Thomas republican leaders who ‘almost universally’ Blayney (1770–1834), the local landlord, faced death ‘with a courage which was never who had commanded several particularly excelled’. He mentions the execution of vicious yeomanry corps in the late 1790s. In prominent rebels — the Sheares brothers and spring 1797, when government had ordered Billy O’Byrne — and the death in gaol of a military crack-down on republicans, Oliver Bond, the republican leader in Dublin Lord Blayney had deployed ‘his little
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Thomas Russell (1767–1803). www.fieldday.ieNational Library of Ireland.
71 Sketches, 113–14 (Cottington’s), 134–37 (Drogheda), 147–51, esp. 150 (Blayney). Ironically, Blayney, a prisoner of war when Gamble’s first two tours appeared, subsequently published a travelogue of sorts, Narrative of a Forced Journey through Spain and France as a Prisoner of War in the Years 1810 to 1814, 3 vols. (London, 1814–16), the third volume of which presents his ‘Observations on the Present State of Ireland’. 72 Sketches, 182–89. The republican woman proceeds to reflect on how ‘because I am woman, I am not to think of this.’ For another republican woman, see A View, 131–86, discussed below. 73 The barber dismisses Gamble’s suggestion army’, burning houses, crops and other Irishwoman’ who, at a ‘house-warming’ that heavy drinking provisions to bring rebel communities to where rebel songs were sung and seditious was a great fault in a heel; his tactics, Gamble surmises, were toasts drunk, called for the assassination of clergyman: ‘Guid man, at once ‘inhuman’ and ‘impolitic’, simply loyalists and scorned him for not feeling like guid man, it was nathing to the congregation if it 71 augmenting the ‘violence of hatred’. a republican: was na for the slight of At Cootehill (where the people were others — they would na ‘outrageously loyal — disagreeably so I ‘You may wear your hair close, you may mind gin he was to be was about to say, but checked myself’), sing what songs, and dance what tunes drunk, till he was near bursting; but then it was he remembered the dead friend who had you please, but I tell you, you are no true what other Sacts said been a doctor there in 1797. Back then, croppy — you reason, but a republican,’ — Ogh aye man, the the inhabitants ‘were supposed to have said she with animation, ‘feels — for papists, and the high kirk, rather a democratic tendency’ and his his bleeding country — for the exile in held out their fingers at us, and gibe us sore, sore, friend got himself mixed up with a ‘United the foreign land — for the prisoner in a on his account.’
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74 Sketches, 219–20. The dungeon — for the victim on the scaffold; Battle of New Ross in 1798. He notes too judge was Baron George. for the wretched wanderer without that Lord O’Neill, ‘another northern lord’, James Quinn, Soul on habitation or name, whose house has been fell at Antrim a few days later. Both, he says, Fire: A Life of Thomas Russell (Dublin, 2002), burned, whose wife has been outraged, were the most amiable of men. It would not 297, 301 n. 64, notes that and property destroyed, by the vile agents have been as great a loss, he intimates, had www.fieldday.ieRussell’s ‘literary work’ of lawless and brutal power …’ some other members of the House of Lords passed into the hands been dispatched.75 of John Dubourdieu (1753–1839), rector Gamble admits to having himself known of Annahilt, County this woman a few years later, when she • Down. Dubourdieu was married. ‘I never was in company was the author of the with a more amiable woman,’ he reflected. The ‘Rebellion’ is also a presence in Statistical Survey of the County Down (Dublin, ‘The enthusiasm of the hour had passed Gamble’s other journey books, his visits of 1802) and that of away, and given place to the sober business 1812 and 1818, and it is the subject of his Antrim (Dublin, 1812). of human life. Occupied with domestic most accomplished work of fiction, Charlton His father, Saumarez employment, and domestic happiness, she (1823; 2nd edn., 1827). In this three-volume (1716–1812), had kept a classical school thought little of those evils she once thought novel, a Presbyterian doctor, apparently at Lisburn, where his great.’72 from Donegal or west Tyrone, becomes students had included Three days after leaving Cootehill, involved in the United Irishmen, survives George Vaughan when an elderly barber with a bad eye who the Rising and, when things settle down, Sampson and William Sampson of Derry, the was trimming his beard in the shabby inn comes to regard the effort at revolution, ‘in former an author whose at Ballygawley chanced to mention that which he had so strangely got entangled, works were sources his congregation’s former minister had a its idle hopes and wishes, as a phantom for Gamble’s journey weakness for whiskey (‘he’s our fond of that had vanished, or tale that is told’.76 books, and the latter a 73 republican lawyer. John the wee drap’ ) but knew the Bible from But while Gamble insists on the historicity Dubourdieu married Genesis to Revelations, Gamble recalled of this ‘fiction’, flagging his extensive use the Sampsons’ sister, ‘a story I had heard of an unfortunate of contemporary song as a mark of its Margaret. And his enthusiast of the name of Russell, who authenticity, it is in his account of his 1812 brother, Saumarez (1766– 1801), graduated from was being executed at Downpatrick, in journey that the real and the imagined Edinburgh with Gamble the year of 1803, for being concerned in appear most blurred as he relates, in ghostly in 1793, became surgeon the insurrection of that period’: before prose, stories told him about the Rising to the Longford Militia the judge had passed sentence, Russell by close and casual acquaintances; these and died unmarried in 1801. On the family, see — Thomas Russell, a friend of Wolfe Tone stories, together with his own recollections H. B. Swanzy, comp., and a founder of the United Irishmen — had of late eighteenth-century politics, account Succession Lists of the told the judge that he expected to hang, for perhaps a third of the book. On this Diocese of Dromore, but that he was in the process of writing visit Gamble had sailed from Liverpool for ed. J. B. Leslie (Belfast, 1933), 142–44, and a commentary on the Book of Revelations Newry, but his ship had been wrecked near Clergy of Connor, from and he would be grateful if he would be Skerries and he had then taken a circuitous Patrician Times to the allowed a few weeks to finish it. Gamble, route home, travelling north through Newry Present Day, Based on who bought the barber a glass of whiskey and Banbridge to Belfast and Ballymena; the Succession Lists Compiled by Canon J. B. before heading off to Omagh, remarks that: then to Toome and Dungiven and finally on Leslie (Dundalk, 1993), ‘Had his lordship allowed him to live until to Strabane. The Rising was first brought 312–13. he had succeeded in making this portion of to mind at Banbridge. Sitting at the market- 75 Sketches, 229–30. ‘There the Scripture intelligible, he would probably house on 13 July, drinking tea with a ‘genteel were many others [among 74 the Irish peers] who could have lived as long as any person in court.’ looking man’ whom he had engaged in have been much better And finally, at Rash, two miles from Omagh, conversation, Gamble was startled when spared.’ passing a demesne that once belonged to a yeomanry corps, on catching sight of 76 Charlton, vol. 3, 244. Luke Gardiner, Lord Mountjoy, Gamble his companion, suddenly started playing observes that the late lord was killed leading ‘Croppies Lie Down’. The man, smiling, the Dublin Militia against the rebels in the explained that he had been suspected of
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being a United Irishman in 1798. Gamble extract and that it had been published on 77 Richard Linn, A History continued chatting with this ‘intelligent the eve of the Rising, a testimony to his own of Banbridge, ed. W. S. Kerr (Banbridge, 1935), man’, whom he found ‘perfectly awakened ambivalence.78 6–7, intimates that the from the reveries of republicanism, if he The dead friend, although not named by Banbridge Reading ever indulged in them’; his new friend took Gamble, can be readily identified. He was Society, formed by the www.fieldday.iehim to the public library of which he was Nathaniel Shaw (1759–1812), minister of ‘leading men of the town and parish’ in 1795, a committee member and later they drank the main congregation in Banbridge since was associated with the 77 punch ‘until a late hour’. 1790, who had died at Henry Hill on 3 or United Irishmen. The following day, Gamble walked to 4 July, just over a week before Gamble’s 78 A View, 42–53; italics the house of an acquaintance, a Presbyterian arrival.79 That Shaw had been a republican added. The Press was a republican newspaper, minister, two miles from Banbridge on the is a reminder of the social, cultural and published in Dublin from Dromore Road. On arrival, he found that political milieu in which Gamble himself September 1797 to its this ‘virtuous’ friend had died the previous had been formed in the 1780s and 1790s. suppression in March week. Invited to stay by the bereaved family, However, that he was dead and, politically, 1798. ‘Patrick O’Blunder, to John Bull, Esq.’, which he spent some time rooting through the had been dead since 1798, intimates Gamble reproduces 80 deceased man’s library. The books were Gamble’s sense of a wider change. Indeed, verbatim (47–53), ‘mostly Treatises on Divinity and Reviews’, Shaw is the second friend that Gamble appeared on the front but on one of the shelves he found ‘a parcel had failed to meet on this trip. En route page of The Press, 18 November 1797. It was of Dublin newspapers, mouldy, and in to Banbridge, he had turned off the main subsequently reproduced some places moth-eaten[,] published in the Belfast road to call on the Presbyterian in Anon., The Beauties years 1796 and 1797. They were a series of minister of Tandragee (properly Clare), of The Press (London, a well-known print called The Press; and also unnamed but clearly Robert Adams 1800), 202–06. 79 A History of seemed to the full as revolutionary, as some (c. 1785–1840), a native of Ardstraw, west Congregations in the publications of the present day.’ Gamble Tyrone. It was 12 July, the town was a Presbyterian Church comments: ‘I looked over a few of them, perfect ‘orange grove’, doors and windows in Ireland, 1610–1982 and was much gratified with the talent they decorated with Orange lilies, and the streets (Belfast, 1982), 109, gives Shaw’s date of displayed, as I lamented its misapplication.’ crowded with people commemorating the death as 4 July, but James He then proceeds to quote a long piece of Battle of the Boyne (1690). Adams was McConnell, comp., Fasti ‘ingenious levity’, a republican polemic in away from home and his meeting house was of the Irish Presbyterian the form of a letter from Patrick O’Blunder closed, the congregation having ostracized Church, 1613–1840 (Belfast, 1951), 230, as 3 to John Bull, the length (six pages) of the him for supporting a petition in favour of July. Gamble called on 14 July (he was in Tandragee two days earlier on 12 Bizarrely, given the tension between real and imagined in the 1812 volume, this tour became fiction July) and refers to Shaw having died ‘about a when it was attributed to Daniel O’Connell (and quoted and paraphrased at length, as if written week ago’. David W. by him) in the English hack Robert Huish’s The Memoirs, Private and Political, of Daniel O’Connell, Esq., Miller kindly helped me from the Year 1776 to the Close of the Proceedings in Parliament for the Repeal of the Union. Compiled to identify Shaw. from Official Documents (London, 1836), 316–71 (55 of 732 pages). This section (‘Diary of a Tour 80 Here, A View, 43–44, a neighbouring in the North of Ireland’), which was illustrated with a map, was discussed inconclusively in Notes Presbyterian minister who and Queries, 7th ser., 5 (1888), 267 (by Matthew Russell, SJ) and 391 (by W. J. Fitzpatrick); 7th was visiting the ‘house of ser., 6 (1889), 173 (Juverna) and 411–12 (Fitzpatrick), without any connection being made to mourning’, tells Gamble Gamble. However, years earlier, Thomas D’Arcy McGee had identified a similar problem in Huish’s of having recently attended a wake that was ‘memoirs’, the presentation of several pages of a speech by Charles Phillips to the Electors of Sligo disrupted by a ‘travelling (1818) as a speech by O’Connell in Kerry. See his Historical Sketches of O’Connell and His Friends … Jew’, a partner in a with a Glance at the Future Destiny of Ireland, 4th edn. (Boston, 1854), 35n. Also see Gamble, Sketches, ‘respectable mercantile 2nd edn. [1826], v, where he alludes to his first journey book having been ‘freely borrowed from by house in the city’, meaning London, who all descriptions of my contemporaries, speechmakers as well as writers … with as little notice taken had come to Ireland a few of me as Vesputius [sic] took of Columbus’. And so it continues: Bew, Politics of Enmity, 86 n. 182, days earlier. The incident attributes Sketches to a ‘J. Gault’. may have happened, but
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the ‘wandering Jew’ was the extension of civil rights to Catholics.81 magistrate that the witness was a notorious a well-established figure One friend dead — indeed, dead before he drunkard who rarely made it home from in Christian oral tradition died — and another passing out of the public a fair or market, but lay in a bog or ditch and literature, enjoying a new ubiquity in early sphere, still minister but not ministering, a where ‘he might fancy a thousand imaginary nineteenth-century spectral figure: Gamble is now beginning his things’. Gamble neither confirms nor denies www.fieldday.ieGothic. This figure is most sustained reflection on the remains of that his host had been a rebel, enigmatically sometimes conceived as republicanism. alluding to people having often seen ghosts a cipher for a penitent, he having been cursed to Over the next few days, as Gamble by the lake: wander the earth forever continues his journey home, he repeatedly for mocking Christ at alludes to events and individuals connected The rushes shaken by the wind of the his crucifixion. Hence, to the Rising. In north Down, he mentions borders of the lake … and the flocks of whether the encounter happened or not, the popular hostility towards Lord wild fowl which sometimes passed over Gamble’s introduction Castlereagh (the conservative statesman it, had from time in memorial, been of such a literary figure was a member of a local gentry family) for mistaken by the midnight wanderer for prior to his representation having ‘turned renegado’ and renounced troops of ghosts, who spread their white of Shaw’s life as having ended in 1798 distresses the liberal patriotism of his youth. Two robes to the wind, and hearkened to the his narrative’s claim to miles outside Belfast, he breakfasts at a music of that hollow blast. The transition reportage. house that belonged to a Mr. Simms, whom from ghosts to rebels was easy … 81 Here, A View, 36–37, he surmises was a prominent republican, Gamble remarked: ‘The county of Armagh exiled with other ‘misguided leaders of the Mr. C—— was re-arrested in 1798 when Presbyterians are the United Irish’ to Fort George in 1799, and a disgruntled former employee swore that he very Spadassins of as he passes through Larne and Ballymena had been a delegate at a provincial meeting Protestantism.’ Spadassin he notes that there were battles at each of of the United Irishmen. The local magistrate is French for bully or 82 bravo, especially a these towns during the Rising. But 1798 sent him to B[elfast] but, after six weeks hired assassin. Adams becomes a decidedly disturbing presence in prison, he was again released when the had been licensed in when he leaves Ballymena, and calls at the presiding officer, an Englishman, ruled that Strabane in 1806. The house of Mr. C——, a bleacher belonging he had no case to answer. On this occasion, dispute in which Adams was embroiled dragged to the ‘second class of Irish gentry’ living he stayed in the courtroom to observe on for over four years, at C—— Vale, a two-and-a-half-hour walk the next trial, that of a forty-year-old ending when he resigned off the ‘great road’, south and west of the countryman, who had been taken in arms. in 1816: see History of town. Gamble did not know this man. He The case against the man was conclusive Congregations, 296–97, and McConnell, Fasti, had been given a letter of introduction to and he was found guilty. Asked if he had 187. Neil Jarman, ‘The him by another man with whom he had anything to say on his own behalf, the man Orange Arch: Creating stopped at Rosehill, outside Ballymena. delivered a bitter speech from the dock, Tradition in Ulster’, Mr. C——’s house was in a glen, watered asking why he should hang and his landlord, Folklore, 112 (2001), 1–21, 5, is mistaken by a brook, with a mountain in front and a Lord L[ondonderry], father of Castlereagh, when he reads Gamble lake behind.83 He spends several days here, who was present in the courtroom, should as expressing ‘delight’ at reading his host’s books during the day and, not, as it was he who had made him ‘an the Orange displays in at night, ‘drinking his whiskey and listening enthusiast in politics’: Tandragee. 82 A View, 58 (Castlereagh), to his stories’. Mr. C——, he writes, ‘is a 71 (Simms), 83 (Larne), Presbyterian and was a Volunteer. He was, of I that stand here a spectacle to this court, 120 (Ballymena). To course, strongly suspected of being a United and soon will be to God and holy angels, these references can Irishman, and fame even conferred on him had once as little thought as any one in be added Gamble mentioning the musician the dignified title of Adjutant-General of the it that I should ever do so. … I minded Edward Bunting and two County.’ In the late 1790s, he was called the plough as my father and grandfather ‘literary men’, William before a magistrate when a man swore that did before me … And I married a wife, Hamilton Drummond he had seen him drilling rebels in white who was the comfort of my life, though and William Drennan, all three of whom had shirts at the lake behind his house. He was I am now the sorrow of hers; and I some involvement with released, however, when he explained to the had three brave children to welcome
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me when I came home among them at C——. The dying man was a Presbyterian the United Irishmen. night. And if my meal was homely, the who had been an Irish Volunteer, carried However, he only alludes to Drennan being best blessing of the Lord was on it, and I eat arms and written and spoken on the cause known as a ‘writer of [sic] it in content, and I didn’t trouble my of reform; he had given his son high ideas politics’; see A View, head about politics or matters of state, of civil liberty and taught him that to resist 66–68. And see A View, www.fieldday.ieexcept to wish success to my brethren in bad government was a duty, but now he 115–20, where a Catholic driving pigs refers to the America; and that I did do, and won’t tells him these things are of no importance Battle of Ballynahinch. go for to deny it now. And my Lord, and he makes his son promise to renounce 83 I have not securely there he sits, came to me his own self, politics. William, unknown to his father, had identified Mr. C—— or and said to me ‘Andrew, why don’t you taken the United Irishmen’s oath of secrecy, a C—— Vale. A View, 123, indicates that he do like your neighbours, and become preliminary step to full membership, but he was a widower in 1810, a volunteer?’ And I said, ‘my Lord, I now abandons politics. After a relationship with two sons and no have no time for such vagaries, I have with a rector’s daughter is destroyed by an daughter. It is likely a wife and three children to support, argument with her father about Bonaparte, that he was one of the Cussicks of Crevilly and can afford neither the money nor he again socialized with his republican Valley or, possibly, one of the time.’ And you said, it was a shame friends. A nineteen-year-old United the Careys of Careyvale. that I should do nothing for the good of Irishwoman, Miss Harriet W——, seduced I am grateful to Eul my country; that you were a volunteer, him at a party and he joined the society. The Dunlop for the latter suggestion. and that all your tenants must become couple were to marry in June 1798, after 84 A View, 128–30. volunteers. And I became a volunteer, and the planned insurrection. By now, Harriet 85 What follows is abridged learned my exercise, and went to field had second thoughts about rebellion: ‘she from A View, 131–86. days, and reviews; and his Lordship made no longer saw in revolution, a bloodless fine speeches to us, and said we were the pageant, but a mournful sepulchre, in the admiration of the world, and that now dark vaults of which repose the conquered, we had got a free trade, we must strive to while echo only prolongs the heavy steps get a free constitution. And when I used of the conquerors, who stalk in mournful to go to N[ewtownards] to pay rent, there silence over their heads’. She pleads with were piles of pamphlets in the office; and William not to turn out in arms, but he the agent would make me take handfuls insists he must. He put on his ‘fatal garment of them for myself and neighbours to of green’, which he had once put on before read; and I did read them, and became to impress her. Now, she thinks it a ‘winding convinced that nothing but reform could sheet’; ‘his green uniform was no longer a save the country. And I did take the flowing robe of triumph, but clung to him United Irishman’s oath, and I did fight at like a shroud’. S[aintfield], and for that I am to die. But William made his way to the rebel camp if I deserve death, what does he deserve at Ballynahinch with the small party of men who sits yonder — he was learned and I he commanded. The night before the battle, am ignorant — he was a great gentleman as many in the camp got drunk, he lay and I am a poor farmer — he found me awake thinking of his father’s dying words. at the plough, and he brought me to In the rout of the following day, he was the gallows — he led me into this, and severely wounded in the head and shoulder; my blood be upon his head and on his he fled from the battlefield and, after children’s for ever.84 riding for some hours, hid in a ditch in the mountains while soldiers with blood-stained Mr. C——’s most extended story is bayonets searched for rebels. After midnight, related by Gamble in ghostly terms.85 It he stole to the cabin of a man who had been begins in 1797 with an old man, Mr. H——, a labourer for his father; the labourer and lying on his deathbed. His twenty-year-old his wife dressed his wounds and put him to son, William, is by the bedside; so too is Mr. sleep in their bed. He stayed for two days,
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86 The verses are from and then wearing some of the man’s old Dark are my eyes, now clos’d in death, ‘William and Margaret’ clothes, he went to see Harriet; she arranged And every charm is fled. (1723), an adaptation, for him to hide in the cowhouse of one of attributed to the Scottish poet David Mallet (1705– her uncle’s tenants but, in late June, when William cried, ‘Sing it, Harriet, sing it!’, 65), of a traditional she was making arrangements to get him out tossing himself on the bed. And Harriet sang: www.fieldday.ieballad. of the country, a cavalry party intercepted her near the hiding place. They threatened The hungry worm my sister is, to rape her, but she was now ‘more a This winding sheet I wear, corpse than a living being’ and oblivious to And cold and weary lasts our night, their threats. They searched the house and ’Till that last morn appear.86 cowhouse, threatened, abused and struck the tenant, but he would not betray the man After he had calmed the young woman, hiding in his cowhouse. Then the sergeant Mr. C—— was taken back to his own cell. threatened to rape the tenant’s own daughter. Between eleven and twelve the following The old man pointed to the cowhouse and morning he was permitted to see the threw himself in agony on the ground. couple again. There was a clergyman now William was taken to B[elfast] on with them, but they paid little heed to horseback; too weak to support himself, him. Harriet was dressed in white. They he was tied to the rider. In B[elfast], he was talked at intervals, falling into long ‘fits of lodged in the same prison as Mr. C——, who abstraction’; William’s mouth would tremble got him a cell of his own and some basic on occasion and he would frequently get necessities. After a few days, he was taken to up and walk rapidly back and forward. court on a chair and tried by court martial; The gaoler came at one o’clock. Harriet ‘His head was tied up. His countenance was was allowed to sit beside William as the car ghastly and pale.’ Harriet was present in the moved through the streets of B[elfast]; Mr. court; the trial was over in a few moments C—— walked behind reading the Thirty- and he was condemned to death. About eighth Psalm. At the gallows, she stood ten, the night before the execution, Mr. beside him, herself mute and motionless C—— got permission to visit the condemned and her eyes closed, as he was hanged; her man and his lover with a bottle of wine and whole frame then stiffened like marble. She some other light refreshment. William was was carried away and for several years was sleeping; Harriet, described as a ‘mourner’, insensible to everything passing around her. was sitting on the bed. Mr. C—— gave her Gamble remarks that ‘From this state she is some wine. Some time later, William woke (I think unhappily) reviving’, adding: and asked, ‘What hour is it?’ He was told it was midnight: ‘Ah! midnight,’ he repeated, The heart which received so rude a shock ‘the hour at which ghosts quit their graves will never taste happiness, and can only, if to visit those they loved.’ He shuddered and it shakes off sorrow, settle into torpor or paused, perhaps reflecting that at that hour indifference — the earth will be without the following night ‘he would be that object form — the autumn without fruit, and the from which the imagination of his mistress, spring without fragrance. Sorrow tears even, would start in horror and affright’. but it enlarges the heart — indifference Harriet must have thought something similar shrivels it up. Melancholy is the repose of for she started to sing ‘with a voice and the soul, indifference is its death. manner almost superhuman’ as she walked to and fro, backwards and forwards, in the cell: •
That face, alas! no more is fair, Leaving Mr. C—— of C—— Vale, Gamble That lip is no longer red; walked as far as a place he calls Violet
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Bank to visit an old friend whom he had in 1798, he had been a republican. Indeed, 87 History of Congregations, not seen for ‘nearly fourteen years’, that Scott had been arrested in 1798 on a 454; McConnell, Fasti, 172. For his death being, in 1812, since the year of the Rising. charge of high treason but acquitted when at Ivybrook, on 17 This friend, whom he calls Mr. S——, brought to trial (though Gamble says none April 1813, see Belfast was an elderly Presbyterian minister who, of that). He had continued as minister of Newsletter, 17 May www.fieldday.ieaccording to Gamble, had been sixty years Toome for a decade after the Rising, only 1813. Scott was a native of Balteagh, an area attached to one congregation. As such, resigning from active ministry in November where Gamble had 87 he is easily identifiable as Robert Scott 1808. His successor was Henry Cooke, a relatives. Ian McBride (1732–1813), then living at Ivy Brook, for young man later to become a key figure in includes Scott (but not which Violet Bank seems a plausible error steering the Irish Presbyterian Church to a Shaw) in his useful list of ministers suspected or deliberate disguise. Scott belonged to more conservative theological and political of republicanism in the the generation that had come of age in position. In 1808, however, the bitter young 1790s: Scripture Politics: the middle years of the eighteenth century man’s narrow Old Light opinions did not Ulster Presbyterianism when, as Jacobitism went from being a find favour with the congregation. Cooke and Irish Radicalism in the Late Eighteenth force to a farce and Ireland experienced left Toome in March 1810 and Scott, it Century (Oxford, 1998), 88 a protracted period without open war, appears, returned to ministry. 232–36. Presbyterians had come to a sense of Scott’s daughter did not at first recognize 88 For an account of themselves as Irish: in adulthood, this same Gamble when he arrived at the house, but Cooke’s time in Duneane, by his son-in-law, see J. generation would decry Britain’s invasions when he identified himself, she took him to L. Porter, The Life and of Ireland’s commercial and constitutional the garden where her father was sitting in Times of Henry Cooke, freedom, and provide ‘moral’ leadership to the sun by his beehives.89 He was asleep, DD, LLD (London, the Volunteer movement. Scott had been his long hair, ‘white as the stricken flax’, 1871), 26–28, where Scott is represented as an ordained to this congregation, properly shading his forehead, and Gamble, as he old man, who had ‘never Duneane and Grange (popularly Toome), watched him sleep, remarked on how little been distinguished for in 1762. Like Mr. C——, and the dead he had changed since he had seen him last. energy, either mental or Nathaniel Shaw, Scott was a republican On waking, Scott brought Gamble into physical; and his views, if he had any clear or or, to be consistent with the idea that his house and then into his room or study. decided views on points republicans had ‘died’ as political actors Again, as in the dead minister’s house at of doctrine, were believed to be Arian. Religious indifference pervaded the whole community. The subtlety with which Gamble alludes to the private and the public impact of 1798 — such as There was still the form when he arrives at Scott’s — is a feature of his three journey books. For instance, in Armagh, in of Christianity, but 1818, looking over an acquaintance’s books, he writes (italics added): ‘I opened the dimmed leaves of there was nothing of twenty wearisome years, and think [sic] of my youth’s hopes, dimmed now as they. How our tastes the spirit. A withering heresy paralysed the differ with different periods of our existence, and how dull and unprofitable seemed to me just now whole community.’ Porter the Anna St. Ives of Holcroft, which I read then with so much pleasure, and possibly reckoned among represents Cooke as being the happiest efforts of human genius. It is a feeble transcript of the philosophy of Godwin, whose ‘almost starved’ out of opinions are brought forward in a ballet of action, and Miss Anna St. Ives is a kind of metaphysical the parish by Scott and his supporters. columbine, who twists and twirls herself about in the display of them.’ See Views, 352–53. Anna St. Ives, 7 vols. (1792) is a once popular novel by Thomas Holcroft (1745–1809), a novelist and playwright who enjoyed critical and commercial success in London in the 1780s. Prominent in pro- Jacobin circles in the city, Holcroft had been arrested for treason in 1794 but was released without being brought to trial. Hence, he was one of the celebrated radicals of London in the years when Gamble, a young doctor, arrived from Edinburgh. Holcroft had fallen into poverty when his audience deserted him in the late 1790s. Two years prior to the visit on which Gamble mentioned him, William Hazlitt had completed Memoirs of the Late Thomas Holcroft, 3 vols. (London, 1816), which went some way to recover Holcroft’s reputation. Interestingly, at least one contemporary critic had earlier detected the influence of both Godwin and Holcroft in Gamble’s fiction: see the review of Howard and Sarsfield in the Augustan Review, 1, 7 (1815), 670–78.
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89 Scott’s daughter gave Banbridge, it was as if time had stopped give him up. He told him he wished him Gamble ‘a cordial fourteen years earlier. Scott’s room ‘appeared no harm, offered him his wages, tended his though, perhaps, a as if it were as little changed as himself wounds which were crawling with maggots melancholy welcome’, causing him to remark — the spectacles lay on the table as I had and told him to go his way. Moved by this that ‘it is sorrowful to formerly seen them — and I believe the humane gesture, the man confessed that he www.fieldday.iemeet as we are beginning identical book was there likewise, it was a had been conspiring with one of the other to grow old, the friends volume of monthly reviews90 — a volume servants, a man named Dennis, to rob him. we have known in our youthful days’. His once highly prized in the North of Ireland, Scott dismissed Dennis, but did not report recurrent preoccupation for the same reason that it was disapproved him to the authorities. The following year, — the failure of life to of by Doctor Johnson — the liberality of its 1799, seven men ambushed Scott as he was turn out as had been opinions on religious and political subjects’. travelling to a town some thirty miles from expected, the failure of the future to be born — The man himself the same, the same book Toome. Dennis was among the would-be here resurfaced. ‘Fourteen on the table, his glasses in the same place robbers; they ‘were mostly desperadoes, who years,’ he wrote, ‘are a as fourteen years earlier: life had ended in had been concerned in the rebellion, and great death stride in the 1798; or put another way, the public world a life of violence and plunder was become life of man — how few can look back upon them may have changed, but the inner, private natural to them’. When Scott recognized with pleasure, how few world had frozen. It was now teatime, and Dennis, one of his colleagues knocked can contemplate them they sat down to a meatless dinner: ‘flesh him unconscious. He woke in a cave on a without despondence, meat in my revered friend’s house was an mountainside. Dennis was standing guard when they reflect how little they performed of article rarely to be met with — for sixty over him. He had remembered Scott’s what, elate in youth and years he had not tasted it, nor did he like to kindness the previous year and he had hope, they expected when see others take it — his food was vegetables, prevented the others from killing him, telling they looked forward to bread, milk, butter, and honey’.91 It too was them what a charitable man he was ‘to all them.’ 90 Possibly meaning the a quiet but audible reference: vegetarianism sects’. And he now assured Scott that he was Monthly Review (1749– was both moral and medical (and Edinburgh as safe as if he were on his own potato ridge. 1845), an influential University, where Gamble had trained, was Scott passed the night in the torch-lit cave, London literary journal. the ‘headquarters of medical vegetarianism’) eating and drinking with his captors, who 91 A View, 217–18. 92 Tristram Stuart, Bloodless but it was also political, having been an included Catholics and Protestants, before Revolution: A Cultural element in many radical counter-cultures sleeping on a bed of heath. The following History of Vegetarianism from the middle of the eighteenth century.92 morning he was blindfolded and placed from 1600 to Modern Gamble spent six days in this house on his horse. Two of the group escorted Times (London and New York, 2007 [2006]), esp. where time had stood still. Judging from him across rough country, leaving him five 239–43, provides a useful his narrative, much of his conversation hundred yards from the town to which he account of vegetarianism with the old man concerned the early stages had been going. in Edinburgh University. of his clerical career, when his New Light A few weeks later, Scott received a 93 A View, 236–57. theology — ‘more rational, more liberal message from Dennis, telling him that he and infinitely more humane’ than dreary had been arrested and was to hang for Old Light doctrines — had made it difficult robbery. He asked Scott to assist in burying for him to get a congregation, but how, him. Scott went to the gaol. It was a scene once placed, he had earned the respect and of noise and confusion. A crowd of country affection of his people.93 And yet the Rising people was gathered at the grated door of still cast a shadow. Scott told Gamble how in Dennis’s cell. Dennis himself was standing ‘the harvest of 1798’, possibly a euphemism on his coffin, begging for money to bury his for the Rising, a stranger had applied to corpse and pray his soul out of purgatory: him for work as a labourer. After a few ‘He rated those who were tardy in drawing weeks, he learned from a reward notice in out their purses, scolded others who had a newspaper that this man was a rebel who already given for not standing back to make had been implicated in a robbery. Scott, room for newcomers; wept, preached and ‘feeling as an Irishman’, could not bear to prayed, all in the course of a few minutes.’
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A man in the cell with Dennis was to hang to speak. Scott lay speechless. The phantom with him; he was a Protestant. The following approached the bed and fell on its knees. day, Dennis and this friend were taken under ‘Master,’ it said, ‘remember I have saved military escort to the place where they had your life, now save mine.’ committed the robbery. There, they were The phantom was Dennis. Having fainted www.fieldday.ieallowed to rest themselves in a cabin, where on sight of his comrade in the dead dress, they put on ‘the dead dress’; that is, the he had to be supported on the car as he shroud and cap with a black ribbon worn was being executed and, as a result, he had by men to their execution. The dead dress swung gently off it; also, he was a tall man, gave the condemned men ‘the look of a and his feet at times had touched the ground spectre, as the imagination forms it, or of a as he hung. After hanging the minimum corpse newly raised from the tomb’. Dennis specified time, he had been cut down and came out of the cabin with a great show of given to his friends to bury. They had taken fortitude but collapsed on seeing the other him to a nearby cabin and used various man attired like a corpse; both men were ‘vulgar methods’ to revive him: his feet were then hanged. put in warm water, he was blooded with a Scott rode home after the executions. He rusty lancet, whiskey was rubbed into his woke the next day at ‘grey morning’ — his skin, applied to his lips and nostrils, and term for dawn. He thought he heard a noise poured down his throat and then, when he in the room and drew back the bed curtains. opened his eyes, milk was given to him from A figure like one of the hanged men, in its a woman’s breast. shroud and dead cap, stood pale and sad That night Dennis, ‘having so in the window. Scott rubbed his eyes and unexpectedly returned among the living’, strove to wake himself. He turned himself decided to go to Scott’s house at Toome, a in the bed, stretched himself forward and distance of four miles across the fields. He tried to penetrate the gloom. The figure met nobody, but if he had, the dead dress did not, as he imagined it would, melt into would have been his protection, ‘for every thin air. It moved its eyes. It opened and one would have run from him as from a shut its mouth. It seemed to be preparing ghost’. But he did not need its protection:
Gamble cites scripture (Isaiah 7:15, ‘Butter and honey shall ye eat, that you may fly evil and choose the good.’) in explaining Scott’s vegetarianism, and then contrasts his health and serenity with the condition of ‘the sensual and beastly gormandizer [sic] of a metropolis, who with greasy hands, and blood-stained mouth, dozes snorting over the table, covered with the hecatomb of animals which are murdered to his rapacious maw, and pays the penalty of his barbarity, in his habitude, his stupidity and lethargy, his face distorted out of all human resemblance, and his body tortured with the gravel and gout’. Although not himself a vegetarian, Gamble had qualms about meat- eating and hunting for sport; note, for example, his comments on hunting in Views, 402–04, and Sketches, 192, where he says the sight of butchers and raw meat reminds him of cannibalism, and 198, where he finds a ‘bloody goose’ which he had been obliged to eat has ‘taken possession of my imagination’. Towards the end of his 1812 tour, he praises the ‘vegetable diet’ (vegetables and milk, potatoes, butter, onions and oaten bread) in the mountain districts of west Tyrone, attributing the longevity and ‘mild, humane and affectionate’ character of the people to their diet (A View, 312–16). Elsewhere, he deplores the Irish and English preference for rare meat, contrasting it with the French tendency to ‘conceal the nature of the food, and to weaken, as much as possible, in the imagination, the idea of a living animal’ (A View, 120–21). And he expresses a preference for the ‘Irish breakfast’— rich cream, butter, sweet cakes, preserved strawberries—over the ‘brutal custom’ increasingly prevalent in England of bringing flesh meat (‘dead animal’) to the table (A View, 71–72).
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94 A View, 219–36. ‘few people in any country would be willing final decision was to be taken, when the 95 A View, 33, 118–20. The to lead to the gallows a man just escaped fatal sword was to be unsheathed — then displayed quotation is from it — few people in Ireland would refuse his moral sense resumed its influence, recycled in Charlton, vol. 2, 185–86. to run some risk to save him from it’. He then the voice of conscience was harkened 96 For instance, A View, knew the room where his master slept; he to, then his feelings and his prejudices, www.fieldday.ie118–20, represents had opened the window and stepped into the which were slumbering only, awoke.95 ‘the Presbyterian’ room from the garden. contemplating revolution as estranged from his true Scott hid Dennis for some time in his Moreover, as evident in that last quotation, self: ‘Government did not house and then got him on board a vessel Gamble had a tendency to write in terms know him — the Catholic bound for the United States. He later became of types — ‘the Catholic’ is emotional and did not know him — a porter in Baltimore, Maryland, the city that artistic; ‘the Presbyterian’ rational and perhaps he did not know himself.’ For an example harboured many of the republicans who left scientific — resulting at times in a dull cultural of Gamble’s use of types, Derry quay in the wake of the Rising — most determinism but also a certain ambiguity: see Sketches, 287: ‘It is notably Robert Moore and John Glendy however many Presbyterians rose, ‘the astonishing how little — and which George Douglas, the Derry Presbyterian’ did not.96 Still, taken together, idea Presbyterians have of pastoral beauty — the printer, had also made his home. Gamble his efforts at explaining change — variously Catholic has a thousand commented: ‘When time has thrown its dark stressing economics, culture, and national times more fancy — but a mantle over the origin of their family, the and international politics — form the outline Presbyterian minds only descendants of poor hanged Dennis may rank of a total history of the politics of identity in the main chance.’ 94 97 Views, 295–96. Gamble’s with the greatest in America.’ Ireland, more especially in the North, in the general depiction of late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Volunteering was based • while also being themselves part of the on his recollection phenomenon he is explaining. of the movement in the north-west in the In these various forms — fact (the journey Gamble’s account of the rise of radical 1780s. His main points books) and fiction (Charlton) and fact Patriotism is straightforward. People, — that companies were repeated in the style of fiction, especially concerned with grievances more apparent relatively autonomous of that of a ghost story (a fiction that must be than real, had achieved a no less illusory landlords and associated with the rise of a sense a ‘true story’) — Gamble makes attempts, independence in the ‘Revolution of 1782’. In of nationhood — are sometimes as asides but occasionally 1818, for instance, he writes: at once consistent with in extended analyses, at explaining the contemporary sources transformation which his home-place had About forty years ago, the Presbyterians and at variance with the interpretation in the undergone in his lifetime. Few of these of Ulster, who, humanly speaking, had ‘revisionist’ scholarship efforts are in themselves compelling nor are so few real evils to complain of, heated of the 1970s and 1980s. they entirely consistent — in some places their fancies, with I could almost say, On Volunteering in the he emphatically emphasizes one factor as imaginary ones. They associated in large region (and a critique of revisionist work), see the cause of a development and elsewhere armed bodies, under the denomination of Breandán Mac Suibhne, another. Most particularly, he vacillates on Volunteers, and by their formidable array ‘Whiskey, Potatoes and the extent of Presbyterian involvement in the having dispelled all dread of invasion with Paddies: Volunteering Rising itself: at one point in 1812 he says which they were threatened, they still and the Construction of Irish Identity, 1778–84’, that the ‘Presbyterians of the north were not continued together, to free themselves from in Peter Jupp and Eoin much less deeply and universally engaged in the supposed political grievances of their Magennis, eds., The the rebellion than the Catholics of the south’, situation. … By the display of her force, Crowd in Irish History but later in the same visit he represents them Ulster at that time obtained privileges, (New York, 2000), 45–82. as balking at the last moment, refusing to which, in all probability would never have countenance violence: been yielded to her solicitations.97
As long as it was uniting, and writing, Likewise, he offers a coherent account of and speaking, he took the lead; but when the transition from radical Patriotism to the rubicon was to be passed, when the republican separatism, locating it in the
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anti-climactic years of the mid-1780s. In (members of the established church) and 98 A View, 117–18. his telling, the Volunteers had ‘freed Ireland to distance Catholics from Protestants. 99 Views, 296–98. 100 Views, 396–98. from what they conceived the tyranny For instance, he is sensitive to a new sense 101 A View, 343–44. Like and oppression of England’ and achieved of ambition and advance in the Roman many contemporary an ‘independent parliament’. However, Catholic clergy. His explanation of their Presbyterians, he www.fieldday.iewhen that parliament failed to meet their efforts to suppress the ‘Irish Cry’ — the had little time for Methodist preachers, expectations, or rather to be sufficiently traditional wailing at funerals of which presenting them as dependent on themselves, they had engaged he was himself a great admirer — is that trading on credulity. In in ‘wild speculations on governments and ‘circumstances having rendered them more 1810, when travelling constitutions’. Government had initially objects of consideration’, they were now between Omagh and Newtownstewart, an repressed this ‘spirit of innovation’ by ‘more sensitive to ridicule’.100 He gives an area where Methodism ‘influencing Parliament, seducing some of impression of a less rational, more emotional was strong, he remarks, the volunteer leaders, frightening others by religious culture emerging among Protestants ‘We are too fond of displaying to them the evils of anarchy every generally, most especially Churchmen, in simplifying in judging the actions of men. where, and the particular evils of anarchy the 1810s. Again, Methodism for Gamble We think of one cause in Ireland’. But the spirit ‘was smothered … was the epitome of excessive enthusiasm; he only, when there are not extinguished; it was covered, not entirely clearly finds it distasteful (though he says he many. The mixture of concealed; and by its concentration in the does not) and it is a subject of curiosity to simplicity and cunning, folly and knavery, is middle classes gained fresh strength’. And him. He connects its rise — and ipso facto more frequent than within a few years the French Revolution the general evangelical turn in Protestantism people are aware would blow it into flame.98 In the meantime — with the defeat of the Rising. ‘Methodism of. How else should — that is, in the mid-1780s — the foisting of of late years had greatly increased in this we have so many miracles, saints, quack- a large military establishment on the country part of Ireland,’ he writes of west Tyrone on doctors, and methodist and an increase of taxes, most especially on his return in 1810, continuing: preachers[?]’, Sketches, alcohol, to pay for it, had further alienated 237–38. ‘the people’ from government, providing It is a curious fact that after the last more kindling for revolution.99 His main rebellion, several who were concerned point is clear: Irish republicanism was not in it, turned drinkers, and others died an import from America or France, nor the mad. Numbers became Methodists. The creation of a few middle-class politicos: it enthusiasm for politics gave way to the was deeply rooted in society and manners enthusiasm of religion. The high-wrought and the experience of bad government. fever, which agitated the mind in the Crucially, Gamble has little of exultation of revolution, could not at all consequence to say on the failure of the subside at once into the settled business, Rising itself; perhaps as a former soldier, he the sober current of life.101 saw conventional military history for the poor sports journalism that it is: the winning But it is changes within Irish side either has more or better resources or Presbyterianism to which Gamble is most makes better use of lesser resources. Still, attentive, picking up on the shifting balance in addressing the retreat from radicalism of forces within the denomination that he is insightful, emphasizing, inter alia, the were causing it to turn in on itself — to efficacy of government’s suppression of become more evangelical in spirit and more the Rising, including the legacy of division conservative in politics. In 1818, after and bitterness that government stoked; the travelling by jaunting car from Belfast to ramifications of Napoleon’s subversion of Ballymena with several young Presbyterian the French Republic; and changes in the clergymen returning home from the General leadership of the different religious groups Synod, he remarked on how the increase of that served to mitigate the difference the regium donum had greatly diminished between Dissenters and Churchmen their ‘influence’ (‘perhaps at no time great’)
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102 Views, 374–80. over their communities: people regarded numbers declining, the community was itself Still, writing of the the government allowance as sufficient for changing, and that, Gamble insisted, would Presbyterian Synod (‘in their support and, hence, no longer looked have a negative impact on the wider society. its construction the most republican assembly upon them ‘as independent pastors of free This idea is first introduced in 1810 when now in Europe’), he does men, but the servile stipendiaries of a court’. he parts with the young man he had met www.fieldday.ieargue (372–73) that the He intimates that Castlereagh’s intention outside Newtownstewart. Emigration to ‘dread of public opinion’ in paying them — ‘to lull the clergy into America, he observed as the fellow headed checks ‘that disposition to slavery, or at least inactivity’ and to make the state secure off for Derry, had declined in recent years, to servility’, to which by making them dependent on it — had but people, particularly Presbyterians, ‘since the rebellion succeeded. Tellingly, he notes that his ‘young were still leaving in large numbers, driven which frightened, and fellow travellers’ were all ‘rigidly Calvinistic by landlords’ exactions and drawn by the the augmentation of the royal bounty, which in their sentiments’; ‘these opinions, which prospect of a better life. Those Presbyterians soothed’, the Synod was a few years ago seemed to be dying away that remained at home, being rational, supposed to be prone. among Presbyterians, are fast reviving tended to marry comparatively late in 103 Views, 421. again’. Here, reflecting on the young men’s life and rarely had large families. But ‘the 104 Sketches, 250–52. 105 The current old opinions, he makes explicit the basic Catholic,’ he argues, is ‘more thoughtless, environmental crisis point he repeatedly tries to impress on a more improvident, more amorous, perhaps has caused a number target readership (the British middle class) takes a wife when he is yet a lad; piles up a of writers to revisit ‘the with a teleological notion of progress: heap of sods into a cabin, eats potatoes, and Year Without Summer’, but John D. Post, The ‘Human reason is not, as some fondly gets children like a patriarch of old’. The Last Great Subsistence suppose, a stream that bears us straight result was that ‘the population of Ireland Crisis in the Western forward, but a ceaseless tide, which has is rapidly becoming more Catholic’.104 By World (Baltimore and ebbed and flowed from the beginning, and the end of his final trip, that of 1818, when London, 1977) remains required reading. shall, in all probability, until time shall be Ireland ‘was so much changed from what it no more.’ When the jaunting car reached was ten years ago that I can scarcely think Ballymena, and the clergymen rode off on it is the same land’, his vision is grimmer. little palfreys — horses of middling quality, And there were reasons for the vision generally ridden by women — which were being grimmer. The long agricultural boom waiting for them where the coach stopped, — sustained by a generation of war with Gamble headed to the local inn, where he America and France — had ended in 1815, befriended a Frenchman as he waited for the when a combination of environmental Ballymoney coach.102 and political factors — severe weather and Of all Gamble’s efforts to explain what demobilization following the final defeat of was happening in Ireland in the 1810s, Napoleon — had precipitated an economic perhaps his most striking contribution crisis that was soon compounded by famine is his flagging of the socio-economic and and disease. A land system that, in the demographic bases for a sense among boom time, had encouraged owners to place Presbyterians, which he himself shares, tenants on bogs and mountains, where they that they now faced cultural death, that could only ever hope to eke out a precarious is, that the norms and values which had existence, came close to collapse, and the defined their community would cease region was only beginning to stabilize when to be. Presbyterians, as he puts it, were Gamble came home in 1818.105 Crucially, ‘the sturdy though decaying oak of this in the north of Ireland, this crisis raised old forlorn wilderness of man’.103 The political ghosts — both, the shade of deep historical project which they had nurtured for over a injustice and the spectre of sectarian generation — overtly, at least from the late cataclysm — as Catholics, seeking work 1770s — had foundered in 1798 and the and food, came down from the mountains, cultural space that had made it possible had where, in Gamble’s phrase, they had been been severely constricted; now, with their ‘pent up’ since the seventeenth century.
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In the north-west in particular, the droves famine and disease, ‘society’ had collapsed, 106 For a sophisticated of ‘mountainy’ people crowding into appearing almost to go back in time. The account of the crisis in the Strabane area, plantation towns — Catholics now suddenly law had lost its majesty. After a spate of legal see Francis Rogan, visible, at the very time Presbyterians were actions — ‘lawsuits, ejectments, distresses, Observations on the disappearing (by emigrating) — resonated imprisonments’ — in the initial stages of the Condition of the Middle www.fieldday.iewith the biblical connotations of famine and downturn, the courts were soon quiet as few and Lower Classes in the North of Ireland … disease.106 And so the crisis at once unsettled people could afford the expense of a lawyer (London, 1819). Presbyterians, strengthening an apocalyptic or expect payment if their case succeeded. 107 On Catholic mentalité world-view in some quarters, while also Even cash dealings were being abandoned: in the late 1810s causing millenarian enthusiasms to pulse and early 1820s, see James S. Donnelly, Jr., through Catholic communities. It seemed In many places society is transported ‘Pastorini and Captain to many that a great transformation was back to the practice of the ruder ages, Rock: Millenarianism imminent: for some Presbyterians, ‘the end’ and payments in kind are becoming the and Sectarianism in was nigh, while some Catholics anticipated commonest of any. A few weeks ago a the Rockite Movement of 1821–4’, in Samuel an end only to their own oppression.107 relation of mine disposed of a field of Clark and James S. Such is the scale of the change that corn which was ready for cutting, for Donnelly, Jr., eds., Irish Gamble encounters in 1818, reality to him which, according to the valuation of two Peasants: Violence appears imaginary: ‘so altered indeed is men who viewed it, she is in December and Political Unrest, 1780–1914 (Dublin, the condition of the country, that there are to get an equivalent quantity of oatmeal. 1983), 102–39, and times when I scarce believe it is real, and A poor man who has a few acres of land Claire Connolly, ‘Prince could almost fancy myself in a dream’.108 from her, and is now nearly three years Hohenlohe’s Miracles: In the final passage of the book, he tries to in arrears, expects, as the harvest of so Supernaturalism and the Irish Public Sphere’, isolate the factors that had produced this favourable a one, shortly to pay a part in David Duff and 109 phantasmal actuality. He now describes of it, but not in money, but by giving her Catherine Jones, eds., the prosperity which the French wars had potatoes and turf. I know not that this Scotland, Ireland and brought to Ireland as having been, like has ever occurred to lawyers on circuit, the Romantic Aesthetic (Lewisburg, 2007), the independence achieved in 1782, ‘more as has been reported, but I am sure that 236–57. apparent than real’. Its effects had been surgeons and apothecaries, physicians 108 Views, 405. dissipated by the ‘refinement in manner here are pretty much out of the question, 109 Views, 412–23. of living, improvement in dressing, and a have been paid in a similar manner.112 110 Views, 413–14. And compare A View, 200– taste for luxuries’ that had accompanied 01. it; ‘something was gained … little was And the upsurge in emigration had made 111 Views, 420–21. saved’.110 More especially, increased the situation worse. Most of the emigrants 112 Views, 416. income had been absorbed by landlords’ were Presbyterians. ‘The Presbyterian’ had raising of their rents to ‘an enormous pitch’. been reared with high ideas of himself. The ‘undue cultivation of the potato’ had He had been taught in his youth that his compounded matters, enabling people to ancestors, ‘bearing the favoured name of live where nobody should have lived; ‘the Protestants, like Roman citizens in a remote bleak and misty hills, fit habitation alone for province, lived on a footing of equality shepherds and their flocks, are now thickly almost with the highest’. He could not now swarming with men’. And man, he writes, is accommodate himself to ‘the degradation like any other object, to be valued he must be wrought in his once lofty condition’ and rare: and so the men in the mountain were preferred to take refuge in America than trodden on and oppressed. The country was accept ‘unaccustomed misery’ in Ireland. now bereft of its gentry, who had decamped ‘The Catholic’, in contrast, rarely emigrated: to London after the Union, ‘leaving their ‘to him the evil of the times is slight for he poor tenantry to the mercy of servile and nor his ancestors ever knew a much better rapacious agents’.111 Hence, when the manner of living …’ And the Catholic — economic downturn had come, and with it made servile by experience — curried favour
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Gamble’s route in 1818. Dunluce Giant's Causeway Castle Inishowen Bush Mills 1818 Coleraine Ballymoney www.fieldday.ieDerry ANTRIM Cloghhole DONEGAL DERRY Ballymena Lifford Strabane Ardstraw Magheracrheracregganeggan Newtownstewart Killeter Castle Gore TYRONE Lough Belfast Termonamongan Neagh Lough Omagh Derg Castle Caulfeild Fintona Dungannon FERMANAGH Lurgan Devinish Island DOWN ThornThornhillhill Richill Enniskillen Maguire's Bridge Armagh Belmore ARMAGH Monaghan Clones MONAGHAN
Cootehill LEITRIM CAVAN
LOUTH 0 40 km
Nobber
LONGFORD N
MEATH Navan
e n DUBLIN oy . B R
0 100 300 500 Phoenix Park
Metres OD Dublin Pigeon House
113 Views, 412–22. Here with ‘delegated greatness’, that is the agents affectionately terms it, he eagerly takes Gamble echoes Sampson’s and bailiffs of absentee landlords who were land at any rent, and bows down before concern that poor Catholics were being at once easily flattered and at the same time greatness, or its representation, in all that preferred for land over quick to extract exorbitant rents from the lowliness of prostration, which delegated Protestants: see Sampson, highest bidder, who were invariably the more greatness in a particular manner so loves. Statistical Survey, 503– emotional, pliant Catholics, not the rational, In a contest for land therefore he is sure 04, and Memoir, 336–41. unbending Presbyterians: to outbid, as by avaricious and short- sighted policy, he is to be preferred to his Long trampled on too and oppressed, more unbending Presbyterian antagonist; [the Catholic] is subservient when he is and scarcely is he settled when he takes not turbulent, and, thoughtless of remote a wife, and begets children to inherit his consequences, and fondly attached to his miseries, and possibly to avenge them.113 own country, to the soil, to the sod as he
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Hence, the ‘degradation’ of the ‘ill- description. Gamble writes from a point 114 Views, 422–23. fated’ Catholics was intimately connected after the future has ended, after a politics Although developed at greatest length in with the emigration of the Presbyterians. that sought a revolutionary break with the Views, the idea that a A Malthusian apocalypse was imminent. past — the radical Patriotism that produced political cataclysm (with But it would be war — not fever or famine the phantasmal Revolution of 1782 or the a demographic dynamic) www.fieldday.ieor emigration, all of which ‘operate too republican paramilitarism that pursued was imminent had been introduced in his slowly’ — that would check the growth the mirage of a revolution in 1798 — has accounts of his visits of in population: ‘I may be wrong, and decidedly passed away, but before a viable 1810 and 1812; see, for sincerely wish that I may, but I fear there new civil politics has emerged, its emergence example, A View, 380: is concentrated in Ireland causes sufficient inhibited by the dissipation of society and ‘In the country where I write this, and probably to erase half the actual generation from the manners, a dissipation that was itself, at at no very distant earth. It is a sleeping volcano, in which the least in part, a product of the rebellion he period of time, there fire of ages is pent up.’114 deplores and its suppression. And it is for may be a most awful this reason that Gamble’s various efforts struggle.’ Also see Brief Observations, 10–11. • at explaining what happened in his home- 115 McCormack, ‘Language, place in his lifetime only ever amount to Class and Genre’, John Gamble has been described as ‘a the shadow of a history. If memory rebuked 1106. It is also an northern supporter of the United Irishmen, the fiction that was becoming history in the insular assessment, indicative of a tendency or at least, a supporter of their general early 1800s, it also called up shades that, in 1970/1980s’ Ireland 115 policies’. It is an inadequate description. for Gamble, are beyond an emotionally to represent anybody Gamble may acknowledge and admire the satisfying explanation, not least the most concerned to establish heroism of executed United Irishmen and decent of men and women becoming rebels the causes of discontent as a ‘fellow traveller’ of enjoy the ‘society’ of surviving rebels, but prepared to take and sacrifice life and, once ‘men of violence’. And he repeatedly deplores rebellion — not the Rising is suppressed, those same decent it is wrong: the United only ‘the late unfortunate rebellion’ but people — or those of them who survived Irishmen proposed the rebellion itself, which he presents as — passing out of the public sphere, dying establishment of an Irish republic, yet John unnatural; he may explain why people in political terms. And hence the ghosts Gamble argues in Brief became rebels in the 1790s, but he still with whom Gamble sups and dines when he Observations, 13–14, regrets it, regarding their republicanism, recalls the late 1790s. that ‘Any dispassionate like their rebellion, as an unnecessary and person who considers the situation of [Ireland unwarranted step. Politically, Gamble and England] must might be better represented as a sentimental Haunted Houses be convinced, that Patriot: he writes reverentially of Henry whenever society became Grattan and expresses a high regard for I saw, I felt, but I cannot describe, the last advanced, they were intended to form one the old Irish parliament (if not for the moments of this horrible scene. Dragged empire of which England Dubliners who bemoan its loss). But from the mud and stones, they dashed a must necessarily be the sentimental Patriot is no less inadequate a mangled lump of flesh right across the head; she was interposed between Ireland and all the rest of Europe, and through her only, could Gamble was not to see the eruption he predicted. However, the crisis of 1815–18, which was arts, knowledge, and followed by another in 1821–22, proved a tipping point in both the demographic decline and the civilization pass to the cultural transformation of the Presbyterian community. A comment in the Preface to Charlton, lesser state.’ 116 Charles Robert Maturin, published in 1823, might be used to extend the argument here about feeling people becoming Melmoth the Wanderer ghosts. Gamble writes: ‘I came [in 1818] to the remote part where I write this, on a visit of a few (Oxford, 1998 [4 vols.; weeks, or at the most months, and I have stayed, I think years’ (italics added). The ‘I think’ is curious, 1820]), 256–57. Maturin suggesting that, as the cultural world that had shaped him changed beyond recognition, he himself inserted a footnote to the cavalry officer’s passed out of time and became ghostly. This extension of the argument is suggested by Jonathan question (‘Where was Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, Mass., 2007), which was the victim?’) and the brought to my attention by Luke Gibbons. response (‘Beneath
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your horse’s feet’): door of the house where I was. With his north-west.119 Indeed, Hamilton had been ‘this circumstance tongue hanging from his lacerated mouth, targeted for assassination on account of occurred in Ireland like that of a baited bull; with one eye his unusually vigorous efforts to disarm 1797, after the murder of the unfortunate Dr. torn from the socket, and dangling on United Irishmen in his own parish: at a Hamilton. The officer his bloody cheek; with a fracture in every time when wealthy loyalists were quitting www.fieldday.iewas answered, on limb, and a wound for every pore, he still their residences across north Donegal and inquiring what was howled for ‘life — life — life — mercy!’ moving into Derry, he had established a that heap of mud at his horse’s feet, — “The till a stone, aimed by some pitying hand, yeomanry corps, detained several prominent man you came for”.’ struck him down. He fell, trodden in one republicans and withstood a siege at his 117 The details of the moment into sanguine and discoloured glebe house. Such was his profile, that in assassination have mud by a thousand feet. The cavalry the wake of his killing, the Irish parliament often been confused. For instance, James came on, charging with fury. The crowd, voted a sizeable pension for his widow, Glassford, Notes of saturated with cruelty and blood, gave Sarah née Walker, and nine children, and Three Tours in Ireland way in grim silence. But they had not special orders were issued to General Lake to in 1824 and 1826 left a joint of his little finger — a hair of disarm Ulster.120 In time, the writer Charles (Bristol, 1832), 56, depicts him being his head — a slip of his skin. Had Spain Maturin would use the details of the killing killed at the Church of mor[t]gaged all her reliques from Madrid to describe a particularly gruesome murder Ireland bishop’s palace to Mon[t]serrat, from the Pyrenees to in his sprawling Gothic novel Melmoth in Raphoe (not Waller’s Gibraltar, she could not have recovered the Wanderer, and a memoir appended to rectory in Sharon); A. T. Q. Stewart, The Narrow the paring of a nail to canonize. The a tourist’s edition (1839) of ‘Hamilton’s Ground: Aspects of officer who headed the troop dashed his Antrim Coast’ would perpetuate the image Ulster, 1609–1969 horse’s hoofs into a bloody formless mass, of a loyalist martyr.121 (Belfast, 1997 [1977]), and demanded, ‘Where was the victim?’ Gamble met a man who had been at 118–19, has him killed in 1798 (not 1797), He was answered, ‘Beneath your horse’s Sharon on the night that Hamilton was done and W. J. McCormack, feet’; and they departed. to death. He met this man in the summer ‘Irish Gothic and Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the of 1812, the summer in which he wrote After’, in Deane, ed., Wanderer (1820)116 about the events of the late 1790s in the Field Day Anthology, vol. 2, 831–949, 833, most ghostly terms. The day before he met represents his killers as In March 1797 republicans assassinated him he had walked from Scott’s house in ‘agrarian assassins’ (not Dr. William Hamilton (b. 1757), rector of Toome to Dungiven. He had stopped that republicans). Fánaid, in the house of Dr. John Waller at night at ‘a little inn or public house’ where 118 William Hamilton, Letters Concerning the Sharon, near Newtowncunningham, some he ate a dinner of veal chops, roast mutton Northern Coast of the fifteen miles from Strabane.117 Hamilton, and boiled beef — he had only ordered County of Antrim … as a magistrate and a Church of Ireland the chops — washed down with a glass of (Dublin, 1786). The minister, was the embodiment of the whiskey, meaning parliament whiskey. ‘The volume went through a number of editions constitution in Church and state. He was malt liquor,’ he observed, ‘was bad, as is too in Hamilton’s lifetime, also very well connected. A former fellow frequently the case in Ireland, there being little including German of Trinity College Dublin and a founding inducement to make it good, for few people (Leipzig, 1787) and member of the Royal Irish Academy, he seem disposed to drink it. Spirits [meaning French (Paris, 1790) translations. Several was acquainted with leading figures in poitín] and water constitute the favourite editions were published academic and ecclesiastical circles and he beverage at dinner, and punch after it.’ in the nineteenth was respected abroad for a vulcanist treatise After dinner, and the bad malt liquor, century, the book serving on the Antrim coast (1786).118 He was Gamble went to ‘the bar’, where he found as a guide to the Giant’s Causeway. well known in political circles too. He had the landlady busy serving whiskey to a 119 William Hamilton, penned a vigorous attack on republicanism, large company and the landlord reading a Letters on the Principles Letters on the Principles of the French newspaper. He invited the landlord to take of the French Democracy Democracy, in 1792 and, in 1796, Dublin a glass of punch with him but he refused and Their Application and Influence on the Castle had solicited (and greatly appreciated) saying that he was ‘under a promise’ and Constitution and his analysis of the political situation in the could only take one glass in the day. Gamble
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knew such voluntary penance to be common; and virtue’ when a violent confrontation Happiness of Britain and people unable to refrain from drinking, between parliament and ‘the people’ had Ireland (Dublin, 1792). 120 On Sharon, see my preferred to restrain it, devising oaths that appeared imminent in autumn 1779.125 ‘Politicization and were hard to break yet easy to evade. A man He had later, in February 1782, been a Paramilitarism’, 263–69. might swear never to drink ‘except out of delegate of the Strabane Battalion to the first 121 Maturin would have www.fieldday.iethe hand of some lady or gentleman in his Dungannon Convention, which energized been familiar with the details of the neighbourhood’; hence, ‘When any merry- the final push for ‘independence’; there, assassination — his making is going forward in which he wishes he had distinguished himself by speaking cousin, Henry Maturin, to take his share, he waits patiently on the strongly in support of the relaxation of the succeeded Hamilton keeper of his conscience with a bottle of Penal Laws against Catholics.126 Besides as rector of Fánaid in 1797: see James B. whiskey, which he puts into her or his hands, having been Gamble’s minister in the 1780s, Leslie, comp., Raphoe and immediately takes back again into his Crawford had also been his teacher: he had Clergy and Parishes own.’ Or else a man might swear never to founded an academy in Strabane in 1785, (Enniskillen, 1940), drink whiskey as long as he lives; ‘he soaks which accepted students of all religions, 51. The memoir of Hamilton is in an edition bread in it, and gets drunk — he does not, he and prepared the best of them for Scottish of Letters Concerning 127 conceives, drink, he only eats it’. Or perhaps universities. The work that Gamble the Antrim Coast a man swore neither to drink in nor out of now silently recalled surveyed the history published by Samuel his own house, but drinks instead with one of Ireland from ‘our Milesian ancestors’ to Hart of Coleraine in 1839. The anonymous foot either side of the threshold, and ‘flatters the achievement of legislative independence, author of the memoir himself that he is not forsworn.’ which in 1783 had been imagined to be real, appears to have had Before retiring, Gamble asked the concluding with a vigorous argument for access to Hamilton’s landlord if he had any books. The landlord radical parliamentary reform, including the correspondence with Castle officials in had little but sermons, and Gamble, having extension of the franchise to Catholics.128 1796–97, suggesting read the like of them in his youth, did not And reading Temple and remembering he may have been wish to see, never mind think of reading. Crawford, as that rowdy company drank in Robert Marshall, a He opted for a copy of ‘Sir William [sic] the bar below, Gamble’s mind turned to the friend of Hamilton who was private secretary Temple’s account of the rebellion of 1641’, condition of Irish Catholics: to Thomas Pelham, an ultra-Protestant pornography of Catholic the chief secretary of violence first published in 1646 of which at It is impossible, without a sinking of Ireland in 1795–98. The least ten editions had appeared since then.122 the heart, to think of the fate of these author also had access to Hamilton’s children’s Perusing it made him mad. ‘Of all accounts generous and warm-hearted, though papers. of that unhappy period,’ he wrote, ‘his are often misguided and misled people, of 122 Gamble is here (264–65) the most partial, the most exaggerated and their sufferings, their proscriptions, their referring to John (not the most absurd. On reflection, he was not expulsions, and when actual violence William) Temple’s The Irish Rebellion (London, himself pleased with the performance, for had ceased, of the contempt which 1646). Two editions of he would not suffer it to pass through a unceasingly pursued them — the brutal Temple, the first since second edition.’ Here, a shadow has fallen scorn, the idiot laugh, the pointed finger, 1800, were issued that across Gamble’s page: the words (from which have marked with indelible letters, very year (1812) by London printers, one by ‘the most partial …’ to ‘… second edition’) the Catholic character, which has made Wilks and the other by are an unattributed direct quotation from past recollection almost predominate over White and Cochran; the William Crawford’s 1783 A History of future hope, which with great swelling Wilks edition had been Ireland.123 Crawford (1739–1800), who had heart and thrilling anguish … But I check prepared by Richard Musgrave, a leading been the Presbyterian minister of Strabane myself, lest my words should convey a anti-Catholic polemicist. in Gamble’s youth, was the epitome of meaning different from what I intend. 123 William Crawford, A the activist New Light clergymen of the Far be it from me to insinuate, or even History of Ireland, from late eighteenth century.124 He had been suppose, that the Catholics are not to the Earliest Period, to the Present Time …, 2 a Volunteer, serving as chaplain to the be gained by kindness, or that were vols. (Strabane, 1783), Strabane Rangers, and preaching to them they relieved from what they deem the vol. 2, 44. Crawford on ‘the connection betwixt moral courage degradation of their present condition, apparently began his
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History in winter 1781 — that December Lord Charlemont had offered ‘assistance’ to him provided he publish his ‘intended history’ www.fieldday.ieby subscription: see Strabane, 9 December 1781, William Crawford to Charlemont, quoted in J. T. Gilbert, ed., The Manuscripts and Correspondence of James, First Earl of Charlemont, 2 vols. (London, 1891–94), vol. 1, 389–90. A committee of seven ‘friends’, including Charlemont and Luke Teeling of Lisburn, a prominent Catholic politico, raised 600 (of a total 700) subscriptions to support the publication; see A History, vol. 1, viii. Also see LJ, 18 June 1782, where, responding to a suggestion by ‘Hibernicus’, Crawford announced that he would extend his history to ‘the present period — a period the boast of Irishmen, and which will shine with a brilliant lustre in the annals of the nation’. 124 For biographical details, see McConnell, Fasti, 136. 125 William Crawford, The Connection betwixt Courage and the Moral Virtues Considered, in a Sermon, Preached before the Volunteer Company of Strabane Rangers, on Sunday the Twelfth of September, 1779, and Published at their Desire (Strabane, 1779). the past would many years longer occupy Flodden Field; yet a celebrated Scotch Crawford delivered that strong hold on their imagination, poet has made it the subject of the only another major sermon during the Volunteer which it now assuredly does. Were poem resembling an epic one which his epoch: The Nature and present grievances removed, ancient country can boast of. Were a generous, Happy Effects of Civil ones in a few years would probably only and, therefore, a wise system of policy Liberty, Considered in be a subject for tales or ballads. What adopted towards Ireland, some future a Sermon, Preached before Colonel Stewart, event was ever more disastrous or less Catholic genius might find his hero in Lieut. Col. Charlton, honourable to a nation than that of King William, and might deck with all
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the charms of poetry, the battle of the on horseback. The horseman immediately the Strabane Volunteers, Boyne.129 dismounted and, ‘with the civility almost Strabane Rangers, and Urney Forresters. universal on an Irish road’, insisted that On Sunday, the 19th Having spent the night brooding over the the doctor take the horse while he walked of March, 1780. And brutal scorn, the idiot laugh, and the pointed alongside him for several miles. The two Published at their Desire www.fieldday.iefinger that had made Irish Catholics what men talked and it transpired, apparently (Strabane, 1780). The companies present they were and imagining a transformation, quite quickly, that the servant had been published resolutions if only Britain adopted a proper policy present in Waller’s house at Sharon when demanding the repeal of toward Ireland, Gamble woke early the next the republicans had arrived looking for the Declaratory Act, and morning to set out on foot for Strabane. William Hamilton. Gamble recollected the declaring that ‘We were born FREE. Liberty is As he was leaving the inn, the landlord event; he describes it as ‘almost the only our glorious birthright in was taking his ‘morning glass’ and, having murder committed in this part of the country support of which we are declined Gamble’s invitation the previous during the late rebellion’, an economical determined to risque our evening, he now asked him to partake. surmise given that several rebels may have property and everything dear to us upon earth.’ Gamble, who had taken a wry view of the been killed on that very stretch of road in See LJ, 24 March 131 landlord’s promise (guessing he had a large a single incident in 1797. And his own 1780. For commentary glass and gave himself a good measure), recollection and the report of this ‘eye on the meeting, see declined (he several times claims never to witness’, as Gamble described him, melded Strabane, 21 March 1780, James Hamilton drink in the morning), asking instead for a into a narrative of what passed at Sharon: to Abercorn, PRONI, draught of buttermilk. Abercorn Papers T/2451/ ‘That’s poor weakening liquor,’ said Doctor Waller was an old and almost IA1/13/19. the landlord, ‘its enough to give a man the bed-ridden clergyman. Mrs. Waller was a 126 Patrick Rogers, The Irish Volunteers and Catholic dropsy.’ middle-aged woman; their house was in a Emancipation (1778– ‘I was going to make the same lonely spot, nearly a mile from any other 1793): A Neglected Phase observation of yours,’ shot back the doctor, habitation. Doctor Hamilton, fatigued, of Ireland’s History ‘it is slow poison.’ exhausted both in body and mind, arrived (London, 1934), 70. 127 On the academy, ‘Slow indeed,’ sniffed the landlord, ‘I there on horseback an hour before it see LJ, 12 July; 16 have taken it many a long year, and never was dark. ‘I am come,’ said he, ‘to beg August; 6 December; found it did me any harm, but a great deal the shelter of your roof for this night 13 December 1785; of good.’ — to claim it rather — I am unable to go 11 April; 31 October 1786; 23 October; As he walked out the door, Gamble farther, nor will I leave this unless I am 13 November 1787, could hear the man with the good measure turned out.’ and SJ, 18 October; muttering behind him: ‘Slow poison, indeed! He was a rector of a parish near the 29 November 1785; May be I will be stout and hearty when you sea side; he had rendered himself very 9 May 1786. Also see Anon., Regulations of are laid under the sod.’ obnoxious to the United Irishmen, by the Strabane Academy. The doctor walked ten miles before the opposition he gave their system, and And an Address to the stopping for breakfast at a large house even his friends allow that he committed Students in General, on denoted by the sign of a white cross; two a number of harsh, if not cruel actions. Opening that Seminary, Delivered on Monday, hundred years later, the tavern is still there, As rebellion became more powerful, his November the 7th, 1785 130 still denoted by a white cross. Travellers, situation became more perilous, and it … by W. Crawford D.D. it occurred to Gamble, often meet crosses required all his address to get clear of with an Address to the and ‘the cross’ in this instance was the his own house, and to pass through the Students in the Class of Languages by W. breakfast, a mediocre one marred by bad tea different parties that were lying in wait Taggart A.M., and an and coarse sugar. He was soon on the road to murder him. Mr. Waller reluctantly Address to the Students again. It was a beautiful day: ‘the sun shone consented to his stopping that night in the of the Mathematical in mild brightness against a serene sky, in house. After tea, Mrs. Waller, two young Class by J. T. Murray (Strabane, 1785). whose blue bosom I contemplated the image ladies, visitors, and Doctor Hamilton, 128 Crawford, A History, of aetherial repose we hope for after death’. sat down in the parlour to a rubber of vol. 1, 28. He was overtaken by a gentleman’s servant whist. They had not finished the first 129 A View, 267–68.
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The poem is Scott’s game, when the window shutters were were present at the killing; Friel was a Marmion: A Tale violently thrown open, and a number of Catholic, but Floyd was a Presbyterian like of Flodden Field voices called loudly for the unfortunate James Kinkaid of Newtowncunningham, (Edinburgh, 1808). 133 130 The premises is The Inn Hamilton. He started wildly up, and the most deeply implicated suspect. at the Cross, a well- rushed to the door. The men without Gamble’s rather convoluted reasoning was www.fieldday.ieknown small hotel, on fired. Mrs. Waller crossed the room at an that nobody having been convicted of the the Glenshane Road. instant, and received a shot in her side, of assassination, the killers must have been 131 On this incident, near Newbuildings, see my which she died a few minutes afterwards. Catholics, as Catholics were less likely to ‘Politicization and Doctor Hamilton ran down to the cellar, inform. Again, the official record suggests Paramilitarism’, 262. where he concealed himself. The assassins that the prime informers in the north- Gamble also refers to with shouts of vengeance, desired him west were those men who could be most Hamilton at the Giant’s Causeway in 1818: to be sent out, threatening, otherwise, easily intimidated. For instance, militia- Views, 390–91. to set fire to the house, and to murder men suborned by the United Irishmen and 132 A View, 269–71. everyone in it. Overcome by weakness facing summary execution once exposed, 133 Derry, 4 March 1797, and fear, overwhelmed with grief for the devastated the organization in the north- R. G. Hill to John Beresford, National loss of his wife, and, probably, irritated west; these men were predominantly Archives of Ireland, against the innocent cause of her death, Catholics.134 But Gamble and the man who Rebellion Papers Doctor Waller gave the fatal mandate. had been at Sharon should have their say: [hereafter, NAI, RP] The servants dragged the wretched man 620/29/29; Letterkenny, 27 March 1797, from the cellar — trembling, quivering, There were probably about twenty of John Rea to Sackville convulsed, grasping at every thing he them. They had traversed partly by land, Morgan, NAI, RP could lay hold of. With the mortal and partly by water, a distance of nearly 620/29/116. heart-sinking which sudden and violent thirty miles, yet, what is most singular, 134 Derry, 7 December 1796, John Bagwell to death inspires, he was dragged along not one of them has ever since been [Edward Cooke], NAI, and thrown out to his murderers, who discovered. It is a question, often and RP 620/26/104; Derry, dispatched him with as many wounds warmly discussed in Ireland, whether Wed. night, George as Caesar was in the capitol. Then they they were Catholics or Protestants. Some Hill to Edward Cooke; Examination of Patrick mounted their horses, and rode quietly have supposed they were a mixture Baldwin, Private in away.132 of both. I am not of that opinion; the the Tipperary Militia, union which took place between the 7 December 1796; It is a matter-of-fact account, if inaccurate two sects, was a most unnatural one. Examination of George Hennessey, Private in on minor details (Hamilton had sent his I mean unnatural, with a reference to the Tipperary Militia, servant to Waller’s to announce that he Irish nature, modified by habit and 7 December 1796, would be coming), moderately ambiguous circumstance. It was kept up only by NAI, RP 620/26/107; (the assassination of Caesar involves both success; misfortune, or the dread of Information of David Dobbyn, Serjeant republican idealism and personal betrayal), punishment, always resolved it into Tipperary Militia, and a little melodramatic (the horsemen its elemental particles, and mutual 21 March 1797, riding quietly away adds a Gothic touch). altercation and mistrust prevailed. On NAI, RP 620/29/99; Gamble appends his own speculations about these occasions, the Protestant almost Information of Patrick Hickey, Private in the the identity of the killers. Here, he makes always was the informer. The fidelity Tipperary Regiment, 23 a tendentious argument that they were of the Catholic could rarely be shaken. March 1797, NAI, RP Catholics who had come down from the I do not here attribute to him greater 620/29/111. mountains of Fánaid; they had, he writes virtue, but greater zeal. His opposition — adding to the eerie mood — travelled over to government was, in some degree, twenty miles by land and water, a common his settled habit; it was in some degree phrase in stories of the supernatural. That his ordinary and habitual movement; argument is at odds with the authorities’ it was the vertigo of the Protestant, conviction in 1797 that only two men from and required the perpetual agitation of Fánaid, James Friel and Robert Floyd, movement to keep it up — whenever he
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stood still, it subsided. He played only, if to burn Sharon glebe, the Wallers’ cook, 135 Sketches, 271–73. I may be permitted to use the expression, Mrs. Squires, had single-handedly pulled 136 A View, 257–75, gives Gamble’s account of the for the counter of speculative freedom, Hamilton from the cellar and ordered night spent in Dungiven which circumstances led him to prize McCafferty to turn him out. McCafferty, and the encounter with more than formerly. But the Catholic without saying a word, had then dragged the gentleman’s servant. www.fieldday.ieplayed for life, for what is dearer than Hamilton by the hair to the hall door and 137 Dublin Evening Post, 30 September 1797; life — he had set his all on the hazard of thrust him through it.137 Yeomanry officers Belfast Newsletter, a die, and he played with a constancy, who interrogated him in the hours after 22 September 1797. a fidelity, a devotedness, equal to the the attack had judged McCafferty ‘a horrid McCafferty (sometimes greatness of the stake. savage’ and lodged him in Lifford Gaol.138 McClafferty) and Sheils were the only male Government, therefore, was probably However, when McCafferty stood trial for servants in the house on benefitted [sic] rather than injured by murder at the Donegal assizes in September the night of the attack. the share the Protestant had in the 1797, the presiding judge, Baron George, 138 Ballymacool, 9 March rebellion, hanging, as he often did, a dead said there was no evidence McCafferty had 1797, John Boyd to Bob [Mansfield], NAI, weight about the neck of his associate, any ‘previous intent’ to harm Hamilton. ‘The RP 620/29/46, refers restraining his efforts, and discovering case,’ he said, ‘was not unlike that of two to McCafferty as a his plans. The events of that day, (at men falling into the sea and having a plank, savage. Also see n.p., least as far as the present generation are sufficient to save the life of one, but not of n.d. [Sharon, 3 March 1797], R. G. Hill to concerned)[,] have placed an everlasting both; in which case … it would be no crime Earl of Cavan, NAI, RP bar between the two — the one has no for one to push the other off the plank as 620/29/13, reporting wish to be trusted; but, if he had, no self-preservation was the first principle of the killing and that inducement, I dare say, would prevail our nature.’ The jury acquitted McCafferty McCafferty had been arrested ‘as from his on the other to trust him. Rebellion, without leaving the box.139 Shiels, although manner of dragging therefore, should it ever again, for the never charged with any offence, became Mr. Hamilton from the misfortune of these kingdoms, take place the subject of innuendo in Fánaid. John cellar, he appears to in Ireland, would likely be confined to Maturin, a son of Rev. Henry Maturin, have been actuated by something more than one great homogenous body, animated Hamilton’s successor, heard that Shiels, a terror.’ by one soul, directed to one object, and, Catholic or a convert or the descendant 139 Dublin Evening Post, 30 therefore, I should conceive, infinitely of a convert, dampened the powder in the September 1797. more dangerous.135 pans of Hamilton’s pistols. Perhaps he did, 140 James Reid Dill, The Dill Worthies (Belfast, 2nd. but the plot (betrayal from within by the ed., 1892), 98–99. Having raked over the events at Sharon, trusted ‘other’) is a ‘dreary steeple’ in Irish Gamble and the gentleman’s servant stopped Protestant polemic and there is no evidence in Dunny Manra (Donemana), a little that the authorities attached any blame to village whose inhabitants had been strongly him at the time.140 One suspects that the republican in the 1790s (though Gamble horseman was McCafferty, if only because a does not say so), ‘to take some refreshment’. man from the Laggan was more likely than And refreshed, they parted there. The one from Fánaid to be on the road from gentleman’s servant rode off to the left, up Dungiven to Strabane. into the mountains. Gamble went forward Barney McCafferty, if he was the alone, and on foot as formerly.136 horseman, was a haunted man, his life defined by the horror of a single night that • he would revisit time and again, even with a stranger met on a country road at the height The unnamed horseman was one of two of summer. Yet it was not McCafferty but men: he was Barney McCafferty or William a haunted house that would give Gamble Shiels, respectively Waller’s and Hamilton’s the greatest pause. Gamble saw this house servants. When the republicans (who had during his third documented visit to Strabane already killed Waller’s wife) had threatened (1818). On this trip, he was more morose
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141 Views, 341. about ‘the ravages of time’, ‘the wreck of one now remains. I know not, nor did 142 Views, 67, 95–96, 98, time’, than he had been in 1810 and 1812; I venture to ask, whether he mourns or 104. he was also more disillusioned with the dull rejoices over him.143 143 Thornhill is in the parish of Trory. The realties of Irish politics and more despairing clergyman was probably about what he saw as a dismal demographic Arriving in Strabane, he lays eyes on www.fieldday.ieWilliam Weir, perpetual dynamic.141 The world-weary mood was set his 74-year-old mother. Seeing her now, he curate of Trory. He had even before he reached Strabane. In Dublin, wonders which of them has had the lonelier entered Trinity College, Dublin, as a sizar, or he met a friend from college whom he life — he who went alone into the wide poor student, in June scarcely recognized, as he was so ‘kneaded world, or she who has spent her life in the 1762 and was still living and moulded by the slow-moving hand of one place, now in old age confronted at in early 1818. James B. time’, and in Cootehill the elderly woman every turn by reminders of all that time has Leslie, comp., Clogher Clergy and Parishes with whom he stopped eight years earlier taken from her: (Enniskillen, 1929), 252, was herself now dead: ‘To the little inn, only lists a single child, a I retired disconsolate and it lessened not We arrived in Strabane … and I again son, for him. the feeling of melancholy, that, long as I beheld the place of my birth. I beheld 144 Views, 153–54. had known Cootehill, it was the first time too the aged parent to whom I owe that I had ever sought, or had occasion to seek birth. I beheld her with pleasure; but it the shelter of one.’ He spent two nights was a pleasure in which there was pain; there, visiting places he had once known the bowed down head was stooped still well — walking through the apparently lower; the dim eye was dimmed further; unoccupied house in which he had stayed in and the weakened limbs trembled more. 1810 (and years earlier) — thinking of ‘the It has been my lot, whether good or loss of long gone friends’. ‘My sleep even bad, to be a wanderer; amidst the scenes was not repose,’ he wrote of that last night of her youth, she has grown old; never in Cootehill, ‘for all the deceased friends has she changed, nor perhaps wished of my waking thoughts, clad in their burial to change her place. But the mountains garments, came to visit me, and to invite me which bounded her narrow horizon to be one of them.’142 Later, at Thornhill, could not shut her out from care. It has outside Enniskillen, he and a distant followed her over them, and made her die relative, an elderly Protestant clergyman a hundred times in the loss of those she whom he had not seen for years, spent the has loved. Could we enter the heart, and night ‘carousing’. But cold rum punch only read its secret thoughts, she dies perhaps brought on bitter melancholy: further, as every green tree, and field, and bush, reminds her of the years that For a while we drained the bowl in all are flown. The daisied bank opposite her due jollity; but the jollity of an old man garden is the same on which, in happy is fleeting as his few remaining years, infancy, she gathered wild flowers; and and as the liquor exerted its influence, the setting sun which sheds lustre on her age’s natural disposition more and more windows, lighted up in this very room appeared. … In wine there is truth, and her opening years and blooming hopes. liquor opened wide the sluices of my To cheerless age, the earth no longer kind host’s eyes as well as his heart; pours forth flowers; and neither rising nor merriment gave way to thoughtfulness setting sun can warm with joy the languid and thoughtfulness to tears. In bitter heart, on which is the chill of more than anguish, he recalled to mind the friends threescore and fourteen years.144 whom are for ever gone, of whom my father was the dearest, and wept over the His first few days in Strabane six fine sons by whom he was surrounded were unsettled. He visited a ‘few’ old when I last saw him, and of whom only acquaintances and made his favourite
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walks, but he found ‘every thing changed, [These] high hills which recall to my 145 Views, 155–56. and changed for the worse’. ‘Since I remembrance my receding years in 146 Views, 168–69. was last here,’ he writes, ‘this town and morning’s brightness, throw evening’s neighbourhood have been visited by lengthening shadows on my coming ones, two almost of the heaviest calamities and not these high hills only, but every www.fieldday.iewhich can befal[l] human beings. Fever green field and low bush, and wide street and famine have been let loose, and it and narrow lane, and lone house, revives is hard to say which has destroyed the some recollection, and haunts me with the most.’ Gamble was here referring to the ghost of former days. If I walk upwards, hunger and disease that ravaged Ireland I pass the ancient meeting house where in 1815–18, when pummelled by a I was early taught to look to heaven as combination of environmental, economic a habitation, and to regard as nothing and epidemiological blows, regional society this vain and transitory world; if I go had come close to collapse. By the end of downwards I see the green lane, where still that summer, he would argue that Ireland stands the deserted school-room, to which, now faced a demographic crisis that, given with shining morning face, I trudged not the country’s cultural and political divisions, unwillingly to school; and if I stand still, was liable to result in sectarian war. In the I have full in view the market-house, first days at home, however, it is the social where I played a thousand times with dislocation that captured his attention. He companions not one of whom remains. himself describes how A few are gone to America, but by far the greater number are dead. Many hord[e]s of wandering beggars, impelled by shipwreck and battle, many more by by the cravings of hunger, carried the sickness, and some no doubt by sorrow; a distemper from door to door; and, from disease which though inserted in no bill of their wretched habiliments, wafted mortality, kills more than we are aware. contagion far and wide. Almost the entire I walk therefore nearly as much alone mountain population, literally speaking, as I should in the wilds of America, and took up their beds and walked; and, somewhat I have of their solitariness too. with their diseased blankets wrapped Commerce, as well as riches, seems to have around them, sought in the low lands, the taken its flight; and in these very streets succour which charity could not give, but where not many years back was all the at the hazard of life. bustle of business, I wander up and down almost as undisturbed as in the fields.146 Irish people, he remarked, have always been indulgent of beggars; and the poor Standing in the town square, he recalled in turn claimed charity ‘as a matter less of that it was once inhabited by ‘a numerous favo[u]r than of right’; now, in ‘frightful gentry, social, hospitable and gay; but numbers’ they had ‘besieged every house, these have almost all passed away, and the and forced their way into kitchens, parlours, houses, where so oft was heard the sounds and even rooms the most remote’.145 of merriment and laughter, are fallen in Against this background, he never shakes ruins or mouldering in decay’. One of the off the morose mood. He returns time and now ruined houses was where, in his youth, again to think about how the town has the ‘venerable old rector’ lived; he could changed from a bustling happy place, a see him still in his mind’s eye, ‘with large prosperous place, to a depressed, lonesome, grizzle wig, and gold-headed cane to prop moribund place, and to think about his his tottering steps’, as he walked to his little friends that are gone: rural church.147 Near that house was the building where General Carleton, earl of
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147 Adam Harvey (c. 1710– Dorchester, who commanded the British at Gamble had in his youth been a frequent 93), rector of Strabane the Battle of Quebec (1775), was reputed caller at this house that reminded him of in 1769–93, was the old to have been born. Gamble had little time Ireland and on intimate terms with the man here remembered. See James B. Leslie, for Carleton; he concedes that he was ‘the extended Crawford family. He writes that comp., Derry Clergy and only remarkable person which this town when he first arrived in England, Crawford’s www.fieldday.ieParishes (Enniskillen, has produced’, but says no one living in brother, Adair Crawford (1748–95), a 1937), 133, 297, 299, Strabane remembers anything of him but celebrated surgeon and chemist, had assisted and Leslie, comp., Raphoe, 44, 61, 126. that he was born in the barracks and that him in his medical career in London; he does 148 Views, 169–74. On his father was a collector of excise. And not volunteer the information that another Richard Montgomery, remembering Carleton, he remarks that brother, Alexander (1755–1823), himself see Hal T. Shelton, Richard Montgomery, the ‘gallant general’ a physician in Lisburn, was to become a General Richard Montgomery and the who led the Americans against him, was key figure in the provincial leadership of American Revolution: a brother of Alexander Montgomery, the republican movement, or that a third From Redcoat to Rebel Donegal’s Independent MP, who, when a brother, John (1746–1813), was one of the (New York, 1994); boy, he had seen being chaired through the leading doctors in Baltimore, Maryland, and on Alexander, see Edith Mary Johnston- streets; he does not recall that ‘Old Sandy’ a prominent member (with Robert Moore Liik, History of the won his last election in 1797 by releasing and George Douglas) of the city’s Hibernian Irish Parliament, republican freeholders from Lifford Gaol to Society.150 William Crawford, however, 1692–1800: Commons, vote for him, fought a duel with one of the Gamble now remembered as ‘an excellent Constituencies and Statutes, 6 vols. (Belfast, more obnoxious local loyalists later that year man’, a ‘pious good man’, respected in 2002), vol. 5, 276–80, and, that when he won, United Irishmen had Strabane by people of all religions and and, on his victory carried him home to Convoy.148 Gamble’s descriptions. A brilliant classical scholar, in the 1797 election, eyes then falling on another neglected he ‘scarcely ever’ tasted ale, wine or spirits my ‘Paramilitarism and Politicization’, house, he remembered its occupant, William — ‘his only relaxation was the tea-table, 276. The election cast Crawford, Presbyterian minister, Volunteer and hearing his daughter play on the piano- a long shadow; see chaplain, delegate to Dungannon, and forte’. There was a ‘sensitive delicacy’ Strabane, 24 October Patriot historian. He here gives a striking about him and if no one dared smile in his 1809, James Hamilton to Abercorn, PRONI, description of this house, connecting its fate presence, people often smiled behind his Abercorn Papers T2541/ with Ireland and remarking that when in back. Gamble, as a boy, had seen in his IA2/18/17, discussing London the residence of the king of England daughter’s music-books how the minister how tenants had voted had reminded him of it: had struck out every expression and word twelve years earlier in ‘that cursed election’. which, even by inference, could be thought 149 Views, 183–84. His house is now a barrack, his study a to sully her innocence. It must be a puzzle 150 Views, 175–84. On guard-room, and the windows which so to many, Gamble mused, that ‘so Christian the Crawfords, see often I have seen fragrant with the rose a man as he truly and unaffectedly was’ A. Atkinson, Ireland Exhibited to England and geranium, I yesterday saw shattered should have taken so deep an interest in in a Political and and broken, hung with belts and pouches, ‘the passing transactions of this fleeting and Moral Survey of Her and soldiers’ coarse shirts. It is only part of unsatisfactory world’, meaning politics, Population …, 2 vols. a large mansion, which often in times past as to write A History of Ireland. It was an (London, 1823), vol. 2, 187–88, and Edward put me in mind of Buckingham House, or important book, the first by a Protestant to Cupples, ‘Parishes of rather Buckingham House put me in mind say that Irish Catholics were ‘more sinned Glenavy, Camlin and of it. The other part has lately been fitted against than sinning’. But the freedom and Tullyrusk’, in Mason, up as a private dwelling, and the mobbled prosperity that Crawford so confidently comp., Statistical Account, vol. 2, 215–80, house only looks the more hideous for celebrated in 1783 had been an illusion; esp. 270–71, 280. On this. It may be compared, as the ill-fated hindsight could only mock his vision of a John Crawford, who land, to which it belongs not unaptly has bright future for Ireland. He had died aged settled in Baltimore been, to a beautiful woman well-dressed only sixty and his family had fallen on hard in 1796, see David L. Cohern, ‘Crawford, to the middle, but her limbs shrunk in times: his daughter was now a ‘cheerless John’, in American poverty, and covered with rags.149 wanderer’, having emigrated with her
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husband and children to America where they Strabane in 1810, ‘a curious anonymity is National Biography, slipped into destitution; a son had sailed imposed on certain figures, as if they were to 24 vols. (New York and Oxford, 1999), for the West Indies on a ship that sank, and be treated not so much as particular people vol. 5, 701–03, and his wife had died ‘of the most excruciating whose careers might be verified but as if Harold A. Williams, tortures of a cancer, which corroded even to they were references in a manifest fiction History of the Hibernian www.fieldday.iethe heart’s blood’.151 masquerading as real human beings’.153 An Society of Baltimore (Baltimore, 1957), argument here has been that the figures met 2–3. Also see History of • on Gamble’s tours were ‘real human beings’ Congregations, 761, and and that, in some instances, their lives can be Campbell, Notes, 64–67. Such then was John Gamble’s home-place: ‘verified’, but that in the case of republicans 151 Views, 182–84, includes a touching description it was a place gone quiet, the push and — indeed, in the case of feeling people of Crawford’s farewell energy spent, a place corroded even to the — their lives had been rendered unreal, not sermon in October 1798. heart’s blood — it was dead. Some of his by the author, but by the ‘manifest fiction’ It is unclear if Gamble contemporaries considered there to be a which became history in the degraded society was present, though elsewhere he indicates tension between fact and fiction, the real and manners that congealed post-1798. that he was in Ireland and the imagined in his representation of that year. that home-place. For instance, writing about 152 ‘Gamble’s View of A View, his 1812 journey, one reviewer The End Ireland’, Eclectic Review, 10 (September — clearly taken with Mr. C——’s story of 1813), 229–43. Also William and Harriet — commented: Think of me, therefore, as of one whom see William Shaw you shall never again behold; think of Mason, Bibliotheca But we really cannot tell whether he me, if possible, with kindness; and when Hibernicana: or, A Descriptive Catalogue means it to be all believed or not. He in your walks you trace fancied figures of a Select Irish Library, assumes most fully indeed the manner amidst the evening’s grey mist, think of Collected for the of a person relating what he knows or me as one of those — as a phantom that Right Hon. Robert believes to be facts, only concealing has vanished, or a tale that is told. Peel (Dublin, 1823), 47, where Gamble’s names under initials; but he begins and John Gamble, Charlton (1823)154 accounts of his tours ends without saying any thing precisely of 1810 and 1812 are on the subject of the authentication of the Towards the end of summer 1812, John described as ‘abounding story, while he might have been sensible Gamble tried to sum up what he thought of in entertaining anecdote, to be perused with some that a more established name than he his people, the people of north-west Ulster caution, as the author is can suppose his to be, would have been — Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter. ‘The thought to have allowed requisite for such a narrative, if it was to people seem highly superstitious here,’ he his imagination at times be given without any of the formalities wrote. And that was unusual; superstition, to take excursions at the expense of truth.’ of evidence. Indeed he will expect every with the decline of darkness, was fading 153 McCormack, ‘Language, 155 reader to challenge the authenticity of a away. And so Gamble set himself Class and Genre’, history so full of romantic incidents, of to explaining why his people remained 1106–07. Ironically, surprising changes of feeling, of tragical unusually superstitious and, here, he rejected McCormack was here discussing the and overwhelming misery, and of retired the idea that physical environment alone second edition of circumstances and communications which shapes culture, and looked instead to lived Sketches, oblivious to it is impossible to conceive how the and imagined experience: the fact that it silently relator could know.152 reproduces some of the final chapters of The country itself may give such a Gamble’s 1812 tour Likewise, and in similar terms, a modern character — awful and majestic in — when presented as critic, concerned to relate Gamble’s travel its quiescent [moments], but forlorn part of his 1810 journey, writing to the making of the Irish historical and dreary, howling with tempests, these passages are a fiction. McCormack novel (not, surprisingly, the Gothic novel), roaring with cataracts, and darkened has provided a rich and has observed that towards the end of with clouds, in its troubled moments, suggestive reading of Sketches, that is, when Gamble reaches it may naturally be supposed to Gothic writing by people
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(Maturin, Maxwell, excite corresponding emotions in the And is this then, the history of man Carleton, Le Fanu, natives. A fondness for the marvellous, — is this the end of his joys, and his Lever, Stoker, Wilde, a shuddering at the indistinct, a sorrows, his hopes and his fears — is Yeats, Synge and Bowen) ‘attached to some degree superstitious dread of futurity, have been it for this he traverses countries, and to the (once) Established remarked in almost all of the northern wanders over oceans — is it for this the www.fieldday.ieChurch of Ireland.’ See nations. But beside the physical influence extremes of the earth are ransacked, to his ‘Irish Gothic and of climate, there has been in Ireland procure him raiment and food — is it After’, 831–949. Gamble might be considered the moral influence of events. It was for this he is a villain — is it for this he to have contributed to natural that the wild ideas of superstition inflicts misery, and sacrifices thousands to another corpus of Gothic should take possession of a people so his ambition? writing — one largely accustomed to gloomy transactions, and Is it for this beauty disdains deformity? produced by people from the Presbyterian that nursed to slaughter, and suckled as — they are both disdained here. community concerned it were to blood, all their notions should Is it for this riches disdains poverty? with the lost opportunity be tinged with it. It was natural that they — they are both poor here. (and lost history) of should turn to the phantoms of their Is it for this fashion shrinks from 1798; here, one thinks of the writings (in various imagination, rather than to the objects vulgarity? — they are both of one fashion genres) of Classon of their reason, and that these ideas here. Emmet Porter, George (gradually softening by time) should Oh, man! In wisdom an infant, but in Sigerson, W. G. Lyttle, be handed down from generation to folly full-grown, raise your head above R. M. Young, Florence 156 M. Wilson and Stewart generation, even to the present. the stars but, your feet rest here — deck Parker. yourself with jewels, but your garment is 154 Charlton, vol. 3, 236. The half-sighted doctor’s point was simple: a shroud — feed yourself with dainties, The sentence is uttered, in Ireland, as in any colonial society, nursed but a worm will feed upon you — build at the end of the second- 158 last chapter, by a man to slaughter and suckled to blood, all ghosts palaces, but this is your abode. going into exile after the are political.157 1798 Rising. It is echoed On a Sunday in that same summer of For Gamble, it was an unusually frank in the final line of the 1812, Gamble went to church in Strabane. comment on the human condition. Although penultimate chapter (vol. 3, 244), when, He did not go inside, but wandered instead a man of a decidedly humanist cast of mind, years after the event, through the churchyard, looking at the he was prone to occasional affirmations of the hero has come to tombstones. ‘A church-yard is the best his belief in a ‘creator’ and an afterlife.159 regard the Rising, ‘its temple,’ he explained, ‘and a tombstone the But now, he said it as he saw it: this is it; this idle hopes and wishes, as a phantom that has best sermon — I could have heard none so is the end. vanished, or a tale that good within.’ Almost twenty years later, on 4 May 1831, was told’. He spent over an hour there, trying ‘to when he had been back home in Strabane 155 On darkness, see A. penetrate the darkness of the tomb’: for thirteen years, Gamble walked over the Roger Ekirch, At Day’s Close: Night in Times bridge to Lifford to attend the funeral of Mrs. Past (New York and In fancy I contemplated those sheeted Despard Humphreys. Humphreys’s daughter, London, 2005), a study tenants of the grave, each in his narrow Ann Jane, was married to William Gamble of with a number of Irish house — I saw the changed face, the Strabane, most probably a relation of John’s, examples. On the decline of superstition, see W. hideous yellow of the body newly making his attendance something of an E. H. Lecky’s History of buried — I saw the blackening hue of obligation.160 the Rise and Influence of putrefaction, the decaying garments, As he crossed the bridge, Gamble the Spirit of Rationalism the crawling worms of what had lain would have seen Croaghan Hill, where in Europe, 2 vols. (New York, 1865), which longer in the ground — I saw the green the Volunteers had staged field days and is here of particular and melted mass of the next stage of this reviews in the early 1780s. In Lifford, as interest given Lecky’s shocking process, and the consummation he crossed The Diamond, he would have writings on eighteenth- of all, in the little heap of dust, about to seen the public houses where Alexander century Ireland. 156 A View, 365. be mingled with the great mass of matter, Montgomery had entertained his supporters from which it sprung. from his first election in 1768 down to his
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Dice and shaker given by James Napper Tandy to James and Andrew Stilley of Ballindrait: the Stilleys had regularly visited Tandy, when he was a prisoner in Lifford. Donegal Historical www.fieldday.ieSociety Museum. Photo: Vincent O’Donnell.
Ballindrait, where the dead woman was born, was home to some implacable republicans, notably 157 I owe this observation brothers James (b. 1765) and Andrew Stilley, the local mill-owners. Andrew had been a county (in Ireland all ghosts delegate to the Ulster provincial committee of the United Irishmen in the late 1790s, and both are political) to Seamus Deane. men remained active radicals after the Rising. They visited the republican celebrity, James Napper 158 A View, 375–76. Tandy, when he was held in Lifford Gaol in 1799–1802; Andrew’s frequent trips to Dublin attracted 159 One contemporary Government attention in 1808 and James attended Daniel O’Connell’s duel with John D’Esterre reader dismissed on the Curragh in 1815. The Stilleys were cousins of Rev. James Porter (1753–98), a native of Gamble’s repeated claims to accept ‘the Tamnawood, Ballindrait, who became a republican propagandist and was executed at Greyabbey, immortality of the soul’ County Down, in 1798, and they had sheltered his son, Alexander, in the immediate aftermath of and castigated him the Rising. As late as the 1820s, the village’s predominantly Presbyterian inhabitants were being for ‘disbelief’; see the fingered as troublesome. In January 1822, for instance, the Bishop of Raphoe wrote to Dublin long review of Sarsfield in the British Critic, Castle, complaining of nightly meetings in Ballindrait, ‘which has always collected together the worst 3 (February 1815), spirits [and] has been a constant source of annoyance & danger to the inhabitants of this part of 208–16, where aspersion the country …’. That same month, Sir George F. Hill, the leader of north-western loyalism, warned is also cast on the role of Dublin Castle that ‘Many efforts, hitherto thank God ineffectual, have been made to produce a superstition in the novel. 160 On this marriage, see reorganization between Roman Catholick [and] Presbyterian upon the former United Irish principle.’ Strabane Morning Post, Some ghosts, then, were restless. 24 June 1823. See Raphoe, 7 January 1822, Bishop of Raphoe to William Gregory, NAI, State of the Country Papers Series I 2359/1; Derry, 27 January 1822, Sir George Hill to William Gregory, State of the Country Papers Series I 2360/7. On Andrew Stilley in Dublin, see ‘Alphabetical List of Suspects, 1798–1803’ [despite the title, it includes suspects active at specific dates after 1803], NAI, RP 620/12/217. There are extracts from James Stilley’s conversations (in 1845) with Classon Emmet Porter (1814–85) in Robert M. Young, Ulster in ’98: Episodes and Anecdotes (Belfast, 1893), 18–19, 58–60; also see Classon Emmet Porter, Irish Presbyterian Biographical Sketches (Belfast, 1883), 16–19.
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161 Kinkaid jumped bail in final victory in 1797. And he would have 1798, had been among the last to relinquish summer 1797. Floyd certainly seen the hulking prison where men their arms and people from St. Johnston, was arrested in Fánaid strongly implicated in the killing of William who would have known the family of Oliver that June, brought into Derry and then sent out Hamilton had been held — James Friel and Bond and shared his republicanism, but of the country. Friel was Robert Floyd of Fánaid and John Kinkaid particularly people from the dead woman’s www.fieldday.ietaken up the following of Newtowncunningham, none of whom own town, Ballindrait, who had ventured month, but released in was convicted yet none of whom remained all and lost in 1798. All ghosts — what had September on giving 161 bail; in summer 1798 at home. He would have seen too the actually happened in their youth denied an he left for America, courthouse from which Barney McCafferty, honest account in print, only spoken about, where he became clerk the haunted man he may have met on the and then only quietly, and more often than to the inspector of road to Donemana in 1812, had walked a not at night, when true stories were told as state prisons in New York. Letterkenny, free man having been acquitted of murdering ghost stories. 17 July 1797, John the man he had helped to kill. On this occasion, the half-sighted doctor Rea to ——, NAI, RP The dead woman being well known went into the church rather than wandering 620/31/241; Derry, and well to do, there was probably a large through the churchyard. And there on 12 June 1797, R. G. Hill to John Beresford, attendance at the funeral — people from a spring day, in the church in Lifford, NAI, RP 620/31/78; Strabane and Lifford, but also from the during the reading of the funeral service, Copy of Information Presbyterian towns and villages of the surrounded by ghosts, John Gamble died.162 of John Dougherty, Laggan — people from Castlefin, who, in Manor Cunningham, 9 July 1797, NAI, RP 620/31/214; New York, 20 November 1799, James Friel to Rev. James Friel, Rossnakill, NAI, RP 620/57/104; Dublin Evening Post, 30 September 1797. 162 On Gamble’s death, see Strabane Morning Post, 10 May 1831. He is buried in the parish churchyard of Leckpatrick. Campbell, Notes, 33, also remarks on his death at a funeral.
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James Gillray, Cincinnatus in Retirement, 1782, etching on paper, 25.8 x 35.0 cm. © Trustees of the British Museum. Ugly Criticism Union and www.fieldday.ieDivision in Irish Literature Claire Connolly
You think it ugly: drawing lines with a knife Down the backs of those writers we exist to dislike. But it’s life.1
Sinéad Morrissey’s poem ‘Advice’ scrutinizes the ‘ugly’ object of literary criticism: the everyday business of dissecting, dividing and analysing a body of literary work. The voice of this poem (composed while Morrissey was writer-in-residence at Queen’s University Belfast) might be that of the creative-writing tutor, urging the recalcitrant poet to find his or her own voice by picking a fight with the literary tradition, those ‘big fish’ described in the next poem in Morrissey’s collection as ‘the Greats’.2 ‘Advice’ offers an ironical celebration of splits and 1 From Sinéad Morrissey, ‘Advice’, The State of the Prisons (Manchester, 2005), 34. divisions. It pours scorn on the 2 Sinéad Morrissey, ‘Reading the Greats’, in The State of the Prisons, 35.
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notion of an ‘undivided’ body, understood of ‘those things which a daily and vulgar 3 The collection in which biologically, or as literary corpus, or as use have brought into a stale unaffecting ‘Advice’ appears enacts a wider dialogue with the cultural group or coterie: familiarity’, Burke forges a philosophical eighteenth century, and space within which the sensations can be in particular with the You think it ugly: drawing lines with a defined and analysed. Assuming that there Enlightenment faith in www.fieldday.ieknife is a shared stratum of sensations that are perfectibility manifested in John Howard’s plans Down the backs of those writers we exist nonetheless subject to cultural differences, for prison reform. to dislike. But it’s life. the Enquiry depicts a world of highly Morrissey borrows the particularized feelings within which ‘the three title of her collection One is disadvantaged by illustrious states, of indifference, of pleasure, and of from Howard’s 1777 essay ‘The State of the company pain’ may be seen to operate.4 Many of the Prisons’. Left somehow undivided. Divide it with striking opening examples Burke produces 4 Edmund Burke, A animosity. are designed to shock readers into a grasp Philosophical Enquiry of his argument by forcing an imaginative into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Don’t be proud — participation in extreme sensations: ‘Suppose Beautiful (Oxford and Viciousness in poetry isn’t frowned on, ... a man ... to receive a violent blow, or to New York, 1990), 31. it’s allowed. drink of some bitter potion, or to have his 5 ‘Caius is afflicted with a ears wounded with some harsh and grating fit of the cholic; this man is actually in pain, stretch Big fish in a big sea shrink sound’, opens his discussion of how pain Caius upon the rack, he proportionately. involves more than the absence of pleasure. will feel a much greater Stake out your territory ‘[S]tretch Caius upon the rack,’ he invites, pain; but does this pain extending the argument to show how arise from the removal of any pleasure?’ Burke, A With stone walls, steamrollers, venomous pleasure and pain have an existence beyond Philosophical Enquiry, 5 spit their relation to one another. 31. From the throat of a luminous The Enquiry’s desire to divide and thus 6 John Whale, Imagination nightflower. Gerrymander it. analyse the sensations is always shadowed under Pressure, 1789– 1832: Aesthetics, Politics by subjection. Even its famous distinction and Utility (Cambridge, Divisions are to be inflicted by ‘stone between the sublime and the beautiful fails 2000), 22, 23. walls’, ‘steamrollers’, ‘spit’ and — in a final to distance either term from a ‘disabling sentence that itself marks a division from passivity’: ‘both the sublime and the the preceding sound patterns — by external beautiful are defined in Burke’s Enquiry as political agency. The term ‘gerrymandered’ states of subjection and domination,’ argues suggests manipulated or manufactured John Whale.6 Luke Gibbons has conclusively political divisions, and carries with it more linked Burke’s aesthetics to ‘the turbulent than a whisper of reference to the border colonial landscape of eighteenth-century between the six counties of Northern Ireland Ireland’, and in particular to agrarian and the 26-county Republic, and to officially unrest in eighteenth-century Munster.7 sanctioned sectarian political practices Gibbons’s account of the Enquiry stresses within the Northern state. In this final the formative influence of Irish places on phrase, ‘Advice’ brings the political realities its young author, in particular the famine- of severed states to bear upon the business of struck Cork of his boyhood and the colonial literary value. Dublin of his adolescence. Burke’s aesthetic Ugliness, lines, the body in pain: the treatise was however begun in London in image patterns of Morrissey’s poem stand the 1750s, during the time he spent studying in striking relation to the terms assembled at the Middle Temple and holidaying in by Edmund Burke in his 1757 treatise on England and Wales. It is amidst these linked aesthetics, A Philosophical Enquiry into relationships and journeys — between the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Britain and Ireland, one the one hand, and Beautiful.3 Opening with an invocation aesthetics and politics, on the other — that
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7 Luke Gibbons, Edmund this essay locates the continuing relevance of writings. The text that seeks to anatomize Burke and Ireland Burke’s Enquiry in our critical constructions such figures of feeling, his Enquiry, is, (Cambridge, 2003), 23. of Irish literature. according to the psychoanalyst Adam 8 Thomas Moore, Memoirs of the Life of the Right Phillips, ‘among other things, a prospective Honourable Richard autobiography’.9 Or, to the critic of Irish www.fieldday.ieBrinsley Sheridan, 2 vols. ‘Drawing lines with a knife’: Union and literature, a proto-national tale. Its sensuous (London, 1825), vol. 2, Division — Phillips says ‘erotic’ — empiricism unites 148. 9 Adam Phillips, at the level of philosophical method a lived Introduction, in Burke, Burke presents an especially complicated division between passion and reason that A Philosophical Enquiry, case study in what is an observably pre- critics have traced back to Burke’s early xiv. Union cultural phenomenon: a writer whose formation in east Munster. F. P. Lock has 10 Lock cites Susannah Centlivre’s play A Bold career has been seen to divide in paired found in Burke’s early upbringing ‘the stuff Stroke for a Wife (1718) oppositions, chiefly between Britain/Ireland, of fiction’: he compares Burke’s education and Frances Burney’s on the one hand, and aesthetics/politics, on among Catholics, Anglicans and Quakers novel Cecilia (1782) as the other. His reputation is split between to the position of an eighteenth-century examples, with the latter text being greatly enjoyed his writing on aesthetics and on politics, heroine with a philosophically or morally by Burke. See F. P. Lock, on cultural geography (in England, France mixed group of guardians.10 Yet the way in Edmund Burke, 2 vols. America, India and Ireland), and on which familial, local and national dynamics Volume I: 1730–1784 political philosophy (Burke the conservative are mapped onto one another within (Oxford, 1998), 27. 11 Anne Fogarty, ‘Literature and counter-revolutionary versus Burke Burke’s biography is closer to the narrative in English, 1550–1690: the defender of local attachments turned strategies deployed by the generation of Irish From the Elizabethan proto-postcolonialist). Writing in the writers that came after him, in particular Settlement to the 1820s in the context of his biography of the national romances pioneered by Maria Battle of the Boyne’, in Margaret Kelleher and Richard Brinsley Sheridan (another figure Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson. Philip O’Leary, eds., The dominated by comparable fissures), Thomas In many ways, Burke’s career reinforces Cambridge History of Moore describes the divided Burke in the and perpetuates a set of divisions that can Irish Literature, 2 vols. following terms: ‘His mind, indeed, lies be said to structure Irish literary history. To (Cambridge, 2006), vol. 1, 140–90 (151); Ian parted asunder in his works, like some the ‘divided’ Burke, we can at the very least Campbell Ross, ‘Prose vast continent severed by a convulsion of add, as exemplars of a comparable division, in English, 1690–1800: nature, — each portion peopled by its own Edmund Spenser, Jonathan Swift and Maria From the Williamite Wars giant race of opinions, differing altogether Edgeworth. Since the 1980s, major advances to the Act of Union’, in Kelleher and O’Leary, in features and language, and committed in in scholarship have helped to restore the eds., Cambridge History eternal hostility with each other.’8 Moore Irish side of these writers’ reputations: these of Irish Literature, vol. 1, offers an aerial survey of the fragmented would include Anne Fogarty’s reading of 232–81 (249). territory of the Burkean imagination in Ireland within the ‘ideological anxieties, 12 James Chandler, ‘A Discipline in Shifting language that echoes across the literary symbolic patterns and narrative dynamics’ Perspective: Why We culture of eighteenth-century Ireland, of Spenser’s Faerie Queene; Ian Campbell Need Irish Studies’, Field evoking the well-known instabilities of Ross’s biographical and textual analyses of Day Review, 2 (2006), narrative position in travel writing, the Swift’s ‘complex and troubled relationship 19–39 (27). geographical discourse of Union and to Ireland’; and Gibbons’s book, Edmund Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Burke and Ireland.11 The figure or trope that is most For authors to be ‘Irished’ or ‘ReIrished’ commonly used to unite the divided Burke is has acquired, as James Chandler points out, the family romance of the mixed marriage: ‘the status of quasi-disciplinary procedure’ child of a Protestant father and a Catholic within Irish Studies.12 Of the revisions I have mother, Burke, we are told, carried Ireland’s mentioned, Gibbons’s is perhaps most tightly confessional divisions within himself and bound up with the advent of Irish Studies reproduced them in the intricate accounts of as a critical practice. The critical energy sympathy in his philosophical and political invested in these ‘shifting perspectives’ is
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James Sayers, * * * * * [Burke] on the Sublime and Beautiful, 1785, etching on paper, 32.8 x 23.2 cm. Trustees of the British www.fieldday.ieMuseum.
what leads Chandler to place Irish Studies in mentioned here has a writer’s reputation the forefront of the overthrow of the ancien settled into anything like orthodoxy. In régime of the disciplines currently taking general, there remains a demand for greater place across the humanities. Perhaps because equilibrium in our critical apprehension of this wider revolution, in none of the cases of divided œuvres, a sense that more work
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13 Quoted in Chandler, ‘A must be done and a better balance must be source of discord’.15 The public discourse of Discipline in Shifting achieved. Joseph Valente, for instance, has unity served to underline rather than erase Perspective’, 27. upbraided Irish Studies scholars for their Ireland’s inferior role in the Union. As such, 14 F. P. Lock, ‘Burke, Ireland 13 and India: Reason, over-Irishing of Dracula. But however it proved a rich reserve of ‘discord’. Rhetoric and Empire’, in one appraises the interaction of British and As with the Burkean mindscape www.fieldday.ieSeán Patrick Donlan, ed., Irish elements, or of aesthetics and politics visualized by Moore and Lock, the territory Edmund Burke’s Irish in the case of these major writers, it is of Irish Studies is often conceptualized in Identities (Dublin, 2007), 154–70 (155). important to note how ideals of balance terms of issues of union and division, and 15 William Parnell, Inquiry and organic unity continue to inform our remains closely bound up with questions into the Causes of understanding of the ways in which they of perspective. In many of the most hotly Popular Discontents ought to be read. Consider, for example, contested cases of re-Irishing, Chandler in Ireland, 2nd edn. (London and Dublin, Lock’s accusation that the ‘Irish’ or ‘post- points out — citing Burke as ‘an especially 1805), 72. colonial’ Burke lists too far towards one side good case in point’ — ‘the question of an 16 Chandler, ‘A Discipline in of Burke’s thought; a side of Burke that is, author being “Irishable” is intensified by the Shifting Perspective’, 27. problematically for him, much too closely sense that, internal to his or her œuvre, we 17 See Tom Furniss, Edmund Burke’s connected with our current preoccupations can find not only another side to the story Aesthetic Ideology: and prejudices. Critics from Conor Cruise but beyond this, an anticipation of what it Language, Gender and O’Brien to Luke Gibbons are accused of means to be able to see or not see the story Political Economy in having ‘delved so deep as to obscure some of from that other side’.16 Burke’s exemplary Revolution (Cambridge, 1993), 4; Seamus Deane, the most prominent contours of the Burkean status in Chandler’s argument depends on ‘Phantasmal France, mindscape’. Lock invokes on his own behalf his reputation for political prescience, itself Unreal Ireland: Sobering the ideal scholarly perspective that could see closely related to what is often described as Reflections’, in Strange Burke’s British and conservative, as well as the supplementary or excessive character of Country: Modernity 14 17 and Nationhood in his Irish and humanitarian, affiliations. his language. The flexibility and fluidity Irish Writing since 1790 Readers will be able to supply other of Burke’s prose style maps onto a kind of (Oxford, 1997), 1–48 versions of this kind of complaint or special knowledge regarding the outcome of (1–2). criticism as it relates to texts or writers the political events on which he comments: 18 See Matthew Arnold, ‘The Function of that they know well. What concerns me Burke’s style is linked to an almost improper, Criticism at the Present particularly here, however, is the problem and, according to Matthew Arnold, ‘un- Time’, in Lectures and of the divided œuvre more generally. Does it English’ knowledge of the future. 18 This is Essays in Criticism, vol. apply especially to our critical constructions perhaps what Yoon Sun Lee means when 3, The Complete Prose Works of Matthew of pre-1800 writers? Where the issue persists she describes Burke’s tropes as having a Arnold, ed. R. H. Super past the nineteenth-century heyday of the ‘deterritorializing effect’: Burke’s prose (Ann Arbor, 1962), 267. Union, we find it adheres most closely to possesses an affective force that serve to 19 Yoon Sun Lee, the reputations of writers to whom the ‘open up passages and connections between Nationalism and Irony: Burke, Scott, Carlyle term ‘Anglo-Irish’ would be conventionally positions that are, in theory, diametrically (Oxford, 2004), 40. A applied (Bram Stoker, Elizabeth Bowen). So opposed’.19 Whether analysed in terms of contemporary caricature has the Union a role or after-effect that is Burke’s prophetic powers or in terms of the of Burke shows him using detectable in the literature that succeeded special power of his language, what interests a box labelled ‘Tropes’ as his political armoury. See it? It might be argued that Act of Union me here is the declension of the difference Anon., ‘House-breaking, itself seems, through much of the nineteenth between aesthetics and politics into a linked before Sun-Set’, published century, to soften, if not solve, this dilemma relationship between poetry and prose, with 6 January 1789; of radical division paradoxically by poetry taken to exemplify the special role of Nicholas Robinson, Edmund Burke: A Life in enhancing the divisions and differences that literary language. Caricature (New Haven, the Act, in attempting legislatively to draw Pascale Casanova’s recent work contends 1996), 127. the two countries together, had produced. that it is only with James Joyce that Irish As William Parnell put it: ‘the Union is a writing attains what she calls ‘autonomy’ name, a sound, a fiction; there is no Union; within ‘Irish literary space’; out of the highly the nominal Union is only an additional politicized context of the revival, argues
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William Dent, Grand Irish Air Balloon, 1784, etching on paper, 33.7 x 24.7 cm. Trustees of the www.fieldday.ieBritish Museum.
20 Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), 315. 21 See Joe Cleary on decolonization and its effect on the world literary system sketched by Casanova: ‘The World Literary System: Atlas and Epitaph’, Field Day Review, 2 (2006), 197– 219. 22 Adam Potkay, The Passion for Happiness (Ithaca and London, 2000), 2–3. 23 Giles Deleuze, ‘He Stuttered’, Essays Clinical and Critical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London and New York, 1998), 112, quoted by Susan Manning, Fragments of Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American Writing (Basingstoke, 2002), 257. Manning (17) relates Deleuze’s Casanova, Joyce enacted a double rejection remains a need to analyse this constitution interest in the ‘federative — he broke with both the language and of literary space in terms of the asymmetries and paratactic’ qualities literature of empire and with the aesthetic instituted by the Union and perpetuated of American writing to Scottish Enlightenment 20 imperatives of cultural nationalism. by the economic and political cleavages of theories of fragmentation As Joe Cleary has shown, however, there the nineteenth century.21 The emergence of and union.
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24 What is extraordinary an idea of national literature as a category as if he had been fully master of the ideas. about Swift and Burke, belongs centrally to these dynamics of union Indeed it must be owned he could make no according to Deane, is 26 the rhetorical energy and division. Among other things, it involved new discoveries by way of experiment.’ In that is expended in a series of divisions inflicted upon ‘the attempting to capture the experience of the the service of a dying wholeness of the eighteenth-century world blind professor, Burke draws attention to his cultural formation. The of letters’ and a resulting reorientation of the own language: www.fieldday.ieconservative politics that 22 are officially endorsed relationship between aesthetics and politics. by Swift and Burke have There are of course a great many writers He did nothing but what we do every day already passed out of who, for commercial and other reasons, split and in common discourse. When I wrote time or can no longer their output between, say, Irish, English and this last sentence, and used the words achieve realization in the (for them, fallen) Indian novels and tales. The issue, though, every day and common discourse, I had present. There is a may be more narrowly identified as one of no images in my mind of any succession nostalgia here that is style: ‘the foreign language within language’ of time; nor of men in conference with historically inflected in Gilles Deleuze’s terms.23 The divisions each other; nor do I imagine the reader but politically aware. 27 For Deane, this takes that structure our understanding of writers will have any such ideas on reading it. the shape of a temporal like Spenser and Swift often boil down to pressure that is brought the difference between the Faerie Queene In showing how everyday words — which to bear on language, and A View of the Present State of Ireland, include words like ‘every day’ — operate finding expression in forms of brokenness and on the one hand, or Gulliver’s Travels and independently of images raised in the mind, fragmentation but also A Modest Proposal, on the other. Seamus Burke aims for as cool as possible a criticism post-modern stylistic Deane’s account of what is most ‘interesting’ of figurative theories of language. In doing so, devices such as self- in Burke and Swift — the relationship he ‘wants to reassert the boundaries between referentiality. Seamus Deane, ‘Phantasmal between politics and style in their writings — texts and images’ and ‘to defy the prevailing France, Unreal Ireland’, is richly suggestive in this respect.24 Burke’s Lockean notion of mental images/ideas as 2–3. See also his account Enquiry itself played an important part in the referents of words’.28 Burke inflects the of Joyce’s Dubliners, the creation of a category of literature that is post-Lockean distinction between words and which argues that ‘immense psychic as well at once aesthetic (different from other kinds images with the developing categories of the as rhetorical energy has of writing) and political (different from the beautiful and the sublime: words as clear and to be expended on the kind of imaginative writing that has emerged modern aspire to the status of the beautiful, production of stasis’. in other places). while images are primitive and obscure and ‘Dead Ends: Joyce’s Finest Moments’, in Derek potentially sublime. The force of Mitchell’s Attridge and Marjorie argument, however, is to show us that Burke’s Howes, eds., Semicolonial ‘Viciousness in poetry’: National Literature anti-pictorialism results in a paradoxical state Joyce (Cambridge, 2000), between Aesthetics and Politics of ‘sublime words and beautiful images’. 21–36 (21). 25 W. J. T. Mitchell, Mitchell ingeniously argues that, by the end Iconology: Image, Text, W. J. T. Mitchell’s reading of the Enquiry of the Enquiry, Burke will have reversed Ideology (Chicago and situates Burke’s treatment of the difference these values so that ‘the tendency of language London, 1986), 121–29. between image and word in the context of to arouse obscure, confused images, or no 26 Burke, A Philosophical 29 Enquiry, 154–55. the Enquiry’s development of the ancillary images at all, will begin to seem normative’. 27 Burke, A Philosophical differences between prose and poetry and Poetry is the ultimate expression of language Enquiry, 154–55. the beautiful and the sublime.25 Among the free from the tyranny of images: 28 Mitchell, Iconology, 123. examples of his contention that ‘WORDS 29 Mitchell, Iconology, 1. may affect without raising IMAGES’, Burke Indeed so little does poetry depend for offers a self-reflective commentary on the its effect on the power of raising sensible process by which words acquire meaning. images, that I am convinced it would Discussing a blind professor of mathematics lose a very considerable part of its who could give ‘excellent lectures upon energy, if this were the necessary result light and colours’, Burke argues that: ‘it was of all description. Because that union as easy for him to reason upon the words of affecting words which is the most
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powerful of all poetical instruments, account of how such circles are configured, 30 Burke, A Philosophical would frequently lose its force along and in particular with regard to the limits he Enquiry, 155. 31 Gibbons, Edmund Burke with its propriety and consistency, if the wishes to place on ‘imitation’. The Enquiry and Ireland, 27. 30 sensible images were always excited. installs a difference between imagined and 32 Potkay, The Passion for real sympathy that depends on a distinction Happiness, 109. www.fieldday.ieThe example given — the description between fiction and reality: 33 Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 44. of thunder forming in Vulcan’s cavern in Virgil’s Aeneid — involves the reader We delight in seeing things, which so far (once more) in ‘affecting words’ that tend from doing, our heartiest wishes would toward violence and distress. Following be to see redressed. This noble capital, the through Burke’s stress on the ‘deep and pride of England and of Europe, I believe lively impressions’ of words, Mitchell thus no man is so strangely wicked as to desire captures an aspect of the Enquiry that tracks to see destroyed by a conflagration or an the threat to sympathy posed by the darkness earthquake, though he should be removed and isolation of the sublime. himself to the greatest distance from the Gibbons, however, recuperates this danger. But suppose such a fatal accident same dynamic for a happier version of to have happened, what numbers from intersubjectivity. For him, the Enquiry’s all parts would croud to behold the ruins, anti-pictorialism is concerned to show how and amongst them many who would have mimetic theories of language fall woefully been content never to have seen London short of comprehending ‘the evocative in its glory?33 capacity [of words] generated through social usage’. Rather than each word generating There is a problem, however, in the a related image or graphic representation, figuration of sympathetic absorption as a ‘meanings are carried over from their scene of pain and ruin. Moreover, this is original contexts through habit and custom, a scene of specifically imperial ruin, with the usages which we share as members of the decline of London here, as always in an interpretive community’. The force of the eighteenth century, echoing the decline Gibbons’s argument is to push forward this of Rome. Imagining subjective responses insight into an understanding of the power to the compelling spectacle of the ruined of words to generate imaginative sympathy. metropolis as part of a set of feelings that This bolsters his depiction of a Burke who are only activated in the case of distress believes in a ‘flow of sympathy that emanates allows Burke to dismiss ‘immunity’ as an from the moral imagination’.31 Gibbons inadequate explanation of the attraction of embeds this discussion of the Enquiry within such scenes. A negative sense of one’s own a broader understanding of Burke the theorist safety from danger is not enough, in other of community and proto-postcolonialist. words, to explain either the compelling These tensions around language and aesthetic spectacle of ruin or the auratic community are condensed in one of the deficit he associates with completion, order, Enquiry’s memorable scenes of sympathy. prosperity and commerce — all those things The Enquiry is explicitly committed to a conventionally associated with London version of imaginative sympathy that leads in its glory. The concept of ‘immunity’ towards the formation of community, as enters Burke’s argument here as a way of Gibbons argues. In this, Burke follows underlining the fiction/reality distinction but David Hume in depicting sympathy not so also for its potential to return thought to the much as a series of acts of transfer from body, the site where ‘affecting words’ make one individual to another, but rather as an their primary impression. outward radiation ‘in concentric circles of The compelling spectacle of London diminishing intensity’.32 Burke differs in his in ruins draws the spectator to the very
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34 Gibbons, Edmund Burke brink of destruction even as it generates the of eighteenth-century theorists of language and Ireland, 88. possibility of sympathetic identification: who sought to show how language is best 35 Burke, A Philosophical without this tension between the roles of analysed in terms of its aesthetic effects. A Enquiry, 44. 36 Philosophy in a Time spectator and fellow sufferer, the full force of set of distinctions emerges in the eighteenth of Terror: Dialogues what Gibbons characterizes as the Enquiry’s century between polite or ‘beautiful’ www.fieldday.iewith Jürgen Habermas ‘fraught engagement with the anxieties of language, associated with proper and modest and Jacques Derrida, empire’ cannot be appreciated.34 The section forms of communication, and impolite interviewed by Giovanna Borradori (Chicago, 2003). concludes: ‘we can feel for others whilst we language, which is rude, aggressive and 37 J. Hillis Miller, ‘Derrida suffer ourselves; and often then most when excessive. The supposedly central experience Enisled’, Critical Inquiry, we are softened by affliction; we see with pity of polite language emerges as the object 33, 2 (2007), 248–76. even distresses which we would accept in the of philosophical concern, with impolite 38 Janet Sorensen, The 35 Grammar of Empire place of our own’. Accepting the distresses language allotted a residual or peripheral in Eighteenth-Century of others as part of one’s own experience space. In depicting a version of polite British Writing produces a version of sympathy that moves language that had recourse to ‘the authority (Cambridge, 2000), 141. the argument towards a necessary but of subjectively experienced aesthetic effects’, 39 Sorensen, The Grammar of Empire, 148. essentially destructive engagement with the Adam Smith’s Glasgow University Lectures 40 Adam Potkay, The Fate pain of others: something very like the notion on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1748) set in of Eloquence in the Age of auto-immunity. motion a set of linguistic ambiguities that of Hume (Ithaca, 1994), A reference to recent mobilizations of bear the markings of the thematics of union ch. 1. the concept of immunity in debates about and division.38 Janet Sorensen notes that community serves to remind us of what is at the main advances in theory and practice of stake here. Burke produces immunity as a ‘polite English’ were authored by a group of concept in order to indicate the inadequacy what she calls ‘non-English British nationals’. of his culture’s idea of tragedy. No more Scottish and Irish thinkers such as Thomas than aesthetic distance provided by fiction, Sheridan, Hugh Blair, Adam Smith, Francis immunity does not account for what Burke Hutcheson and Edmund Burke found in characterizes as a delighted or eager flocking the ‘amphibious discourse of aesthetics’ an to the scene of pain or distress. In terms of appealing admixture of private responses current theory, much of it under the sway (located in the culturally particular world of Jacques Derrida’s late writings on the of the senses) and universal standards topic, immunity helps us to theorize the (represented in the abstractions of taste). As relationship between self and community Sorensen puts it: ‘Neither pure abstraction and particularly those parts of the self that nor total embodiment, tasteful language can be held back from incorporation within appeals to subtle physical responses, forever wider communal or national structures.36 universalizing while also relativizing them.’39 In J. Hillis Miller’s account of these debates, These linkages were underwritten, as Derrida is nearly unique in opposing the Adam Potkay has shown, by a temporal idea ‘that the individual is and should be his schema, with impolite language — eloquence social placement, with no residue or leftover — consigned to the past.40 There, however, that is not determined by the surrounding it lays important claims to a sense of civic culture’.37 What space Burke’s Enquiry betterment and community. Eloquence does make for meanings generated outside and its political analogue, enthusiasm, ‘social placement’ is found in the discussion thus trouble the formulation of theories of language, which, as suggested above, of polite language. Even Hume admits to powerfully imagines, if it does not endorse, a bias in favour of enthusiasm, at least if an isolationist vision of communication as the alternative is superstition, because the part of its anxiety over the limits of imitation former historically has links to liberty and in the fostering of sympathy. the dissenting tradition. In general though, Burke is often studied as one of a group Scottish culture can manage this problem
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William Dent, The Long-Winded Speech; or, the Oratorical Organ Harmonized with Sublime and Beautiful Inflation, 1788, 14.8 x 10.0 cm. Trustees of the British www.fieldday.ieMuseum.
41 Potkay, The Fate of Eloquence, 8. 42 Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: through the elaboration of cultural synthetic Scott’s Waverley novels. As Potkay says of The Romantic Novel forms: most famously evidenced in James Ossian: ‘Macpherson capitalized on this and the British Empire Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian and Walter archaizing of eloquence by paradoxically (Princeton, 1997), 132.
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43 Katherine O’Donnell, modernizing the ancient clan: that is, divide eloquence from politicized enthusiasm. ‘Gaelic Poetry, Rhetoric, the Ossianic forgeries reconcile the age’s Irish Romantic drama, whether in plays by Rhetoricians and Burke’s nostalgia for sublime eloquence and political Alica LeFanu, Richard Lalor Sheil, Charles Philosophical Enquiry’, paper presented at the community with its taste for subdued Robert Maturin or John Banim, treats Royal Irish Academy manners and private life.’41 In eighteenth- the issue of eloquence at a kind of meta- www.fieldday.ieConference, ‘Edmund century Wales, the notion of hwyl developed level, aware of the drama’s dependence on Burke and Irish Literary under the influence of Nonconformist rhetorical skills yet making the power and Criticism, 1757–2007’, April 2007. See also Jean religion: namely, an emotionally charged limits of eloquence part of the thematics Dietz Moss, ‘“Discordant and enthusiastic form of speech that gained of the plays. Sheil believed Irish rhetorical Consensus”: Old and authority from its association with pulpit skills were much hampered by the closure New Rhetoric at Trinity preaching but later became linked with more of the Trinity College Historical Society, College, Dublin’, Rhetorica, 14, 4 (1996), debased forms of oratory. which was suppressed by Lord Castlereagh 383–441. The transnational context enables a as a consequence of the 1798 rebellion. And 44 I am grateful to Terence fuller appreciation of the treatment of clear evidence of the backlash against Irish Brown for discussion of language in Romantic Ireland, as part of eloquence can be found in Mary Russell this point. 45 Stephen K. Land, From what Katie Trumpener has characterized Mitford’s description of Maturin’s Women; Signs to Propositions: as the ‘transperipheral Irish-Scottish public or, Pour et Contre as ‘a detestable book — a The Concept of Form sphere’.42 Burke’s time at Trinity College mere hotch potch of Glenarvon and Corinne in Eighteenth-Century Dublin would have exposed him to the mixed up with that indescribable nonsense Semantic Theory (London, 1974), 48. classical model of eloquence, best known which most Irishmen and Irishwomen call 46 Reading Burke shortly from the publications of his friend Thomas eloquence, and which is as like it as rouge is before Home Rule, Leland, whose translation of Demosthenes to the bloom of fifteen’.47 Gladstone was told appeared between 1754 and 1761 and whose These linguistic tensions form the matrix that ‘your perfervidum ingenium Scoti does not Dissertation on the Principles of Human from which first Romantic then modern need being touched with Eloquence was published in 1764.43 There is definitions of literature itself emerge. The a live coal from that a sense in which pursuing a political career theories of linguistic difference elaborated Irish altar’. Quoted by in Britain created the conditions in which by Scottish and Irish thinkers during the Conor Cruise O’Brien, ‘Introduction to the Burke’s language came to be understood eighteenth century mesh with debates Cresset Library Edition’, and analysed: had he remained within this around taste to create a new and significant Irish Affairs: Edmund Dublin context, what critics often describe role for culture. Even opposed thinkers like Burke, ed. Matthew as the excesses of his style might never have Burke and Hume share a desire to widen the Arnold (London, 1988 44 [1881]), xi. come to be diagnosed in these terms. constituency of taste beyond the kind of élite 47 See Moore’s Sheridan, Such a counterfactual proposition denies, of group imagined by thinkers like Shaftesbury vol. 2, ch. 11, for his course, the realities of British–Irish relations earlier in the century, and alike participate in discussion of the public in the eighteenth century, but does serve to the establishment of national boundaries on speaking styles of Sheridan and Edmund Burke; M. highlight how the importation of the Trinity culture. In Irish Studies, we are familiar with W. Savage, ed., Sketches, College Dublin speaking model to the British a definition of Irish literature that traces its Legal and Political, by the parliament plays a part in the invention of beginnings in the late eighteenth century and Late Right Honourable an idea of Irish culture. Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent. But the Richard Lalor Sheil, 2 vols. (London, 1855), If, in Burke’s Enquiry, there is always Scottish perspective allows us to see that it vol. 1, 16; letter of Mary a sense that language will exceed its brief is the idea of national literature itself that is Russell Mitford to Mrs (Stephen Land refers to Burke’s claims for ‘a being produced at this moment. Alongside Hofland, 17 April 1819, rhetorical surplus in language’45), then, in Castle Rackrent, Edgeworth published (with in Letters of Mary Russell Mitford. Second Series, Irish literary production from the eighteenth her father) An Essay on Irish Bulls, a text that ed. Henry Chorley, 2 vols. century onwards, there is an ongoing set is extensively engaged with the cultural and (London, 1872), vol. 1, of worries over the issue of eloquence and political horizon of language in the context of 59–60: cited in http:// its relationship to political enthusiasm.46 the newly created United Kingdom. www.british-fiction.cf.ac. uk/anecdotal/wome18- Moore’s biographies of both Sheridan and The role of literature within the Union 41.html. Lord Edward Fitzgerald continually try to described thus far depends on debates
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around the representational power of the despotism of fact’ — is another way of 48 Jon Mee, Romanticism, language itself, and in particular the absorbing all those qualities that troubled Enthusiasm and Regulation: Poetics and relationship between word and image. The the formulation of polite language in the the Policing of Culture 51 Scottish case is important for comparison eighteenth century. in the Romantic Period because both the Union of 1707 and (Oxford, 2003), 24–25. www.fieldday.iethe difference embodied by the role of 49 Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm and literature within that Union are more ‘venomous spit / From the throat of a Regulation, 4–5. complete. Ireland has problem areas of luminous nightflower’: Theory and Tradition 50 Seamus Deane, ‘Arnold, incompletion, one of which is crucially the Burke and the Celts’, in idea of eloquence and enthusiasm, often Writing about Burke in the Preface to his Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature, diagnosed as a kind of unregulated spill-over 1881 edition of Burke’s Letters, Speeches 1880–1980 (London, of affecting words. This is in contrast to Jon and Tracts on Irish Affairs, Arnold deploys 1985), 22. Mee’s account of the ways in which British the figures of difference that I have been 51 Matthew Arnold, ‘On Romantic culture worked to differentiate tracing so far — Britain/Ireland, aesthetics/ the Study of Celtic Literature’, Lectures forms of enthusiasm from the authentically politics, poetry/prose — to invoke the need and Essays in Criticism, ‘literary’, so that ‘the idea of literariness for a more complete English culture. In vol. 3, The Complete itself’ came to be defined in its difference Arnold’s efforts to remind his audience of the Prose Works of Matthew from rancour in religion and politics.48 importance of Burke as the great master of Arnold, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor, 1962), 344. Mee has revalued T. E. Hulme’s sceptical English prose, the Britain/Ireland difference Original emphasis. definition of romanticism as ‘spilt religion’ to becomes at least partly submerged, only 52 Arnold, Preface, Irish show the myriad ways in which political and to resurface as irony: among the many Affairs Edmund Burke, religious enthusiasm were subsumed into the paradoxes attendant upon the celebration xxxvii–xxxviii. poetics of British romanticism.49 A residual of Burke the English prose stylist is its problem within the formulation of theories reliance upon a construction of Burke of polite language — eloquence/enthusiasm the commentator on Irish affairs. Arnold — thus becomes a kind of figure for both introduces Burke’s political speeches to an poetry and the difference of literature, audience that he characterizes as forgetful even as it accumulates connections with of his greatness. Arnold characterizes the the experience of foreign, ‘Oriental’ and dangers attendant upon forgetting Burke peripheral places. (and with him, Swift) in terms of loss and For the Irish and Scottish writers who division. To lose Swift and Burke ‘from advanced their theories of language in our mind’s circle of acquaintance’ is to terms of subjectively experienced aesthetic ignore prose at the expense of poetry (no affects, these connections with place were one now forgets to read Shakespeare and often secondary to an embodiment that Milton, Arnold argues) and to inflict a could lay claim to a certain universality. harmful division upon the national body: Later accounts of this difference, however, ‘the unacquaintance shuts us out from came to be understood increasingly in great sources of English life, thought and terms of national character. When Matthew language, and leaves us in consequence very Arnold reworked Burke for the post-Famine imperfect and fragmentary Englishmen’.52 decades, he ‘went further than Burke would In Arnold’s view, Burke’s prose assumes ever have dared’ in ‘introducing the “Celtic” a position within the tradition of English idea as a differentiating fact between Ireland letters that is not unlike the role Arnold and England’.50 Arnold positions ‘Celtic accords to Celtic literature within his literature’ on the cusp of definitions drawn broader scheme of cultural union. Arnold’s from both linguistics and the discourse famous essay ‘On the Study of Celtic of national character. His notorious Literature’ contends that a blending of attribution of sentimentalism to the Celt — racial types (Celtic and Saxon) within the ‘Sentimental, always ready to revolt against United Kingdom is necessary for cultural
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53 Arnold, ‘On the Study of and political wholeness. The essay opens status: Celtic Literature’, 292. with its author in Wales, holidaying in 54 Laura O’Connor, Llandudno while he watches preparations ... the poor Welshman still says, in the Haunted English: the Celtic Fringe, the for an Eisteddfod, a form of Druidic revival genuine tongue of his ancestors, gwyn, British Empire and De- conceived during the late eighteenth century goch, craig, maes, llan, arglwydd; but his www.fieldday.ieAnglicization (Baltimore, as part of an effort to revivify bardic land is a province, and his history petty, 2006), 26–27. language and culture. Arnold muses on the and his Saxon subduers scout his speech 55 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the predicament of Welsh, focalized through the as an obstacle to civilisation; and the echo Revolution in France imagined perspective of a ‘French nursery of all its kindred in other lands is growing (Harmondsworth, 1969). maid’, and seen here as emblematic of the every day fainter and more feeble; gone in 56 Arnold, ‘On the Study of fate of Celtic languages within the Empire: Cornwall, going in Brittany and the Scotch Celtic Literature’, 293. Highlands, going, too, in Ireland; — and As I walked up and down, … looking there, above all, the badge of the beaten at the waves as they washed this Sigeian race, the property of the vanquished. 56 land which has never had its Homer, and listening with curiosity to the strange, Here, Arnold imagines the feelings of a ‘poor unfamiliar speech of its old possessors’ Welshman’ whose rich topological language obscure descendants, — bathing people, (white, red, rock, field, chapel, lordship) vegetable sellers, and donkey-boys, — raises images that exceed the political status who were all about me, suddenly I heard, of his country as ‘a province’ whose history through the stream of unknown Welsh, has been rendered ‘petty’ by incorporation words, not English, indeed, but still within the Empire. And yet something does familiar. They came from a French nursery happen in this mismatch between word and maid, with some children. Profoundly image: a space opens in which the ‘genuine’ ignorant of her relationship, this Gaulish ‘faint’ and ‘feeble’ sounds of the Welsh Celt moved among her British cousins, language can be heard. speaking her polite neo-Latin tongue, and The nature of this space is determined full of compassionate contempt probably, by a sentimental relationship between past for the Welsh barbarians and their jargon. and present. Sentiment is undoubtedly What a revolution was here! How had the dominant note sounded in Arnold’s the star of this daughter of Gomer waxed, characterizations of Celtic literature, while the star of these Cymry, his sons, something for which the essay has been had waned!53 severely censured. Shaun Richards specifically locates the emergence of In Haunted English, Laura O’Connor theoretical approaches to Irish literature expresses her outrage at Arnold’s silencing in a rejection of Arnoldian sentimentalism of the Welsh language in this passage.54 allied with the emergence of a politicized However, Arnold’s treatment of Welsh strain of criticism. Recalling splits that depends on his ability to imagine the took shape at the International Association affective response of the nursery maid, for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature whose Frenchness alone is perhaps enough conference of 1984, held in the University to turn Arnold’s mind to Burke: ‘What of Graz, Richards remembers the ‘mystical- a revolution was here!’ It is not only the magical’ version of Irish literature put Burke of the Reflections55 who is present forward in the contribution of the late here, but also the Burke of the Enquiry. Professor Robert O’Driscoll: a paper Arnold refreshes Burke’s distinction between entitled ‘The Irish Literary Renaissance words and images for a community that has in the Context of a Celtic Continuum’ experienced a tragic loss of the link between (published in the conference proceedings proud place name and debased national as ‘A Greater Renaissance: The Revolt of
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the Soul Against the Intellect)’. Richards’s William Dent, French Flight; or, recollections can barely contain the felt the Grand Monarque and the Rights of Kings Supported in a impatience at Driscoll’s dated Arnoldian Sublime and Beautiful Manner, position: ‘O’Driscoll glossed his position in 1791, etching on paper, 39 x the question period: “The Celts could not 11.4 cm. Trustees of the British www.fieldday.iehave invented the refrigerator”, and for that Museum. we were to be grateful, irrespective of the curdled consequences.’57 Most recently, O’Connor insists that Arnold’s admiration for the richness of the Welsh language is only the second part of a ‘double move of screening out Celtic languages and apotheosizing Celtic culture onto a pedestal’. The Welsh language acquires an affective dimension in Arnold’s account that positions it within the realm of the beautiful rather than the sublime. Together, the deafness to the language and its exoticization in elegy serve to ‘tune out the thick texture ... of Welsh culture and sublimate it into something else, an abstract notion of the Celt, which transforms ... Wales into a spectacle of ruin’.58 The network of Burkean meanings is suggestive. Arnold here partakes of the eighteenth-century and Romantic convention of the flight of philosophical speculation brought on by the experience 57 Shaun Richards, ‘Our of revolutionary change. What comes into Revels Now are Ended’: view in the moment of revolutionary or Irish Studies in Britain — colonial destruction is the previously vague Origins and Aftermath’, in Liam Harte and Yvonne — because lived as everyday and filling out Whelan, eds., Ireland our vision without need of framing — field beyond Boundaries: of traditional culture. Mapping Irish Studies in There have been a number of scholarly the Twenty-First Century (London, 2007), 48–57 efforts to rescue Arnold as an early, if (50). See also his ‘Irish flawed, theorist of multiculturalism. Robert Studies and the Adequacy Young, for instance, opposes what he calls of Theory: The Case of ‘Arnold-bashing’ with the suggestion that Brian Friel’, Yearbook of English Studies, 35, 1 his ethnographic politics foregrounded the (2005), 264–78. role of race in the formulation of ideas of 58 O’Connor, Haunted culture.59 Comparing English, Irish, Welsh- English, 28. American and African-American theorists 59 Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: of culture, Daniel Williams has also been proposes that ‘Arnold’s willingness to Hybridity in Theory, Race concerned to show how ethnicity is integral imagine that Union could no longer be and Culture (London and to the late nineteenth-century construction conceived as a matter of Ireland becoming New York, 1995), 87–88. of cultural authority, rather than something more like England, but must instead proceed 60 Daniel Williams, Ethnicity and Cultural 60 that assails culture from the outside. And on principles that would newly articulate Authority (Edinburgh, in an Irish context, Mary Jean Corbett the meanings and uses of cultural difference, 2007).
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61 Mary Jean Corbett, also constitutes a powerful critique of beauty: the soothing effects of custom, ritual Allegories of Union Englishness’.61 Perhaps this proto-Irish and repetition. Seamus Deane, drawing on in Irish and English Studies aspect to Arnold is what the Fenian Burke, describes the ensuing cultural politics Writing, 1790–1870: Politics, History, and the John O’Leary registered when he listed in the following terms: Family from Edgeworth Arnold’s essay among his ‘best hundred Irish www.fieldday.ieto Arnold (Cambridge, books’ in 1886, noting that ‘he is always Tradition ... refers to ... modes of feeling 2000), 159. more or less suggestive and mostly very that are the more precious for being 62 Quoted in Margaret Kelleher, ‘Prose Writing sympathetic, even if, occasionally ... a little out-of-time and therefore enduring, and Drama in English, patronizing’.62 D. P. Moran’s comments on rather than in time and therefore merely 1830–1900: From Arnold in his Philosophy of Irish Ireland fashionable or transient. Above all, such Catholic Emancipation are also suggestive. Moran condemns ‘On feelings, while they would seem at times to the Fall of Parnell’, in Kelleher and O’Leary, the Study of Celtic Literature’ as dangerous to run merely from the moist to the eds., Cambridge History but at the same time registers its critical lachrymose, were most traditional when of Irish Literature, vol. 1, pliability when he bemoans how it takes they included within them a sense of the 449–99 (477). the place of an indigenous Irish (specifically tragic dimension of human experience.64 63 D. P. Moran, The Philosophy of Irish Irish-language) conceptualization of our Ireland (Dublin, 1905), traditions: The invocation of the ‘merely’ here and 104. the discomfort with the ‘moist’ and the 64 Seamus Deane, ‘Factions We were all on the lookout for somebody ‘lachrymose’ suggests that only feelings and Fictions’, in Foreign Affections: Essays on to think for us, for we had given up that incline towards tragedy carry complex Edmund Burke (Cork, that habit with our language. Matthew meanings and values. Yet there is a case to be 2005), 6. Arnold happily came along just in the made for analysing these ‘modes of feeling’ 65 Raymond Williams, The nick of time, and in a much-quoted essay in all their soggy variety. As Raymond Country and the City (New York, 1973), 10. suggested, among other things, that one Williams suggests, sentiment may be less a 66 Joe Cleary, ‘Irish of the characteristics of Celtic poetry matter of ‘historical error’ and more one of Modernity’, in Joe Cleary was ‘natural magic’ ... We seized on the ‘historical perspective’.65 and Claire Connolly, eds., phrase like hawks ... Then yet another Deane’s critical writing draws from Burke Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture Irish make-believe was born, and it was a deep and almost painful awareness of the (Cambridge, 2004), 1–24 christened ‘The Celtic Note’, Mr. W. B. antinomies of tradition and modernity and (18). Yeats standing sponsor for it.63 a conceptualization of their interrelation in the present moment (however that What interests Moran about Arnold is his present is conceived). Deane’s Burke having established a principle of difference spoke first to the Ireland of the 1980s and that, because muddled and mystical, created helped him to indict the paltry promises the conditions in which much sharper and of pluralism and its shallow relationship more hard-edged forms of cultural and social to the history of our divided island. As inquiry could take shape. Joe Cleary puts it: ‘on these conundrums For Arnold as for Burke, the taken-for- of Ireland and the modern, [Deane] has granted aspects of culture — the things demonstrated, an entire national literature that fill out the edges of vision and might has battened, revisiting the vicissitudes of be thought of as sublime — come into that problematic monotonously, occasionally perspective as part of a widespread framing with extraordinary brilliance’.66 At the same of national traditions, itself part of the time, though, there is a tendency to dismiss longer history of European romanticism. sentiment as the opposite of analysis, rather In linguistic terms, words obscure, but that than forming a part of the condition under obscurity is in the process of acquiring a investigation. To put it in its most basic value that is bound up with ideas of affect. form, these conundrums of Ireland and Tradition thus goes from a state of sublimity the modern have an affective dimension. to one that is associated above all with We might also notice here how embodied
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emotions constitute a realm of experience, new century (especially by Walter Scott) 67 Deane, ‘Phantasmal which, in the period after the Enquiry was can be seen to work to exorcise a residue of France, Unreal Ireland’, 7. published, came to be increasingly associated sentiment that is for Goode condensed in the 68 Mike Goode, ‘Dryasdust with women and — via a shared discourse of figure of Burke. Central to this process was Antiquarianism and ornamentalism, weakness and dependence — a reorientation of the relationship between Soppy Masculinity: The www.fieldday.iewith oppressed national cultures. This shared forms of philosophical knowledge and the Waverley Novels and the Gender of History’, conjunction is almost certainly why Ireland national past that would allow the former Representations, 82 saw the development of the genre of the to negotiate the latter without becoming (2003), 52–86 (61). national tale, with its marshalling of affective subsumed by its demands: the feminized 69 Goode, ‘Dryasdust responses, in the hands of women writers and figure of the antiquary came to serve as Antiquarianism and Soppy Masculinity’, in the shadow of the Act of Union. a model for the dangers inherent in the 61–62. For Wales to be both the territory of process. 70 Gilles Deleuze and abstraction and of ruin brings it close to the Theory, then, is neither simply the Félix Guattari, What France of the Reflections, devastated by the possession of centre or periphery but rather is Philosophy?, trans. by Graham Burchell abstraction wrought by both revolutionary a tool to be deployed in a reclamation of and Hugh Tomlinson and colonial systems and yet, out of the the resources of national culture. From (London and New York, devastation, producing both new and newly the Romantic period, this exorcism of 1994), 164. systematized concepts. Wales then, or the sentiment has been coded as a necessary Celtic countries, can be seen via this Burkean remasculinization of culture. In terms of the prism as, to borrow Deane’s description of longer history of Irish literature, the problem France, ‘the territory of theory’.67 It may may be identified as one of the subjective seem strange to think of the Celtic world effects produced by language and the question as the site of abstraction rather than rich of how to handle them in a literary tradition particularity, but Burke’s role in Romantic- accustomed to tracking political rather than era culture allows us to reconcile these aesthetic issues. In manoeuvring between the contradictory possibilities. Most obviously, related figures of difference traced throughout Burke was a powerful spokesperson for this essay, there is a danger that Irishness the case against abstract theory made continues to be located on the side of politics, in the name of cultural particularism. with aesthetics found elsewhere. As Mike Goode has recently argued, however, the turn away from abstraction (associated above all with Reflections on ‘Gerrymander it’: Past Feeling the Revolution in France) suffered a loss of cultural authority during the Peninsular and Burke’s Enquiry concerns itself with the Napoleonic wars. Goode highlights accounts excess of affect over representation in ways of Burke’s defence of French culture that that helpfully focus our attention on the role sought to weaken its cultural authority of the aesthetic in Irish literary and cultural by underlining its gendered, national and criticism. ‘Affects’, according to Gilles confessional dimensions.68 Because the Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ‘are no longer rejection of theory in Reflections operated in feelings or affections; they go beyond the what came to be a negatively characterized strength of those that undergo them.’70 Their sentimental and chivalric mode (witness speculations on art as ‘a bloc of sensations’ the many contemporary caricatures of its are part of a wider reconsideration of affect author as a sad and hopeless knight-priest within literary and philosophical thought. A figure), Romantic-era cultural politics sought major aim of the argument presented here a space for a less sentimental version of is to open up Irish literary criticism to the ‘forward-looking knowledge’ — a more resources of the new scholarship on affect. ‘manly’ history.69 The scientific models of Sianne Ngai’s 2005 book, Ugly Feelings, history developed in the early years of the situates her work among that of a growing
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71 Sianne Ngai, Ugly body of critics who believe that ‘emotion may once embodied and external: as such they Feelings (Cambridge, be recuperated for critical praxis’. Crucially, possess the power to overwhelm individual Mass., 2005), 8, 3. this is a critical praxis devoted to ‘the effort understanding. To grasp this process, we 72 Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in of thinking the aesthetic and the political need to realize a fuller sense — or perhaps Eighteenth-Century together’.71 That sentimental discourse is sensation — of the power of history and www.fieldday.ieBritain and France above all defined by having formal properties tradition to inflict ‘affective discomfort’.77 (Baltimore, 2006), 15. is important here — it consists of a set of Dipesh Chakrabarty, in Habitations of 73 Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 22–23. literary conventions which, if they are to be Modernity, writes of historiographical 74 Festa, Sentimental Figures recognized, will be as ‘a formal aspect of a attempts to engage with — to reach out of Empire, 2. text rather than an ideological position’.72 and touch — the threatened territory of 75 Festa, Sentimental Figures Ngai’s book is concerned to locate and tradition in terms that might have come of Empire, 54–55. 76 Siobhán Kilfeather, ‘Alice analyse not so much a collection of affective straight from Burke’s Enquiry. His prose Maher’s Materials’, Field responses as a series of what she calls carries Burke’s sense of the attraction and Day Review, 2 (2006), ‘representational predicaments’ that revolve dangers of community, enlivened with fresh 3–17 (17). around ‘the exact role and status of emotion anxieties about the limitations of such 77 For this formulation, see 73 Kevis Goodman, Georgic in the aesthetic encounter’. In terms of the supposedly assured theoretical approaches Modernity and British figures of difference worked through in the as ‘critical traditionalism’. The past, writes Romanticism: Poetry and course of this argument, to end on sentiment Chakrabarty, ‘comes to me as taste, as the Mediation of History is to end on the related issues of aesthetics/ embodied memory, as cultural training of (Cambridge, 2006), 10. Goodman locates her politics and Britain/Ireland — and to suggest the senses, as reflexes, often as things that work as part of ‘a revised a way of thinking about these topics in terms I do not even know that I carry. It has the historicist method that of their interrelatedness. capacity, in other words, to take me by reserves a place at the Contemporary post-colonialism provides surprise and to overwhelm and shock me.’ table for sensation and affect’. compelling accounts of the linkages between He goes on: 78 Dipesh Chakrabarty, emotion, aesthetics and politics. In historical ‘Modernity and terms, Lynn Festa has helped us to think That is why, it seems to me, that, in the Past: A Critical about how the turning inward of sentimental addition to the feeling of respect for Tribute to Ashis Nandy’, Habitations of discourse is inextricably linked to the turning traditions, fear and anxiety would have Modernity: Essays in outward of expansionist empires (France and to be the other affects with which the the Wake of Subaltern England).74 Sentiment is not so much cover modern intellectual — modernity here Studies (Chicago, 2002), for empire as a ‘structure of feeling’ that implying a capacity to create the future as 38–47 (46). allows for ‘repetition without absorption’.75 an object of deliberate action — relates to Sentiment is thus theatrical — which in the past.78 Burkean terms means it offers both a perspective on and a necessary distance from Creating the future of Irish literature in power. In more contemporary terms, appeals relation to its past demands reading practices to aesthetics afford a degree of immunity that alert to the full affective range embodied in can function as a kind of defence against the texts that continue to cross borders shaped imperatives of community. Siobhán Kilfeather by uneven distributions of power. has located in Alice Maher’s art a powerful example of such an appeal: ‘Maher’s ability to reinvigorate a sense of wonder around certain objects is a historicist act. It is harder to explain why her own art goes so far beyond simply suggesting what is already known about women, history and tradition.’76 The imperatives of history and tradition as the ‘already known’ are undoubtedly pressing. They are — as Burke knew — at
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132 Politics and the Cinematograph www.fieldday.ieThe Boer War and the Funeral of Thomas Ashe Denis Condon
A. Would you use the cinematograph to foster a national spirit in Eirinn?
B. Would you use it to forward the Irish-Ireland movement?
C. Would you use it for political propaganda?
These questions were posed by ‘Oisín’ in a competition for the young readers of the column Buidhean na hÉireann (the Irish Brigade) in two issues of the newspaper Sinn Féin in late 1910 and early 1911. An anonymous ‘friend of the Brigade’ had offered five shillings for the best essay answering these questions. Although the winning essay, if C. W. Locke’s cinematograph house and triple dioramic apparatus, c. 1910. Photo: Rischgitz/Getty there was one, does not seem to Images. have been printed in the
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newspaper, the competition is evidence films by the time of the 1916 Rising. 1 Sinn Féin, 24 December that some radical nationalists were thinking In order to concentrate on the closeness 1910 and 7 January 1911. 2 ‘Pictures in Ireland. By about how moving-picture technology of factual films to politics in early twentieth- “Paddy”’, Bioscope, 18 might be used for their political purposes. century Ireland, those fiction films that were June 1914. The questions, however, posed as they are first made in significant numbers in 1910–20 3 In particular, see Kevin www.fieldday.iein a children’s column, perhaps suggest an have been omitted from this discussion: their Rockett, Luke Gibbons and John Hill, Cinema uneasiness with the seriousness of the issue, political dimensions have been discussed in and Ireland (London and 3 that while the cinematograph might be other commentaries. Paradoxically, early Sydney, 1987), 7–32; utilized to promote an Irish national spirit, ‘factual’ films have received little critical and Ruth Barton, Irish advance the Irish-Ireland movement, and attention, yet those that survive have had National Cinema (London, 2004), 18–33. disseminate political propaganda, the new a busy afterlife and are familiar to a wide 4 Harvey O’Brien, The Real technology should not after all be put to such audience through their use by makers of Ireland: The Evolution of use. Such reluctance would not have been historical films and television programmes. Ireland in Documentary overly surprising, given the amount of Irish While early Irish fiction films can only be Film (Manchester, 2004), 120. nationalist energy expended in reviving or seen at the film archives that house them inventing Gaelic cultural pursuits untainted or in rare archival screenings elsewhere, a by association with British domination large body of political non-fiction film is and what may have been regarded as an readily available on DVD, notably in the film undesirable foreign technology.1 documentaries Mise Éire (1959) and Saoirse? Nevertheless, between 1896, the date (1961), directed by George Morrison for the of the first exhibition to an Irish audience Irish-language cultural organization Gael- of projected moving pictures, and the Linn, and in the first episode of the landmark establishment of the Free State in 1921, television history Seven Ages (2000), directed nationalists and other political groups in by Seán Ó Mórdha for the Irish national Ireland did use film for political purposes. broadcaster RTÉ. Through frequent use in In 1914, for example, the Union Defence television programmes that illustrate Ireland League equipped lecturers with three large in the last years of the nineteenth century vans with cinematographs and fold-out and the first decade of the twentieth, the screens to tour Britain, with the aim of relatively few factual film images from the promoting the unionist cause by showing late colonial period have become detached films of Edward Carson and the Ulster from the history of their own production, Volunteer Force.2 Others with no obvious distribution, exhibition and reception. political affiliation used politics as the pretext This is problematic on a number of levels. for making films to ensure large audiences. Harvey O’Brien has argued that Mise Éire The concern here is the political uses of and Saoirse? offer ‘a depoliticized political film and the filmic uses of politics in Ireland history, built solely upon the construction of in relation to the Boer War and the funeral an image of the nation amenable to received of Thomas Ashe. These two historical nationalist mythology’.4 For O’Brien, moments exemplify the interaction of politics Morrison created a powerful myth of the and what would, by the end of this period, ‘birth of a nation’ that would long exert a come to be called cinema. Specifically, in retarding influence on the representation of showing something of the circumstances in Ireland in moving pictures. Despite this, his which the people of Dublin were at times films were important because at the very least the audience for and/or the subject of films they preserved early film material long before of political events, I hope to illuminate the establishment of the Irish Film Archive the dialectical relationship between the in 1992; indeed, for decades, Morrison’s production, exhibition, and reception of documentaries were ruefully described as ‘topical’ films at the turn of the century and Ireland’s only film archive.5 It is important to what had become commodified as ‘newsreel’ note, however, as indeed IFA curator Sunniva
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5 Martin McLoone, Irish O’Flynn has observed, the selective nature a cartoon, will complete a really first-class Film: The Emergence of of Morrison’s act of preservation, by which picture programme.7 a Contemporary Cinema he extracted the political items contained in (London, 2000), 17. 6 Sunniva O’Flynn, ‘Irish Ireland’s first newsreel series,Irish Events, Although this helps to enhance our Newsreels: An Expression to create his documentaries, while neglecting awareness of the historical importance of www.fieldday.ieof National Identity?’, other items of a non-political nature seen by topicals, these films did provide the occasion in Roger Smither and their first audiences.6 for some remarkable political displays. Wolfgang Klaue, eds., Newsreels in Film O’Flynn’s insight — that political items Not only did the Irish political scene Archives: A Study Based filmed by an Irish newsreel company were undergo enormous changes between 1900 on the FIAF Newsreels first presented to their audiences as part and 1917 but so too did moving pictures. Symposium (Trowbridge, of a series of short scenes of local interest Even use of the term ‘cinema’ to designate 1996), 57 and 59. 7 Dublin Evening Mail — begins the process of re-imagining the a venue dedicated to the exhibition of [hereafter, DEM], 29 context for these films. Whereas much moving pictures did not become common September 1917. about moving-picture entertainments until after 1912, and was not universal even 8 Rick Altman, Silent Film changed in the sixteen years between the then, many establishments preferring to Sound (New York and Chichester, 2004), 18–23. exhibitions of Boer War films and the Irish call themselves picture houses. Part of what Events special The Funeral of Thos. Ashe Rick Altman has called the ‘identity crisis’ in 1917, their essential ‘variety’ nature of projected moving pictures, they emerged remained constant. Variety covered a wide as a form of entertainment independent of range of entertainments — from live acts the established media from which they had that accompanied the film, itself regarded liberally borrowed, then underwent internal as an ‘act’, in the music halls and variety ‘jurisdictional conflicts’, and finally reached theatres in the early 1900s, to the filmic ‘overdetermined solutions’ to tease out variety provided by cinema programmes these problems.8 It would be anachronistic in the late 1910s. For O’Flynn, the typical to call these moving pictures ‘cinema’ combination of a one-minute political film or even ‘early cinema’; contemporary along with four other one-minute films of sources demonstrate how film shows were sporting or cultural interest is likely to have understood at specific moments. lessened the impact of the political material Emphasis here is on the encounter on the audience. Besides, the audience of a between historical audiences and films, late 1910s cinema programme would usually rather than on extended textual analysis have seen this newsreel material as an of the films themselves. The aim is to accompaniment to a featured dramatic film, challenge entrenched myths about early one or more short comedies, and perhaps film entertainments. For example, it is a travelogue or other non-fiction ‘interest’ widely believed that James Joyce established film of five to ten minutes in length. This can Ireland’s first cinema, the Cinematograph be seen in the programme at the Bohemian Volta, in Dublin’s Mary Street in December Picture House in Dublin’s north-city suburb 1909. However, there was fixed-venue, of Phibsboro for the first part of the week in dedicated picture entertainment in Ireland which The Funeral of Thos. Ashe formed the before the Volta. Between March 1908 and Irish Events contribution: January 1909, for example, the Colonial Picture Combine’s People’s Popular Picture On Monday next a splendid picture by Palace was located at the Queen’s Royal the Fox Company is announced, ‘The Theatre in Dublin’s Brunswick (now Pearse) Island of Desire’, featuring George Walsh, Street, when the venue’s theatrical patent a thrilling tale of the South Seas; a two- and lease had temporarily lapsed. Differing part Keystone comedy, ‘Teddy at the significantly from the Volta and attracting Thottle’, will afford plenty of fun. The a substantially proletarian audience, this Gaumont Graphic and Irish Events, with picture palace opened with a programme
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headed by The Story of the Kelly Gang, a of, events. However, it was to be some 9 The Story of the Kelly sensational melodrama about the notorious time before such resistance manifested Gang, Australia: Gibson and Tait, 1906; dir. Australian outlaw.9 Of Irish extraction, Ned itself in response to moving images of the Charles Tait. Kelly proved a popular subject and the film queen’s visit, or of the Boer War for that 10 P. J. Mathews, Revival: created a stir in an audience used to the matter, because the speed with which a film The Abbey Theatre, Sinn www.fieldday.ieQueen’s staple stage melodramas about the production company could screen images of Féin, the Gaelic League and the Co-Operative deeds of Irish nationalist heroes. But an even the war in British and Irish venues depended Movement (Cork, 2003), earlier encounter between Dublin audiences upon how quickly a camera operator could 17–18, 66–91, 122–24. and films had occurred eight years before. be shipped to and from ‘the seat of war’. 11 Mathews, Revival, 72. By contrast, the telegraph, while unable to 12 Editorial ‘The Royal Visit’, Evening Telegraph transmit pictures, could deliver information [hereafter, ET], 8 March The Boer War rapidly between the parts of the Empire 1900. suitably connected. War films may have 13 ‘Corporation and the It was the visit of Queen Victoria to Dublin been screened at Dublin’s Lyric in the week Queen: The Lord Mayor Proposes an Address: in April 1900 that produced the first following the outbreak of hostilities between Scenes in the Council substantial encounter between politics and the Boers and the British, but the images were Chamber: “God save the cinematograph in Ireland. Continuity of the Spanish-American War, which had Ireland” Sung from the exists between street protests organized been under way for nearly a year and a half. Gallery’, ET, 14 March 1900. against Victoria’s jubilee in June 1897, pro- When the advertisement for this act claimed 14 ‘The Lord Mayor’s Boer demonstrations that began in August that ‘All Important News from the Seat of Procession: A Hostile 1899, and opposition to the visit of Edward War arriving during the Performance will Reception’, ET, 17 VII in July 1903.10 Of particular interest be Announced Nightly on the Cineograph’, March 19005. 15 Mathews, Revival, 89. here, however, are the public demonstrations however, the war referred to was the conflict 16 Simon Popple, ‘“But the by the Irish Transvaal Committee, an in South Africa, which was dominating the Khaki-Covered Camera organization led by James Connolly, Maud news. As Simon Popple has observed: is the Latest Thing”: The Gonne, Arthur Griffith, and John O’Leary, Boer War Cinema and Visual Culture in Britain’, and supported by such figures as W. B. Yeats, The war itself straddled the end of the old in Andrew Higson, ed., Michael Davitt, and William Rooney. The and the beginning of the new century, and Young and Innocent? The last of the great pro-Boer demonstrations marked the end of a tradition dominated Cinema in Britain 1896– was held on 17 December 1899, on the by the manual transcription of information 1930 (Exeter, 2002), 13–14. eve of the arrival in Dublin of Colonial and impressions. New media based on Secretary Joseph Chamberlain.11 When the technologies of the camera and the the Transvaal Committee’s efforts against telegraph altered not only the speed with army recruitment in early 1900 seemed to which the war could be covered but also be having an effect, a two-week royal visit, the nature of the representation.16 to begin on 3 April 1900, was announced in an attempt to champion the British cause.12 When moving-picture representations of the Dublin Corporation’s decision on 14 March conflict eventually arrived in Irish theatres to deliver a loyal address to the queen led and other venues, they encountered patterns to angry scenes in the council chamber, of reception that had largely been established with separatist nationalists singing ‘God by other entertainments. From early in the Save Ireland’ from the gallery,13 and on St. war, Dublin theatre audiences voiced their Patrick’s Day the inauguration procession of displeasure at jingoistic displays by British Lord Mayor T. D. Pile was attacked in the stage performers. In January 1900, the Irish streets.14 A planned peaceful protest against Playgoer’s ‘Odds and Ends’ column advised the Victoria’s visit, organized by Yeats for 4 that ‘all reference to the war and soldiers April, was suppressed by the police.15 should be omitted from our entertainments These demonstrations occurred in for the present, seeing the divided state of immediate response to, or even in advance our people on the matter’.17 In February,
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17 Irish Playgoer, 1, 9 a writer in the same journal described the state of affairs that exists at present, in (1900), 4. Gaiety audience as ‘over sensitive’: ‘Our not compelling all companies to ‘blue 18 Irish Playgoer, 1, 14 Wilkie Bard was singing a capital medley pencil’ every Jingo allusion while here (1900), 12. 19 ‘San Toy: Lively Scenes song, and the very mention of one line ... if this were done, I, for one, would at the Gaiety — Singers of “The Soldiers of the Queen” created go with a merrier heart to the theatre, www.fieldday.ieTurn the Theatre into a an uproar.’18 At the same theatre, more knowing that I could then sit out a play Bear-Garden by Singing substantial disruption greeted the opening without uproar and hideous noises.21 “Jingo” Songs’, Irish Playgoer, 2, 10 (1900), of the new musical comedy San Toy, which 11. included such jingoistic songs as ‘Private The same sensitivities were not apparent 20 Irish Daily Independent, Tommy Atkins’ from the 1893 musical in Belfast, where for several weeks in late 14 May 1900. comedy The Gaiety Girl: January and early February the Alhambra 21 ‘Odds and Ends’, Irish Playgoer, 2, 13 (1900), 2. featured war sketches such as Briton or Boer 22 ET, 10 March 1900. the indefensible introduction of war and The Union Jack. 23 ET, 10 March 1900. glorification and jingoistic bunkum of What appear to be the first Boer War films that sort completely marred the ordinary in Ireland were exhibited at the Lyric in March playgoer’s enjoyment on the opening 1900 by Scott’s metascope, ‘the most up-to- night, as each reference to such caused a date appliance for showing living pictures’.22 disturbance, which, at times, developed As well as views of the battles of Spion Kop, into quite a pandemonium of discordant Modder River, and Nicholson Nek, mentioned sounds that completely obliterated what in the advertisement, the show featured general was taking place on the stage. This films of South Africa — ‘among many others, introduction of contentious matter into Cape street, Port Elizabeth’ — and further war- musical plays ought to be discontinued, related footage, including: ‘the Roslin Castle, especially in Dublin, where so much conveying consignments of troops for the diversity of opinion on such-like affairs is, war; the “Fighting Fifth” digging trenches at at present, or in fact, always to be found.19 Estcourt; a Skirmish with the artillery outside Ladysmith; the Lancers at the Modder River; It was not just the Gaiety’s predominantly Bridging the Tugela, and Watering the Artillery middle-class audience that reacted in and Transport Mules; the Ambulance at Work, this way. When comic singer Harriet etc’.23 These films do not seem to have caused Vernon appeared at the low-priced Lyric anti-British demonstrations or displays of variety theatre on 15 May 1900 dressed loyalty in the Lyric. as an English officer, ‘though she looked A delay in the arrival of pictures, however, exceptionally well in the uniform, a very could as likely have increased as reduced large number of the people who were present the resistance to them, but their mode of objected, and showed that they did so in presentation was crucial to the audience’s the usual way’. Despite establishing that the reception of them. When the films were uniform was the problem, ‘Vernon came out presented in a neutral way — without any pro- in the same dress and sang what a majority British display by the lecturer, or the choice of of the audience considered a Jingo song, with jingoistic music, or the patriotic wording of the result that during the time she was on titles — they could be accepted as information the stage hissing was very noticeable’.20 The rather than resisted as propaganda. Reviewing Irish Playgoer columnist Conn comments: the first week of ‘WAR PICTURES. The Very Latest, including “Relief of Kimberly”, I, for one, sincerely wish the war was Troops in Action, Most Thrilling Scenes’ and over, in order that amusement-seekers in the first showing of ‘HER MAJESTY THE Dublin may again be allowed to enjoy QUEEN’s Gorgeous Entry into Dublin’ at themselves in peace ... I fear our local the Empire Theatre of Varieties, the unionist managers are greatly to blame for the Dublin Evening Mail briefly comments that
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Republican prisoners returning from British jails to an enthusiastic reception on 18 June 1917 pass Dublin’s Queen’s Theatre in Great Brunswick (now Pearse) Street. www.fieldday.ieFrom Release of the Sinn Féin Prisoners.
they ‘were greatly appreciated’ and ‘received element in the audience had previously been 24 DEM, 10 and 14 April with unstinted applause’.24 A newspaper with prompted to sustained applause in response 1900. this ideological outlook might be expected to footage of the queen’s visit, it seems 25 ‘The Empire Palace’, DEM, 17 April 1900. to emphasize demonstrations of loyalty and remarkable that the pictures were not more 26 See, for example, ‘The downplay shows of protest. In its review of contentious. Transvaal Irish Brigade’ the shows at the Empire during the second The nationalist Evening Telegraph’s and ‘Transvaal Irish week of the run of these films, however, the strong pro-Boer stance reflected the broad Brigade: Four of Its Sturdy Members’, ET, same paper demonstrates that the music-hall nationalist position, which drew a clear 28 October 1899 and 9 audience could divide on political lines. On the analogy between the British threat to the self- December 1899. evening of 16 April, protest broke out before determination of the Boers and that of the the potentially explosive film material had Irish, understood either as Home Rule or as been shown: independence. The paper gave prominence to illustrated articles on the Transvaal Irish Mays and Hunter, banjoists, played Brigade, which fought with the Boers.26 several charming selections, and for a However, it could not ignore the fact that moment or two the gallery threatened much larger numbers of Irish recruits fought to become disorderly, in consequence of in the British army against the Boers, and it is representations of different schools of on such an issue that the accusations against politics, calling — some for ‘Killarney’ the British establishment’s manipulation and other for ‘Rule Britannia’. Eventually of the news take an interesting turn. The the banjoists played ‘Killarney’, and were Telegraph’s report ‘A Sensational Story: cheered again and again.25 Dublin Fusilier’s Letter from the Front: The Boers and the Border Regiment’ displays the In this context, and given that the loyal Dublin Fusiliers as patriotic Irish men in their
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Members of the Dublin Brigade of the Irish Republican Army fire a volley of shots above the grave of Thomas Ashe. From www.fieldday.ieThe Funeral of Thos. Ashe.
27 ET, 27 January 1900. readiness to tell the true story of British losses The first film exhibition at which 28 ‘Sham War covered up by the military hierarchy.27 protests are recorded was the Modern Cinematograph Films’, The delay in the delivery of genuine Marvel Syndicate’s film and variety show Optical Magic Lantern Journal and Photographic films of the war in South Africa, and the at the Rotunda between 8 and 20 April Enlarger, 11, 30 (1900), subsequent difficulty of filming a guerrilla 1901. The company was run by T. J. West, 30. campaign, encouraged certain film producers ‘a gentleman long and favourably known 29 Robin Whalley and Peter to shoot staged war scenes. In March 1900 in theatrical and amusement matters Worden, ‘Forgotten Firm: A Short Chronological the Optical Magic Lantern Journal lamented in Dublin, his association with our city Account of Mitchell that ‘A correspondent asks us how he is to extending over twenty-five years, during and Kenyon, know real from sham war films, seeing that which time he has been very successful in Cinematographers’, Film several subjects are made at home from life his endeavours to meet the public taste’.32 History, 10, 1 (1998), 28 37–38. models.’ These staged war films, the longest When protests were made against parts 30 Popple, ‘The Boer War running series of which were produced by of the show, the reviews were careful Cinema’, 20. the Mitchell and Kenyon Company between to exonerate him. As well as managing 31 Popple, ‘The Boer War 1900 and 1902,29 ‘draw on the standard the show, he delivered ‘a descriptive and Cinema’, 20–21. 32 ET, 13 April 1901. Boer narratives, in which the patriotic interesting lecture at each display’. Far All quotations in this behaviour of the Tommy is contrasted with from offering a damning verdict, the two paragraph are from this the devious and unchivalrous conduct of substantial reviews in the Telegraph might review and an earlier, the Boer’.30 Staged films were joined in late be said to be generous in their attentiveness longer review titled ‘The Modern Marvel 1900 by patriotic trick films, such as R. W. but equivocal in their praise. Their overall Syndicate, Limited: An Paul’s Kruger’s Dream of Empire, directed by assessment, nevertheless, was that the Interesting Show’, ET, 9 Walter R. Booth, which includes an animated ‘whole show certainly makes an amusing, April 1901. dream and the disappearance of live-action interesting, and wonderful entertainment’. figures.31 The variety acts, consisting of singers and
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Michael Collins delivers his brief oration at Ashe’s graveside. www.fieldday.ieFrom The Funeral of Thos. Ashe.
jugglers, were ‘a pleasing adjunct to the audience disapproval. It seems likely that 33 Joan of Arc, France: photographic portion’. The main attraction West altered the programme to make it more Star, 1899; dir. Georges Méliès. featured the drama Joan of Arc,33 which acceptable to the divided loyalties of Irish 34 Advertisements appear was judged to be ‘both entertaining to the audiences. in the daily papers in the old and instructive to the young, and last Two South African-themed entertainments week of 29 July 1901. night the display was received with loud played seasons in Dublin to coincide with the 35 Popple, ‘The Boer War Cinema’, 23. and long well-merited applause’. But some lucrative Horse Show week in late August 36 ‘“Savage South Africa”: of the accompanying topical films elicited 1901. Savage South Africa, playing at the Unique Entertainment at conflicting responses from the audience: grounds on Jones’s Road, was advertised as Jones’ Road’, DEM, 6 ‘not a circus but real life. not pictures but August 1901. Some did not meet with the approval reality’.34 Its demonstrations of trick-riding of a large section of the audience. They and pageantry based on the Zulu wars objected to representations of her late attracted more than usual attention because Majesty Queen Victoria, and scenes of the outbreak of the Boer War, and new representing ‘Our gallant soldiers, who acts were added accordingly,35 including a have been fighting for the last eighteen months’. Some of those present cheered realistic scene descriptive of Major and clapped, and the remainder booed Allan Wilson’s last stand on the banks and hissed, but probably both parties of the Shanghani River, and the piece were satisfied, notwithstanding the de resistance was afforded in the Khaki flavour of that portion of the concluding spectacle dealing with the entertainment, for, as a show, it was battle of Elandslaagte, in which the rattle good, and this, the manager said, was all of Maxim guns and the roll of heavier he wanted the audience to admit. ordnance played a leading part.36
By the end of the week, the Telegraph was As the different newspaper reviews described describing the show with no mention of it, audiences could read this variation on the
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Crowds thronged the streets not only for the Sunday funeral but also for the removal of the body from the Mater Hospital to the Pro-Cathedral and the procession from the www.fieldday.iePro-Cathedral to City Hall, when this high-angle shot of the hearse nearing College Green was taken. From The Funeral of Thos. Ashe.
37 ‘The Stage and Gallery: Wild West show as either pro-Boer or pro- Of course the Myriorama was painted Poole’s Myriorama’, British, or as apolitical spectacle. for a British audience who imagine that DEM, 24 August 1901. The other South African-themed their aggression in the South African 38 ‘Poole’s Myriorama’, ET, 6 August 1901. entertainment running in August 1901 Republics has been an uninterrupted 39 ET, 10 August 1901. was not so ambiguous in its address to series of successes, and that the Yeomanry its audience. One of Poole’s myriorama are the equal of Napoleon’s Old Guard. companies, which had long-established links Yesterday these pictures were not received to Dublin, encountered difficulty because of with unmixed approval. But better the jingoism of its Boer war-based show of than these unfortunate views was the still and moving pictures. ‘There are no less photographic display in reference to the than seven of Messrs Poole’s organisations Pekin [sic] disturbances and scenes of all being exhibited to-night in various parts general interest all over the world.38 of the kingdom,’ reports the Evening Mail, ‘and so well is the business arranged, that no The Telegraph reiterated its claim of show is ever seen twice in the same town.’37 controversy in its Saturday ‘Music and the The company that met with protests in Drama’ column at the end of the first week Dublin was owned by Joseph Poole and of the season: ‘Poole’s Myriorama continues managed by Fred Mayer. The Evening to draw large houses at the Round Room, Telegraph offers a blunt assessment: Rotunda, and the pro-British representation of South African war scenes give rise to a The entertainment is styled ‘Our Empire’, little excitement nightly between the patrons and the title is entirely expressive and of the show who hold opposite views on the descriptive. The principal portion consists subject of the war.’39 of scenes in the Boer war, and while the Poole’s case is illuminating because the pictures as pictures are good enough, the war films were included with paintings history pourtrayed … by them will not be and still photographs. In assessing the of much assistance to the young student. entertainment as a whole, the Telegraph
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reviewer admires them as aesthetic objects, Pilgrimage to Lourdes, as well as the early 40 ‘Odds and Ends’, Irish while criticizing their use to advance the Irish animated film Ten Days’ Leave, with Playgoer, 2, 3 (1900), 2. 41 This accounts for most of British cause. Dublin newspapers and newspaper cartoonist Frank Leah in 1917, Collins’s laconic oration journals pointed out the limitations of and the 1920 drama Aimsir Padraig/In the at the graveside, reported the new media technologies based on the Days of St. Patrick. in the daily papers; see, www.fieldday.ietelegraph and the photograph. ‘“[F]aked” It was a film from the GFS’s newsreel for example, Irish Times, 1 October 1917. snapshots of the war,’ observes the Irish Irish Events, which ran from 1917 to 42 Evening Herald Playgoer, ‘made with pictures of theatrical 1920, that marked the spectacular public [hereafter, EH], 1 supers, who are made up as Boers or culmination of a protest in September 1917 October 1917. Englishmen as occasion demands are much against British government treatment of more dramatic than the real ones, and find Sinn Féin prisoners in Mountjoy prison. ready sale in Paris.’40 While remarkable The occasion of the protest was the death achievements in themselves, these media of Thomas Ashe, president of the Irish could be made to lie, whether inadvertently Republican Brotherhood, as a result of force- on occasion, to increase their entertainment feeding while on hunger strike. In a series of value, or to suit the ideological position demonstrations carefully stage-managed by of the companies that produced them and republican leaders, Ashe’s body became the screened them. emblem of a new public solidarity between the various insurgent nationalist groups that were already moving towards coalition The Funeral of Thomas Ashe under the Sinn Féin banner. The protest’s highlight was Ashe’s funeral at Glasnevin In the sixteen years between the Boer War cemetery on Sunday, 30 September, the film protests and the funeral of Thomas largest public demonstration since the Rising Ashe, some significant uses of film for was put down in 1916, at which the Irish political purposes occurred. There were Volunteers marched openly under arms and exhibitions of films covering republican fired three volleys of shots over the coffin, commemorations at the grave of Wolfe Tone ‘the only speech which it is proper to make in Bodenstown, Co. Kildare, in 1913 and above the grave of a dead Fenian’.41 1914. And some cinema-owners around the The Evening Herald commended the country, including the Horgan brothers of exhibition on the evening of Ashe’s funeral Youghal, County Cork, shot and screened ‘of films showing various ranges of the films of local political groups. But the procession and scenes associated with it. The founding by Norman Whitten of his General rifling part at the grave was included’.42 The Film Supply company after his arrival in widespread publicity of organized events Ireland in 1910 was of national importance. after Ashe’s death allowed GFS to plan a Whitten had worked in film since its earliest newsreel special for their Irish Events serial. days, beginning his career with the British In what might be called a ‘prequel’, some of pioneer film-maker Cecil Hepworth. As the the material relating to Ashe’s lying-in-state name of his company suggests, Whitten at City Hall was shown at the Rotunda on distributed films and supplied cinema and the Saturday night preceding the funeral, film-making equipment, but he also made with the complete film, including the many kinds of film, including: news films procession through the city to the cemetery, of events such as the funeral of Jeremiah due for general release on the following O’Donovan Rossa in 1915; local interest Monday. The final film was first exhibited, films; British army recruitment films; however, on the night of the funeral at the promotional films for such companies as Bohemian.43 Run by Frederick Sparling, the Court Laundry and Patterson matches. He Bohemian was a 1,000-seat cinema located also made a film of the 1913 Irish National on the route of the funeral procession out
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43 See advertisements in of the city, between Mountjoy prison and and the spectator(s) and, at least in early DEM, 29 September Glasnevin cemetery.44 cases, the producer and the exhibitor are 1917. Reporting on the filming of the funeral, often remarkably allied with one another. 44 For details of the location, management, the cinema journal Irish Limelight observed Such an alliance between producer/exhibitor and seating capacities that people ‘took part in the procession, and spectator/subject does not transcend www.fieldday.ieof most Irish cinemas of went home to have tea, and an hour later the material conditions in which the films the period, see Cinema saw themselves on the screen. Some hustle were produced and consumed. In fact, the Yearbook 1915 (London, 45 1915), 94ff. on the part of the camera men!’ While earliest manifestations of this participative 45 Irish Limelight, 1, 10 by no means unprecedented for important spectatorship, when it is particularly (1917), 8. events, the speed with which Whitten associated with the local-view film, seems 46 Irish Limelight, 1, 10 prepared the film for exhibition distinguished to be associated with a form of primitive (1917), 8. 47 DEM, 29 September the GFS from its competitors; in this case, accumulation in which the moving image of 1917. A Modern Taming from Charles McEvoy, proprietor of the previously unfilmed groups is expropriated of the Shrew, United Masterpiece Picture House, who also for profit. States: New York Motion filmed the funeral but was unable to show Other factors in the first exhibition ofThe Pictures, 1915; dir. 46 Reginald Baker. his film until the Monday evening. The Funeral of Thos. Ashe must have worked 48 ‘Sinn Féin Prisoners’ theatrical exhibition of The Funeral of Thos. to dissipate this participative dynamic or Homecoming: Story of Ashe is as important as the speed of its to make it fleeting. Advertisements for the the Filming of Recent appearance. The Limelight report suggests Sunday evening show at the Bohemian, for Remarkable Street Scenes in Dublin’, Irish that, having taken some refreshment, example, describe it as ‘a special long and Limelight, 1, 7 (1917), mourners reassembled at the Bohemian to interesting programme’, featuring ‘a five- 16–17. This incident is reconstitute the political demonstration part exclusive comedy-drama entitled, “A treated in more detail in that the funeral represented. Here, they Modern Taming of the Shrew”’.47 With Rockett, Gibbons and Hill, Cinema and Ireland, viewed the funeral distilled to its ten-minute the evening performance beginning at 34. highlights — twice the usual length of a eight thirty and the funeral film screening newsreel — all taken from advantageous at ten o’clock, the spectators would have viewpoints. In a sense, the exhibition at the experienced an hour and a half of other Bohemian represented the culmination of the entertainments. There is no report that the political protest, of the concentration of the cinema’s well-publicized orchestra played energies and emotions that had been built up dirges or patriotic tunes, although this seems over several days. That night the spectators very likely and happened in on similar were freed from the limited perspective occasions. Earlier that year, when Whitten available to people in a crowd; they saw all managed to get the Irish Events film Release the key events from a privileged vantage, an of the Sinn Féin Prisoners screened just hours audience now seeing itself. after their arrival in Dublin on 18 June, The screening of this film might seem to be a moment when the cinema assumed a Some of the ex-prisoners and their key role in Irish political protest. However, friends could not resist the temptation little information is available on what to see themselves ‘in the pictures’, and a happened in the Bohemian that night. contingent marched up to the Rotunda What does survive suggests that the film early in the afternoon. They cheerfully would have fostered a participative form of acceded to the genial manager’s request spectatorship among the people who chose that they should leave their flags in the to attend its screening. ‘Participative’ here porch, and, when inside, gave every implies a more advanced form of interaction indication of enjoying not only ‘their own than took place with the Boer War films, film’ but the rest of the programme.48 this kind of spectatorship occurring between the subject, the producer, the exhibitor and The power of the cinema to enthral its the spectator(s) because both the subject audiences is evident in this account, with
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A memorial card for the optical perspective. Newspaper reports and hunger-striker Thomas Ashe. photographs demonstrate that even such Courtesy of Dublin City Public apparently god-like perspectives as the high- Libraries. angle shots above the crowd reproduced the points of view of numerous mourners. www.fieldday.ie‘Over 200,000 spectators and sympathisers thronged the route,’ declares one evening newspaper, ‘roofs, windows, verandas — even lamp-posts, railings, walls, hoardings, trees, statues, and monuments — every possible point of vantage was utilised by eager sightseers.’49 The Freeman’s Journal reported that ‘residents of many houses were charging for seats at their windows, and that the sites were appreciated by those taking advantage of them was testified by the numbers who witnessed the procession from these points’.50 The caption to a photograph in the Freeman reads:
Sunday at the O’Connell Statue: The above picture gives a very good idea of the dimensions of the crowd which surged round and up the base of the O’Connell heightened political feeling having been, at Statue on Sunday afternoon. For fully least momentarily, forgotten in the sense of two hours before the cortege was due to enjoyment of the other entertainments on pass men and boys by the score fought to offer. Nevertheless, it also indicates a tension obtain a good view by climbing amongst that undermines the apparently smooth the figures which adorn the plinth, until identification being advanced between all but the statue itself was obscured.51 the cinema audience and the mourners on screen. This tension is present in the This film and others like it address not Limelight’s suggestion that it was not the only those who could claim this very direct continuation of the demonstration that form of spectatorial identification with brought mourners to the Bohemian but the the image, but also those who desired to 49 ‘30,000 Mourners: narcissistic pleasure of seeing oneself on witness the event. In the weeks following Incidents in Yesterday’s screen, of picking oneself out of the crowd. the funeral, apart from cinema-goers who Mighty Funeral: Facts This kind of pleasure was a particular were indifferent or hostile, it is likely that and Figures: 3 Miles feature of the earliest films, but early films screenings of the film in Dublin and in the of Marchers in Massed Formation’, EH, 1 also purposely employed the figuration of fifty cinemas around Ireland that subscribed October 1917. the crowd as an instance of identification. to Irish Events would have brought 50 ‘Thomas Ashe: Funeral In any event, it is unlikely that many together spectators who had taken part in in Dublin Yesterday: individual mourners could have identified the demonstrations as well as those who Impressive Scenes: 52 Enormous Crowds themselves among the throngs depicted had been unable to attend. From this Throng the Streets’, in long shot by the funeral film. With the perspective, these films are essentially local Freeman’s Journal, 1 camera viewing events from among the newsreels targeted at spectators who could October 1917. spectators, it could, however, help re-create decode them. Therefore, it was not only the 51 Freeman’s Journal, 2 October 1917. for its audience their participation in the actual participants who would be able to 52 Irish Limelight, 1, 12 funeral as a group by reproducing their place themselves in the crowd, but also those (1917), cover.
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53 Irish Limelight, 2, 4 who could fill in this ‘back-story’, those who favourable to the nationalist cause. A 1918 (1918), 15. would have wanted to be in the crowd and listing of Irish Events specials features: Irish who, as a result, became virtual participants. Sinn Fein Convention; Funeral of Thos. These films worked on the desire to see Ashe; Release of the Sinn Fein Prisoners; oneself as a participant, whether or not one South Armagh Election; Consecration of the www.fieldday.ieactually had been present at the event, and Bishop of Limerick; Funeral of the Late John provided a semi-public context in which to Redmond, M.P.; and Waterford Election. ‘It experience this mediated participation. has been proved,’ boasts the advertisement, When exhibited as political propaganda ‘that topicals such as any of the above will in jingoistic shows, the Boer War films attract a larger audience than a six-reel engendered protest among nationalist exclusive.’53 In the context of wider political audience members and displays of loyalty events and especially when they took the among unionist members. On the other place of the featured attractions at the top hand, such Irish Events specials as The of the cinema programme, as The Funeral Funeral of Thos. Ashe seem more directly to of Thos. Ashe did at the Bohemian Picture offer the possibility of fostering ‘a national House on 30 September 1917, the political spirit in Eirinn’. These latter films could be significance of these films becomes more used to imply identification between the fully visible. spectator and popular protest. In the period between the 1916 Rising and the War of Research for this essay was made possible by Independence, GFS seems to have ensured funding from the Irish Research Council for its audience by being more obviously the Humanities and Social Sciences.
145 Field Day review www.fieldday.ie
146 ‘I will acquire an attitude not yours’ www.fieldday.ieWas Frederick MacNeice a Home Ruler, and Why does this Matter? David Fitzpatrick
‘Just another bourgeois liberal, I would have said. Although he was a great Home Ruler, in his day.’ Nick laughed. ‘Not a popular position for a Protestant clergyman, surely?’ ‘Carson hated him. Tried to stop him being made bishop.’ ‘There you are: a fighter.’1
This exchange appears in John Banville’s melodrama The Untouchable (1997), where 1 John Banville, The Untouchable, Victor Maskell (Anthony Blunt’s rev. edn. (London, 1998), 72. Jon Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice world-weary double-agent, (London, 1995) [hereafter, Stallworthy, LM] is among the eight incongruously grafted onto Louis authorities acknowledged by Banville (406). MacNeice’s Irish roots) discusses his father with Nick, another hybrid figure who turns out to be John Frederick MacNeice (1866–1942), Bishop of Down the Fifth or Sixth Man. Banville’s and Connor and Dromore (1934–42), probably late 1930s. Photo: MacNeice Collection, Carrickfergus Museum. Field Day Review 4 2008 147 Field Day review
The young clergyman with his extended family, probably taken in Clonsilla, County Dublin, c. 1895. Photo: MacNeice Collection, Carrickfergus www.fieldday.ieMuseum. 2 I have chosen the forename Frederick rather than John since the latter name seems almost never to have been used in his signature until his elevation to the bench of bishops in 1931 (though John alone appears on the birth certificate). His lifelong alternation between the initials ‘F. J.’ and ‘J. F.’ is notorious, exhibiting a family disposition to live uncomfortably with any particular name: see Stallworthy, LM, 5. In the notes that follow, father and son are referred to respectively as ‘FM’ and ‘LM’. The form McNeice was invariably used until account, though a travesty of what scholars credentials. However, it has been surmised 1913, when he broke have written about Frederick MacNeice,2 that his parents’ bruising experience of with family practice by demonstrates the pervasiveness of his sectarian conflict while missionary teachers adopting the less Scottish variant MacNeice, while posthumous reputation as an heroic outsider on Omey Island, culminating in the family’s sporadically using the within the ‘Black North’. Critics and fabled flight in 1879,4 left Frederick (then more contracted form in biographers concur that Louis MacNeice’s thirteen years old) with a lifelong detestation signatures. attitudes towards religion, morality, politics, of sectarian confrontation and intolerance.5 3 See, for example, Terence Brown, ‘MacNeice: Father and above all Ireland, were profoundly His mental world as an adult was that of a and Son’, in Terence influenced by those of his clergyman father. liberal Protestant nationalist, fundamentally Brown and Alec Reid, Louis was both attracted and repelled at odds with the political outlook of his eds., Time was Away: by the unity and humanity of his father’s congregations and neighbours in Belfast and The World of Louis MacNeice (Dublin, 1974), world-view, sustained by his serene faith in Carrickfergus. 21–34 (23); Terence Christ as peacemaker and reconciler. The Louis MacNeice’s supposed childhood Brown, Louis MacNeice: rector (later bishop) is almost universally experience of alienation within Protestant Sceptical Vision (Dublin, portrayed as a tolerant if puritanical Ulster is often cited in explaining his youthful 1975), 8–10; Albert Haberer, Louis MacNeice, southerner, courageously opposing all forms repudiation of its values and symbols, his 1907–1963: L’Homme of sectarianism and violence, abhorring romantic identification with the West of et la Poésie (Talence, both revolutionary republicanism and Ulster Ireland, and his sympathy with non-violent 1986), 15; Edna Longley, unionism, and supporting Home Rule.3 nationalist and anti-imperialist movements. Louis MacNeice: A Study (London, 1988), 19, 22, Admittedly, Frederick MacNeice’s early By this account, while rejecting his father’s and ‘“Defending Ireland’s association with the Society for Irish Church religion and morality, Louis paradoxically Soul”: Protestant Writers Missions to the Roman Catholics, notorious embraced much of his outlook on Ireland and and Irish Nationalism for its ‘aggressive’ campaign of proselytism Irish politics. The rector’s presumed support after Independence’, in Vincent Newey in both Connemara and Dublin, casts some for Home Rule is crucial to this widely and Ann Thompson, doubt upon his liberal and non-sectarian held analysis of the poet’s Irishness and eds., Literature and
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Nationalism (Liverpool, political vision. Yet the supporting evidence mixed 1991), 198–214 (199); is remarkably threadbare, being restricted Motives of those who bring their drums William T. McKinnon, to assertions by Louis himself, ambiguous and dragons Apollo’s Blended Dream: A Study of the Poetry utterances by his father in later life, and To silence moderation and free speech of Louis MacNeice academic inferences based on possibly Bawling from armoured cars and carnival www.fieldday.ie(London, 1971), 9–10; misleading extracts from published sermons wagons.10 Seán McMahon, ‘A Heart and addresses. This article will assess the that Leaps to a Fife Band: The Irish Poems credibility of such interpretations, present It is notable that Louis’s numerous of Louis MacNeice’, fresh evidence indicating a very different evocations of his boyhood give no particular Éire–Ireland, 11, 4 (1967), political viewpoint, suggest reasons for the illustrations of his father’s nationalism, 126–39 (129–31); Robin subsequent disregard of such evidence, and and that (in Stallworthy’s words) ‘neither Marsack, The Cave of Making: The Poetry of assess the consequences for our understanding his letters home [from preparatory school] Louis MacNeice (Oxford, of the poet’s Irishness and for our reading of nor his parents’ letters to him mention the 1982), 1; Stallworthy, some of his most celebrated works.6 worsening situation in Ireland’.11 When LM, 34. Among the few The most authoritative testimony to at home, he appears to have paid little critics who have examined Frederick MacNeice’s Frederick’s nationalism is that of his son, attention to political conversations, for his influence on Louiswithout whose imaginative and finely embroidered sister Elizabeth recalled that ‘there was so the explicit attribution of autobiographical writings have been so much talk in the house about Carson and the nationalist sentiments are widely accepted at face value as a reliable [Ulster] covenant that he must have heard Peter McDonald, Louis MacNeice: The Poet in factual source: ‘My father was one of the it though he never in later years seemed to His Contexts (Oxford, very few Church of Ireland clergymen to be have any memory of doing so. Of course, 1991) and also William a Home Ruler. This was another reason for he heard the history of it later on’.12 It is T. McKinnon, in his despising Co. Antrim and regarding myself difficult to avoid the conclusion that Louis enigmatic but suggestive reappraisal of ‘The as a displaced person. Sometimes this feeling MacNeice’s account of his father’s supposed Rector’s Son’, Honest caused an inner conflict in me.’7 Another nationalism was based on adult rather than Ulsterman, 73 (1983), passage implies that Frederick’s reputation childhood observations. 34–54. as a Home Ruler was established before It is a curious fact that Frederick 4 By a family account summarized in 1917, when his second wife was thought MacNeice himself never advocated or Stallworthy, LM, 5, a ‘very daring’ for having gone ‘so far afield endorsed Home Rule in his many published fracas in Claddaghduff as my father — especially as he was a Home booklets and sermons. As Christopher Fauske on 23 March 1879 Ruler’.8 These recollections were written has guardedly averred, ‘MacNeice had gone led immediately to the ‘flight from Omey’: ‘The in 1940, two decades after Home Rule had to Carrickfergus with a reputation as a Home following night, friends ceased to be a practical option (except for Ruler, a reputation bolstered by his stance of the McNeices brought six counties of Ulster), and they reflect the against the Covenant, but of his politics he a coach to the mainland 33-year-old poet’s renewed respect for his actually said nothing in public throughout side of Omey strand, 13 and William, Alice, and father and for many aspects of both southern his life’. Though not strictly accurate, as their eight children were Ireland and Ulster. Slightly earlier testimony I shall show, this assessment highlights the driven the sixty miles to may be found in Zoo (1938), where difficulty of defining the political stance Galway and put onto the Frederick (as a ‘pacifist’ and a ‘Home Ruler’) of one whose politics were avowedly non- Dublin train.’ In reality, William Lindsay McNeice is set apart from Ulster’s ‘patronising and partisan. The only text that has been cited as appears to have departed snobbish’ gentry, that ‘inferior species’;9 and a direct affirmation of nationalism, as distinct alone, leaving his family also in ‘Auden and MacNeice: Their Last from a disavowal of (Unionist) party politics, in a state of siege on the Will and Testament’ (1936): is Frederick’s engaging historical sketch of island for several months: see Alice Jane to William Carrickfergus (1928): McNeice, 22 May 1879, I leave my father half my pride of blood in Galway Express, 7 And also my admiration who has fixed The extension of the franchise in 1884 June 1879. I am grateful His pulpit out of the reach of party made inevitable some form of Home to Dr. Miriam Moffitt for drawing the existence of slogans Rule for Ireland ... Election after election this letter to my attention. And all the sordid challenges and the gave similar results. That surely was
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Frederick and his brother Ferguson John. Photo: MacNeice Collection, Carrickfergus www.fieldday.ieMuseum. 5 This interpretation is implicit in Stallworthy’s superbly crafted biography, and explicit in Fauske’s statement that ‘his experience of the flight from Omey led the man later to understand the dangers of division’: Christopher Fauske, ‘Side by Side in a Small Country’: Bishop John Frederick MacNeice and Ireland (Newtownabbey, 2004), 4. 6 This article originated in a paper delivered to the superb conference held at the Queen’s University of Belfast, in September 2007, to celebrate Louis MacNeice’s centenary. There I benefited greatly from discussions with (among others) Jonathan Allison, Terence Brown, Edna and Michael Longley, Rev. J. R. B. McDonald, Peter McDonald, and Jon Stallworthy. I am especially grateful to Jane Leonard for her perceptive comments on drafts of this article. I am also indebted to the custodians of several private collections as well as many public libraries and archives; to Jon Stallworthy a writing on the wall. It was thought, Rule! Such arguments, and they had a for permission to quote unpublished however, that such warnings and verdicts very Prussian ring about them, did duty correspondence in the could be disregarded. Arguments were for a time. Bodleian Library, Oxford, reiterated for more than a generation where Judith Priestman which were a denial of the assumed MacNeice went on to dismiss Edward was an invaluable guide; and to Helen Rankin for meaning of democratic government. The Carson’s initial confidence that resistance in her generous treatment true entity, it was urged, is Great Britain Ulster ‘could defeat, and not simply delay, of a demanding visitor and Ireland. It is the majority in that unit the whole Home Rule policy’, and to deplore and for permission to cite that should count ... Ireland in so far as it the growing acceptance of partition as the material and reproduce photographs in the was educated and rich was against Home Ulster leaders themselves ‘began to think Carrickfergus Museum,
150 ‘I will acquire an attitude not yours’
The rector and his second wife, Beatrice, in Carrickfergus. Photo: MacNeice Collection, www.fieldday.ieCarrickfergus Museum. MacNeice Collection (the source of all illustrations accompanying this article). 7 LM, The Strings are False: An Unfinished Autobiography, ed. E. R. Dodds (London, 1965), 223. 8 LM, Strings, 62. 9 LM, Zoo (London, 1938), 80. 10 LM, Collected Poems, ed. Peter McDonald (London, 2007), 732 [hereafter, CP]. 11 Stallworthy, LM, 65. This report is currently unverifiable, as most of LM’s early family correspondence was withdrawn from the Bodleian Library in December 1995. Many early letters will however appear in the Selected Letters of Louis MacNeice, ed. Jonathan Allison (London, forthcoming 2008). 12 Elizabeth Nicholson, ‘Trees were Green’, in Brown and Reid, eds., Time was Away, 11–20 (15). In Strings, however, LM claimed that ‘remembering my father and Home Rule, I said I thought Carson was a pity’, when challenged for his views by a ‘tipsy American soldier’ on along Nationalist lines’.14 On the face of hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. a train in spring 1919 it, this analysis demonstrates that Frederick Thou art weighed in the balances, and found (71); he also recalled having ‘heard political was not merely an opponent of partition, wanting. Thy kingdom is divided, and given arguments’ before the but a pragmatist who accepted, however to the Medes and the Persians.’15 Great War, which ‘were reluctantly, the necessity for Home Rule. The practical proof of Frederick’s all about Orangemen We shall return to the question of whether nationalism, liberalism, and non- and Home Rulers’ (53). Elizabeth’s sensitive and as a younger man he had indeed, like the sectarianism, as expounded by a detailed recollections prophet Daniel, accurately divined the distinguished procession of MacNeicians, of her parents and ominous writing on the wall of Belshazzar’s relates mainly to four episodes: his public brother stopped short of palace, ‘mene, mene, tekel, upharsin’: ‘God refusal to sign the Ulster Covenant in
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September 1912; his espousal of an in Carrickfergus, with a comment which attributing nationalism to ecumenical ‘League of Prayer for Ireland’ conceals as much as it reveals: ‘The ministers Frederick, while stating that ‘his political opinions between 1920 and 1924; his initiation of a of religion in Carrickfergus, in permanent differed widely’ from similar campaign in 1935–36 in response charges, did not sign the Covenant. They those of ‘the Northern to renewed sectarian conflict in Belfast; represented a minority, negligible indeed people whom he served’ www.fieldday.ieand his successful resistance in the same in numbers, whose conscientious scruples (14). 13 Fauske, ‘Side by Side’, 15. period to the government’s proposal that the exposed them at the time to some adverse 14 FM, Carrickfergus and 19 Union flag should officiate perpetually over criticism.’ In a celebrated response, a Its Contacts: Some Carson’s grave in St. Anne’s Cathedral.16 In butcher on the Select Vestry remarked: ‘That Chapters in the History each case, scholars have drawn inferences was a grand sermon the Rector gave us. But of Ulster (Belfast, 1928), 70, 75. Publication from Frederick’s words and actions which he spoiled it all at the end by telling us he was preceded by full 20 are by no means self-evident. Opposition wasn’t going to sign the covenant.’ weekly serialization (in to the Ulster Covenant implied rejection Oddly, no scholar appears to have a prominent position of the threat of violence as a political tool, scrutinized the omitted elements of that and an unusually large font) in the Carrickfergus but not approval of any particular political ‘grand sermon’, which reveal its author to Advertiser [hereafter, programme. Collaboration with other have been an orthodox and unrepentant CA], 27 January to 29 Protestant clergymen, in two ecumenical and unionist. The rector declared that the June 1928. non-partisan campaigns for reconciliation, opposition to Home Rule was ‘democratic’, 15 Daniel 5:25–28. 16 See, for example, George was likewise consistent with unionism as working men being united by ‘a common Rutherford, ‘John well as nationalism. Finally, Frederick’s conviction that Home Rule would be a death Frederick MacNeice’, refusal to sanctify Carson’s legacy in the blow to the industrial life of Ireland. In this Carrickfergus and form of a flag raises the issue of which opposition they are joined by the farmers District Historical Journal, 7 (1993), 38–46; aspect of Carson’s political career gave of Ulster, and I may add of Ireland’. Even Stallworthy, LM, esp. offence to his fellow southerner. In order to Nonconformists in Ireland (unlike Britain) 34–37, 172–74; Fauske, test the implications of these episodes for opposed Home Rule, because ‘they know ‘Side by Side’. our understanding of Frederick MacNeice’s this country, its history, its circumstances’. 17 CA, 6 and 20 September 1912. politics, we must first re-examine the MacNeice eloquently endorsed the 18 CA, 4 October 1912; historical record. widespread fear that a predominantly quoted in Stallworthy, As rector, Frederick joined several other Roman Catholic parliament ‘could not LM, 35, and in many local ministers on a committee to make be trusted to do justice to a Protestant other studies. 19 FM, Carrickfergus, 72. ‘arrangements for the celebration of Ulster minority’, citing the examples of Quebec, The Covenant was, Day in Carrickfergus’ in 1912, though, ‘in Italy, France, and Spain: however, signed by the absence of the text of the Covenant’, Frederick’s curate, Robert he insisted that attendance at the various Is it any wonder that the Irish Roman Newett Morrison, and by the two Presbyterian church services should not entail automatic Catholic has been described as a rebel ministers at nearby 17 endorsement of that document. When whose feet are in British fetters and whose Woodburn: Ulster addressing his congregation in St. Nicholas’s head is in a Roman halter? ... Are not the Covenant, signature church, he undoubtedly caused a sensation Bishops the patrons of the Party? Are not sheets (on line), Public Record Office by declaring that he personally (like others the Priests, almost as a rule, the chairmen of Northern Ireland who approached the issue ‘primarily from of the local branches of the United Irish [hereafter, PRONI]. the Church’s standpoint’) would not sign League? 20 Nicholson, ‘Trees’, 15. the Covenant, feeling that ‘Ireland’s greatest interest is peace, and they shrink from a Citing the absence of lay protests against policy which, as is avowed, in the last resort, enforcement of the infamous Ne Temere means war — and worse still, civil war’. decree regulating ‘mixed’ marriages, he Such a course would tend to ‘intensify the asked, ‘Isn’t the fear of the Irish Protestants bitterness that many of them hoped was fast a reasonable fear?’, rejected all previous Irish dying away’.18 This final passage from the parliaments as ‘ghastly failures’, and asserted sermon was extracted by Frederick himself that ‘Ireland has self-government just as
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21 CA, 4 October 1912. England and Scotland have’. MacNeice exercise in casuistry, but an understandable 22 Letter from Lady predicted that ‘as the masses advance in attempt to antedate the process by which he Elizabeth Nicholson, prosperity and in education the desire for had gradually moved from optimism about quoted in McKinnon, ‘Rector’s Son’, 53. Home Rule and the interest in agitation the future of the Union to the conviction that 23 Ulster Guardian: Organ will die away’. Meanwhile, ‘let no word be it was doomed. On the first anniversary of www.fieldday.ieof the Liberal Party spoken, let nothing be done to wound the Ulster Day, he reaffirmed his unionist ideals: in Ireland (Belfast), 5 feelings of our Roman Catholic neighbours October 1912 (second leader). In November ... One of the chief reasons we oppose Home Why may not we claim, and rejoice to 1921, the rector assisted Rule is because we believe it would lessen claim, that we are Irish, no matter what at the dedication of a individual liberty ... And because such are our remote ancestors called themselves, Presbyterian memorial our ideals, therefore, we recognise the rights and that while remaining Irish we also to the Ulster Guardian’s ex-editor, Major of others, whether majorities or minorities, can be members of a wider unity, sharers William H. Davey from to think their own thoughts and be true to in the strength and glory of the Empire Carrickfergus: CA, 3 their own convictions’.21 for which our fellow-countrymen have September 1920 (obit.), MacNeice’s exposition of the case for made such splendid sacrifices? 25 November 1921. 24 CA, 3 October 1913. the Union is utterly conventional in its 25 CA, 29 May 1914. terminology and assumptions, blaming By then, however, he felt that ‘a great wrong 26 See lists of officers in nationalist disaffection on lack of education has been done on our side’ through appeals CA, 14 June 1912, 10 and on clerical domination, detecting signs of ‘to race hatred, and to religious, or rather July 1914, 18 June 1915, 24 14 July 1916, 3 August opposition to Home Rule among respectable irreligious bigotry’. Seven months later, 1917, and 28 June 1918. Catholics, deploring all policies tending to he warned a parade of Ulster Volunteers He assumed the same undermine the gradual process of Anglo-Irish that they must submit, in extremis, to the office in the Carrickfergus reconciliation, and echoing the ideals of liberty mandate of the electorate: Unionist Club in 1914, but not in the following and toleration embedded in the ‘Qualifications year: CA, 20 February of an Orangeman’. Far from detecting ‘a And speaking as a Unionist to Unionists 1914, 6 March 1915. writing on the wall’, MacNeice in 1912 still I say — ‘We must make it plain, adhered to those very arguments with their abundantly plain, that while we are ‘very Prussian ring’ which he was to formulate opposed to the change of Government and dismiss so scathingly in 1928. By using now proposed, and with which we are the passive voice to express the failed Unionist now threatened, we are no less opposed position that he had once espoused, Frederick to the thought of a war which would managed to mislead credulous posterity range us against the soldiers of the King, without actually lying. Like his children, he or against our fellow-countrymen ’. was an accomplished rhetorician who knew when and how to be economical of truth. As In the absence of an agreement, ‘then there’s Elizabeth observed so acutely: ‘Both Louis and no alternative but to demand that the his father were very complex people, I think, question be submitted to the people of the and it was often hard to understand what was United Kingdom. In making such appeal we in their minds (though their minds were in know there are risks’.25 The rector’s public many ways so different).’22 Contemporaries, commitment to the Union was expressed in his of course, were not so easily misled. When annual election as a vice-president of the East praising his ‘brave act’ in declining to sign the Antrim Unionist Association between 1912 Covenant, a liberal weekly pointed out that and 1918.26 But the threads of his unionism ‘Mr. McNeice’s Unionism is of too staunch a were beginning to unravel as Carson’s Ulster character and has been too often manifested campaign shifted inexorably from all-Ireland in his parish for him to risk being dubbed a rejection of Home Rule towards provincialism Home Ruler because he is commended in a and acceptance of partition. Home Rule organ’.23 By December 1918, when ‘the people’ Frederick’s sleight of hand was not an of Ireland returned a republican majority
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In the rectory garden. Photo: MacNeice Collection, www.fieldday.ieCarrickfergus Museum.
while Lloyd George’s coalition parties commercially, but ‘political unity’ could 27 FM, For Peace with swept the polls in Britain with a bipartisan never be secured through military force. It Honour between North commitment to Home Rule, the existing could come only through the consent of the and South: An Address to Orangemen ... on Union had clearly lost its popular mandate. people themselves, North and South ... If Sunday, 9th July, 1922 Four years later, with partition a fait it became clear, as it might, that what was (Carrickfergus, 1922). accompli and the Union ‘gone’, the rector desired was a political unity, within the reminded the Orangemen of Carrickfergus British Commonwealth ... then it should be that ‘the old order whether for good or possible, with goodwill on both sides ... to evil has passed away’. Ireland remained ‘a find a way to a final settlement of what has unity geographically’ and to some degree been known as the Irish question.27
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Farewell to soldiers leaving Carrickfergus railway station during the Great War. Photo: MacNeice Collection, www.fieldday.ieCarrickfergus Museum.
28 Consider the excited responses of numerous journalists and politicians to Bloomfield’s recent revelation that he does ‘not find the idea of some form of Irish unity or closer association — almost certainly after my time — in any way unthinkable in principle. But what is conceivably acceptable in principle would have to be mutually acceptable in practice’; Irish Times, 24 August 2007. In January Far from being a repudiation of his earlier ‘Roman Catholic and Protestant alike’, in a 1922, Craig expressed a beliefs, this cautious contemplation of unity succession of enterprises designed to create similar view to Michael Collins: ‘For the present by consent, within the Commonwealth, in ‘a new outlook in Ireland’ and to curtail the an all-Ireland Parliament the indefinite future, echoed the sentiments accelerating cycle of reprisals and counter- was out of the question, of a procession of liberal unionists in reprisals. The campaigns of 1920–24 and possibly in years to come Northern Ireland stretching from Sir James 1935–36 were exceptional only for their — 10, 20, or 50 years — Ulster might be tempted Craig to Sir Kenneth Bloomfield. It is non-sectarian rhetoric, which carefully to join with the South ... astonishing that, even today, such innocuous avoided both selective ascription of blame and If he were convinced it utterances arouse a frenzy of excitement expressions of selective empathy. Otherwise, were in the interests of as signs of either progressive or subversive the Christian message broadcast by MacNeice the people of Ulster, he 28 would frankly tell them thinking, according to viewpoint. and his fellow ministers was indistinguishable of his views, but should In July 1920, when Frederick MacNeice from that of countless sermons addressed to such an eventuality arise, inaugurated his first ecumenical crusade all denominations. The appeals for priestly he would not feel justified for peace and reconciliation among all collaboration in these crusades brought no himself in taking part in an all-Ireland Parliament’; religious groups throughout Ireland, no response, though in late 1920 the parish Cabinet Conclusions, 26 practical possibility remained of keeping priest of Carrickfergus commended his January 1922, in PRONI, ‘southern Ireland’ within the Union. Protestant fellow clergymen for helping to CAB 4/30/9, quoted in Rather than campaigning against partition, keep the town ‘free from the evils that have Patrick Buckland, James Craig, Lord Craigavon also a lost cause, the rector attempted to arisen out of the recent labour troubles’, by (Dublin, 1980), 57. mobilize Christians of all denominations, ‘assiduously preaching peace and a Christian
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Louis and his stepmother in wartime Carrickfergus. Photo: MacNeice Collection, www.fieldday.ieCarrickfergus Museum.
29 Revd. George McKay to Very Revd. Patrick Convery, published in CA, 10 December 1920 (from Irish News). 30 Belfast News Letter [hereafter, BNL], 22 July 1935. 31 FM to LM and Mary, 16 September 1935: LM Papers, Box 7, Bodleian Library (uncatalogued). 32 FM, Reunion: The Open Door: A Call from Ireland (Belfast, 1929), esp. sermon delivered in Trinity College, Dublin, 10 March 1929. 33 Carrickfergus RFC tolerance of the rights of their neighbours’.29 leaders such as Bishop Mageean was far from Minute Book, 13 MacNeice’s Catholic counterpart as bishop laudatory. As ‘Daddie’ wrote to Louis and his September 1909: in of Down and Connor (Dr. Daniel Mageean) then wife, Mary, in September 1936: ‘Yes, I private hands. I am continued to portray his flock as guiltless fear the R.C. bishop & I were a bit mixed up grateful to Jane Leonard for alerting me to this victims of Protestant persecution while uttering in the English papers. He was given credit for fact. Sixteen years later, his own separate appeal for peace in July some of my appeals for fairmindedness &c, both the rector and 1935.30 Though MacNeice’s campaigns drew & I suffered occasionally because of some the then parish priest rapturous responses from the Catholic press of his criticisms & attacks!’31 Though an attended the funeral of a former Congregationalist and indignation from some diehard Ulster eloquent advocate of ecumenical co-operation minister: CA, 20 loyalists, his private assessment of Catholic and eventual reunion among the Protestant February 1925.
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Louis and his first wife, Mary, standing with Frederick and Beatrice at Bishopscourt, Waterford, 25 August 1932. Photo: MacNeice Collection, www.fieldday.ieCarrickfergus Museum.
34 Grand Chaplains and Deputy Grand Chaplains [hereafter, GC and DGC] of the Loyal Orange Institution included the Methodist cosignatory of the appeals of 1920, James Ritchie, DGC for Fermanagh (1938–41) and a leading Antrim Orangeman in 1920; and three of the fifteen clergy who distributed ‘A Message of Peace’ to Belfast shipyard workers in July 1935 (William Shaw Kerr, dean of Belfast, GC for Ireland; Canon Robert Cyril Hamilton Glover Elliott, DGC for Ireland from 1940; and John McCaffrey, a Methodist minister and DGC for Londonderry City in 1922): CA, 16 July 1920; BNL, 23 July 1935; Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland [hereafter, GOLI], Report of the Half- Yearly Meeting (December 1935, et al.). 35 Northern Whig, 22 February 1936. These Churches, Frederick was less sanguine about withhold permission for the permanent rolls of honour, though the prospects for rapprochement with the display of a Union flag above Carson’s ascribed to the 36th 32 (Ulster) Division in the Church of Rome. His only known public tomb. The ostensible justification for board’s statement, were collaboration with a priest involved the game resisting Craigavon’s proposal was the presumably the eight that was later to obsess his son: in September lack of precedent in other cathedrals for volumes of Ireland’s 1909, both the rector and the parish priest of setting such emblems over civilian tombs Memorial Records, 1914– 1918 (Dublin, 1923). For Carrickfergus were enrolled as ‘Vice-Presidents or monuments, and the board eventually letters to MacNeice from or Patrons’ of the town’s Rugby Football mollified its detractors by agreeing to the deans of eleven English Club.33 Otherwise, Frederick’s non-sectarian place a flag over the memorial rolls of cathedrals, in response partnerships were restricted to other Protestant honour at the west end of the cathedral.35 to his enquiry about precedents (not in file), denominations, several of his clerical Remarking on this compromise in a letter see FM Papers, Bodleian collaborators being prominent Orangemen.34 to Louis, ‘Daddie’ found ‘much to rejoice Library, dep. c. 759. MacNeice’s reputation as a liberal over: the Clergy, in the main, and the 36 FM to LM, 24 February dissentient from Ulster orthodoxy was respectable people, include the working 1936: LM Papers, Box 36 7, Bodleian Library enhanced by the decision of the Belfast men, are with us’. It is far from clear that (uncatalogued). Cathedral Board, which he chaired, to the bishop had been primarily responsible
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for the board’s unexpected declaration of Ireland. This betrayal was aptly symbolized 37 Irish News, 14 December independence, and the Irish News mused by the selection of soil from six counties 1935; cf. BNL, 14 December 1935. that ‘of all those who were engaged in the (rather than nine or thirty-two) in tribute to 38 Francis J. McKenna to matter on the side of the Board he [the the arch-partitionist. Carson’s offence was FM, 28 October 1935: bishop] was probably the least consulted or to shatter Frederick MacNeice’s dream of FM Papers, Bodleian www.fieldday.ieresponsible’.37 MacNeice was nevertheless winning over Catholic minds and hearts to Library, dep. c. 759. 39 Extract from ‘Parish criticized by a Catholic correspondent for the ideals of the Union. Notes’ by Canon Marable approving Carson’s burial in the cathedral If Frederick MacNeice was never a Williams (incumbent in the first place, so allowing St. Anne’s to Home Ruler, neither was he unreservedly of St. Luke’s and ‘become a fashionable graveyard for “sham liberal in matters of faith. Not only was he precentor of Connor), in Lower Falls Magazine, statesmen”’.38 ‘Sincere Churchmen’ of his reared among the ‘soupers’ (proselytizers) December 1935: Irish own persuasion also deplored the conversion and ‘jumpers’ (converts) of Connemara, News, 5 December 1935, of a place of worship into a ‘Mausoleum’ for but he followed the example of his parents 6 January 1936. ‘political pilgrims’, while pointing out that and three elder siblings by taking paid 40 BNL, 23 October 1935, echoing his tribute to ‘Ulster pilgrims from Monaghan, Cavan and employment with the Irish Church Missions. the living statesman in Donegal’ would inevitably be reminded of ‘a After two years’ training and teaching Carrickfergus, 71: ‘He broken covenant’.39 with the Missions in Dublin, he went on had great qualities of MacNeice was careful to avoid any public to teach at a Protestant boys’ orphanage in head and heart; he had courage, enthusiasm, slight upon Carson’s memory, expressing Ballyconree, near Clifden in County Galway, quickness, eloquence.’ ‘deep regret’ at the death of ‘one of the close to the Mission school where his future 41 In Memoriam: Last outstanding figures of his day, and one whose wife, Lily, worked for over a decade before Honours to Ulster’s great gifts of head and heart gave him a place their marriage in 1902.44 Frederick’s father Leader, Lord Carson of Duncairn (Belfast, 1935), of his own in the hearts of multitudes’.40 The remained as a scripture reader with the 5, 24–25, 29, from bishop played an admittedly minor part in Missions in Dublin until his retirement in Belfast Telegraph, 26 the funeral service, uttering the final words of 1905; and his widowed father-in-law, a October 1935; BNL, 28 prayer after the lowering of the coffin, over zealous convert from Connemara, lived with October 1935. 42 LM to Blunt, 9 December which a Methodist minister had emptied the Frederick and Lily in Belfast until his death 1935, as quoted in contents of a ‘silver bowl presented by the in the following year. Far from severing Stallworthy, LM, 173. Northern Ireland Cabinet and containing his connection with the Missions and their 43 Nicholson, ‘Trees’, 16. soil from each of the Six Counties’.41 This aggressive sectarianism after the mythic flight 44 See Society for Irish Church Missions to narrative was characteristically improved by from Omey, Frederick maintained an active the Roman Catholics Louis in a letter to Anthony Blunt, alleging connection with the society throughout his [hereafter, ICM], annual that his father ‘had to sprinkle earth from career. His congregations in Belfast and MSS Agency Books, the 6 Northern Counties on the coffin of ... Carrickfergus raised subscriptions for its 1856–1905: ICM, Dublin. his lifelong bête noir [sic] out of a large gold work on at least seven occasions between 45 ICM, annual Report of 42 chalice.’ Despite the bishop’s measured 1903 and 1928; he served as an executive the Committee ... with responses to these rituals of veneration in member of the Belfast Auxiliary for several a List of Subscribers to his cathedral, there is no reason to doubt years after 1907; and, like most Irish the Irish Branch (Dublin, 1896–1939): virtually full the sincerity of his remark (in a letter to his bishops, he became a vice-president of the set at ICM, Dublin. 45 daughter) that Carson would ‘be remembered society, upon his elevation in 1931. 46 FM, Diary, 12, 13 as the man who broke the unity of Ireland’.43 On several occasions, he invited T. C. July 1913: FM Papers, This statement is generally assumed to refer Hammond, an incorrigible proselytizer and Bodleian Library, dep. c. 758; CA, 25 to the unity promised for Ireland under Orangeman who became superintendent October 1918. Thomas Home Rule. In reality, it surely arose from of the Dublin Missions, to address his Chatterton Hammond the sense of betrayal felt by former ‘Southern congregation in Carrickfergus.46 Hammond (1877–1961), curate, Unionists’ with respect to those who was among the preachers at a festival in aid then incumbent of St. Kevin’s, Dublin (1903– opted for Home Rule in Northern Ireland, of the Missions staged in thirty-one churches 19); superintendent, while ditching their southern brethren in the Belfast region on 10 February 1935, Dublin Missions (1919– and antagonizing nationalists throughout the Sunday after Frederick’s enthronement 36); principal, Moore
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Theological College, in St. Anne’s Cathedral. Though unable to appears never to have paid dues, he presided Sydney (1939–49); attend the annual meeting of the Belfast over the unfurling of a new banner on Easter archdeacon of Sydney Auxiliary on the following day, the bishop Monday, 1911, served as lodge chaplain for (1949–61). During his years at St. Kevin’s, wrote: ‘that the work of the Missions was the years 1912 and 1913, and last appeared ‘more converts had primarily a work of witness for the faith on the roll in 1915.50 After a rare outburst www.fieldday.iebeen received out of the in its primative [sic], uncorrupted form of violence against Catholic windows in Church of Rome than in ... He knew well that all who supported July 1912, he exhorted a meeting of local any other parish church in Ireland’: A. E. Hughes, the Missions in Belfast and elsewhere Orangemen and unionists to ‘assist the Lift up a Standard: The had as their aim the uplifting of Christ, local [Constabulary] force in the event of Centenary Story of the the King of Love.’47 In his campaigns for assistance being required’. The meeting Irish Church Missions peace and reconciliation, Frederick applied obediently resolved to enrol the brethren (London, 1948), 38; see also Warren Nelson, the techniques perfected by Alexander and club members as special constables, who T. C. Hammond: Irish Dallas, founder of the organization, whose were to help preserve the peace ‘by placing Christian; His Life and marketing strategies included massive themselves each evening in different parts Legacy in Ireland and mailshots and distribution of a multitude of the town’.51 Lily MacNeice had recently Australia (Edinburgh, 1994) and Clergy of of handbills to supplement incessant presided over an Orange bazaar, after which Dublin and Glendalough: exhortations from the pulpit and through both husband and wife were effusively Biographical Succession the press. Though MacNeice’s parishes thanked for their services. In response, Lists, comp. J. B. Leslie, in Belfast and Carrickfergus presented Frederick reminded the brethren that ed. W. J. R. Wallace (Belfast, 2001), 700. limited opportunities for the conversion 47 BNL, 9, 12 Febraury of Roman Catholics, the rapid growth of the society was not a political, but a 1935. secularism among nominal Protestants religious society. They opposed Home Rule 48 MacNeice was elected presented a more urgent challenge to because they believed it meant Rome Rule as a DGC for Belfast for the years 1903–09 ministers struggling to save souls through ... Convince them that Home Rule was not (except 1905) and as more efficient dissemination of the gospel Rome Rule and that it would benefit the a district chaplain for of Jesus Christ as expounded in the ‘open country and they would be Home Rulers. Belfast Districts nos. 6, Bible’. He came to see secularism rather than And to prove that Home Rule really was 10, 3, and 1 for various years (successively as a popery as the principal threat to salvation, Rome Rule, he spoke about the Ne Temere member of Lodges 410, just as partition supplanted Home Rule as decree as an example.52 631, and 938). Though the principal threat to liberty in Ireland. giving various initials, it Though modifying his strategies as external In January 1915, LOL 1537 was one of may be shown that all of these returns refer to FM. conditions changed, Frederick MacNeice the few local organizations to publish a See officer lists in GOLI, remained profoundly true to his youthful resolution of condolence after Lily’s death, Reports, and in annual ideals in both faith and politics. in remembrance of ‘the valuable services reports of Belfast County The quintessential embodiment of rendered to the lodge by her, and of the Grand Lodge. 49 CA, 6 August 1909. both all-Ireland unionism and evangelical esteem and respect in which she was held 50 CA, 21 April 1911; LOL Protestantism was, of course, the Loyal by the brethren’.53 As late as March 1920, 1537, Minute Books and Orange Institution. It is, therefore, scarcely though evidently no longer an active Roll Books: in private surprising that MacNeice belonged to Orangeman, MacNeice revisited the Orange hands. 51 CA, 12 July 1912. Five three Orange lodges in Belfast between Hall to witness his sister-in-law unveiling a men were eventually 1903 and 1909, acting as a chaplain for roll of honour for local brethren who had imprisoned following no less than four of the city’s ten District served in the Great War.54 attacks on thirty-three Lodges.48 Within a year of his controversial Frederick took little interest in the houses, only four of which belonged to appointment as rector, ‘Bro. Rev. F. J. ostentatious celebrations each Twelfth of Protestants: CA, 27 McNeice’ was welcomed by the brethren of July, and was only once reported among the December 1912. Carrickfergus Total Abstinence LOL 1537, chaplains seen ‘on or near the platform’, at 52 CA, 2 February, 1 March whereupon ‘he assured the lodge of his the Castlereagh field in 1902. He therefore 1912. 53 CA, 15 January 1915. sympathy and assistance whenever called witnessed the epic confrontation between 54 CA, 26 March 1920. He on’.49 Though an infrequent attender who Colonel Edward Saunderson and Thomas
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Sloan which eventually led to the creation whatsoever ... The Orange society is not was one of five clergymen of the Independent Orange Order and a a political society ... I know well that present, ‘in addition to the brethren’, at the serious rift in Belfast unionism.55 MacNeice many most excellent men have used the unveiling by Dorinda seems never to have had a public part in opportunity, which membership of the Florence, wife of the the East Antrim demonstrations, apart society has given them, in advocating the second Mrs. MacNeice’s www.fieldday.iefrom apologizing for his absence in 1920.56 basic principles of Christian revelation.60 brother, Thomas MacGregor Greer. She Though addressing at least three July was a leading figure in the ‘anniversary services’ for Orangemen in MacNeice himself was, of course, among Ulster Women’s Unionist Carrickfergus in 1909, 1917, and 1922,57 those ‘most excellent men’. When pursuing Council and (by 1927) he used these occasions to preach the virtues his campaign for peace in the shipyards a in the Carrickfergus Women’s Loyal Orange of temperance, tolerance, internationalism, few weeks later, he made a ‘very special Lodge No. 7: CA, 7 reconciliation, and respect for law and order, appeal’ to Orangemen, offering a remarkably January 1927. Mrs. Greer paying scant attention to the customary positive account of the order: was perhaps the ‘Belfast commemorative themes. Already, in 1909, aunt, lately engaged in gun-running’, with whom he wished ‘to God we had the strength and I witnessed the great procession on the Louis and John Hilton wisdom not only to remember but to forget. Twelfth of July. It was magnificent. I dined in September Surely there is no true wisdom in recalling was deeply impressed by its orderliness, 1928: LM, Strings, 269; year after year the story of wrongs inflicted on one might say, the solemnity of it. I feel Stallworthy, LM, 124–25; Dorinda MacGregor Protestants in 1641, or any other rebellion’.58 sure that the thousands of splendid men Greer, Diary, 24–25 For MacNeice, Orangeism was a potentially whom I saw at close quarters were and April 1914, in PRONI, useful tool in promoting godliness, sobriety, are lovers of order and justice and peace. D/2339/4/8/23. and respectability among workers of all I believe that those men, worthily led, 55 BNL, 14 July 1902. 56 CA, 16 July 1920. Protestant denominations, offering access to a could more than any other men now 57 CA, 16 July 1909, 13 far broader range of souls than that reachable find a way, an honourable way, out of July 1917, 14 July 1922. from the pulpit of St. Nicholas’s. Like so a vicious circle. I implore the leaders of In 1927, he conducted many Orange chaplains, he regarded the the Orange Society not to let such an another anniversary service but engaged a order as a ‘religious’ rather than a ‘political’ opportunity go by.61 special preacher for the institution, concentrating on the cultivation occasion: CA, 15 July of morality within the lodge rather than the At the very apogee of his liberal reputation, 1927. assertion of supremacy outside it. it is clear that the moral ideals of Orangeism 58 CA, 16 July 1909. 59 BNL, 1 July 1935; So long as Orangeism did not stand in had not lost their allure for the lord bishop Rutherford, ‘John the way of Irish unity within the Union, of Down and Connor and Dromore. Frederick MacNeice’, MacNeice remained involved. As the The father that Louis MacNeice put 41–42. institution followed Carson’s lead towards behind him as a rebellious adolescent, and 60 Letter from FM, 8 July 1935, in BNL, 9 July acceptance of partition, he dissociated re-embraced as a tormented adult, was not in 1935. himself from its inner counsels and my view the liberal, non-sectarian nationalist 61 BNL, 22 July 1935, transferred his fraternal enthusiasm to with whom MacNeicians have become so reprinted in FM, Our freemasonry. By 1935, he was regarded as familiar. During Louis’s early childhood, First Loyalty (Belfast, 1937), 61–68. In 1938, an antagonist by many leading Orangemen, Frederick remained a conventional all- however, he watched ‘a especially when he applauded clerical Ireland unionist and Orangeman. As Louis very large procession’, ‘aloofness from party politics’ and warned matured, his father’s political and religious from the front of St. that ‘the influence that is gained by a priorities were changing in response to the Thomas’s rectory and then from the junction of clergyman in the political sphere lessens catastrophic effects of war and revolution, the Lisburn and Malone 59 his influence in the spiritual sphere’. In all other objectives being subordinated to roads, exclaiming ‘But response to widespread protests, some by his the necessity for peaceful reconciliation of what does it all mean, own clergy, he declared: both international and local antagonists. and why are Clergymen in it?’ See FM, Diary, 12 Frederick’s post-war sermons and addresses July 1938: FM Papers, I was not thinking of the Orange Order, were remarkable in the Irish context not Bodleian Library, dep. c. and I was not insinuating anything for their content but for their irenic tone, 758.
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62 LM, Strings, 78–79; from which all elements of rancour and Orange drums’ or ‘voodoo of the Orange Stallworthy, LM, 71. partisanship were excised. Indeed, a neglected bands / Drawing an iron net through 63 ‘Belfast’ (September aspect of Louis’s early rejection of his father darkest Ulster’,63 but ‘an emotional safety- 1931) and ‘Autumn Journal, XVI’ (1938), in is his adoption of a bitterly censorious style, valve’ or ‘catharsis’ for men who were CP, 25, 138. whereas in later life he emulated his father’s privately ‘quiet and unemotional’. The www.fieldday.ie64 LM, ‘Northern Ireland preference for measured words and balanced Orangeman’s ideal, so Louis declared and Her People’, 148–49, judgements. Yet, tolerant and broad-minded in 1944, was to be ‘a decent wee man’ in LM, Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice, ed. Alan though he was, Frederick remained to the — ‘unostentatious, sober, industrious, Heuser (Oxford, 1990), end a son of the Irish Church Missions, a scrupulously honest, and genuinely 143–53. loyal subject of the monarch, a celebrant of charitable’.64 Echoes of Orangeism and 65 ‘The Gardener’ (summer the moral and political mission embodied the Irish Church Missions suffused Louis’s 1939), in CP, 188–90; LM, Strings, 47–48; LM, in the British Empire, and an upholder poetry and prose throughout his career, as ‘Childhood Memories’ of many of the tenets of Orangeism. In in the affectionate tributes to Archie White, (recorded for BBC, rejecting his father, Louis was also rejecting rectory gardener and Orangeman,65 and Belfast, 2 July 1963), in the Loyal Orange Institution. This provides those Dallas-like references to ‘the garish LM, Selected Prose, 267– 73 (269). Archie White’s a vital subtext for that curious passage in Virgin’, ‘your dolled-up Virgins’, ‘the garish mark appears among the The Strings are False where Louis (aged altar’, and ‘cormorants / Waiting to pounce Carrickfergus signatures thirteen) panders to his headmaster at like priests’.66 These elements belonged to to the Ulster Covenant: Sherborne by agreeing that the Twelfth the MacNeice heritage just as much as the PRONI. 66 ‘Belfast’ (September was ‘all mumbo-jumbo’, thus offending a virtues of sobriety, tolerance, breadth of 1931), ‘Valediction’ teacher from darkest Portadown: ‘Oh this vision, and hatred of violence with which (January 1934), ‘Autumn division of allegiance! That the Twelfth of they coexisted in Frederick’s mental world. Journal, XVI’ (1938), and July was mumbo-jumbo was true, and my There was more in the celebrated ‘box of ‘Prologue’ (1959) to ‘The Character of Ireland’ father thought so too, but the moment Mr. truisms’ than one might have supposed: (uncompleted book of Cameron [recte Lindsay] appeared I felt essays), in CP, 25, 10, rather guilty and cheap.’62 In truth, he was His father gave him a box of truisms 138, 779; cf. LM’s jeer surely betraying not only his teacher but also Shaped like a coffin, then his father died; that ‘the potboy priests and the birds of prey his father, the former Orange chaplain. This The truisms remained on the mantelpiece were still the dominant could not be made explicit, since by 1940, As wooden as the playbox they had been caste’ in Dublin, when the account was composed, Louis was packed in September 1939: Strings, in effect collaborating with his father in the Or that other his father skulked inside. 213. 67 ‘The Truisms’ (1961), in attempt to redraft Frederick’s biography and CP, 565. to obscure the less palatable elements of his When the prodigal son returned to bless his earlier career. parental home, it was the Orange verities The poet’s own view of Orangeism was of civil and religious liberty, symbolized by becoming more benign, and closer to his the open Bible, which ‘flew and perched on father’s attitude in later life. The Twelfth his shoulders’ and nourished the tree that was no longer a nightmarish ‘banging of ‘sprouted from his father’s grave’.67
161 Field Day review www.fieldday.ie
162 Snapped Thomas Allen’s www.fieldday.iePulp Fictions Seamus Deane
An exhibition of photographs cannot escape being an exhibition of photography. That is, the technology of reproduction, especially when it is highly sophisticated, as here, is always on show as a technology. The elaborateness of the set-up and the design is so painstaking that we feel we are looking at prints that bear the unmistakable mark of something individually handcrafted while also having the equal and opposite mark of the mass-produced, a mark that belongs to photography itself. These photographs present us with images from American pulp fiction (westerns, detective stories, war romances, science fiction) that initially illustrated the stories themselves and that have now been cut out and mounted, seeming to rise in three-dimensional space as in children’s pop-up books, to be
Intrude
Field Day Review 4 2008 163 Field Day review www.fieldday.iePosse
photographed. But the crude figures don’t jawed males and curvy females rising or entirely leave the wood-pulp pages in which striding from the dog-eared paper and limp they were first realized; their passage from covers into the afterlife/former life of the print-illustration via cut-out arrangement stereotype (Intrude), images that have been to the two-dimensional photograph that deeply imprinted into our consciousness dramatizes the relations between material by repetition in different popular media. and imaginative production provides a The glaring typography of the book commentary on the capacity and the limits covers, spines, blurbs and titles and the of representation. well-thumbed pages indicate cheapness, In one sense these are images that are mass-production values, sensationalism. playful, familiar and even stale, refreshed by But Tom Allen’s photographs are not at all being drenched in a new technological wave. derisive. They do, though, have a strange Yet they still transmit a sense of trouble, effect; these images, which once were so lightly indicated in the punning, ambiguous slick and modern, now appear as poses titles, repeated in the transgressions from from the ancient ritual of being ‘modern’, of image to book to the ‘real’, accelerating the the limited repertoire of gesture developed allure they once had as popular stereotypes in early mass-consumer production. Their of men and women, precisely because they self-conscious modernity now looks as are so dated through being so knowingly sculpted and histrionic as the acting styles updated — isn’t this what ‘retro’ is? — into of the movies of the 1920s and 1930s. The this glossy new medium. The criss-cross clarity of the poses belongs to the world between book and photograph is at the of sexual fantasy, to popular fiction and to heart of the comic element, with square- the cinema. Allen reminds us of this by his
164 Snapped www.fieldday.ieStranger
miniaturization of the human figures or by main street of the frontier town and its the enlargement of the book sizes; the ratio rowdy bar, with the frail swing-to doors that between them, and the transition from the scarcely divide street from bar or the sober, represented — especially when it makes solitary step of the law from the drunken claims to being ‘realistic’, tough-guy-no- uproar of the lawless, is a plainly charted nonsense-nothin’-fancy presentation — to territory, full of clear divisions between the the ‘real’ is always a fake but necessary natural and the civilized, rooted in a stalwart element; you can’t let anyone, man or system of moral decisiveness that comes woman, on to a screen or a page unless out of the barrel of a six-gun held by a man they are already made up as manly men or wearing a star (Posse). Coming through as sexy women. So the images are always that door, which is more like a hinge or a front loaded; their startling obviousness is membrane, the cowboy or gunman walks what alerts us to the gender weight they out of and into, into and out of, the real and carry, although their popular appeal in part imagined (Stranger, Loaded). The shoot- depends upon their ease, their refusal to out for the sovereignty of the main street appear to be carrying anything culturally between the good and the bad man at high ‘heavy’ or ‘symbolic’. noon is the iconic image, although we must Cowboys and detectives of the hard- remember too the hidden audience of the boiled kind in dime novels, like cowboys fearful townsfolk that casts the unrinsable and gangsters in movies, are specifically stain of the watcher, tense and ashamed, on American heroes with specifically American the brightness of the image. And in these locations for their colportage morality. The photos the implied (or explicit) onlooker, the open country of the Wild West or the wide viewer, belongs to that grouping; the very
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Left: Dark Hunger www.fieldday.ieRight: Jackpot
act of looking sends a ripple of voyeurism example, of the city machine (both in the across the photograph, itself the product political sense, and as ‘organized’ crime), for of a watching eye, a lens, a chosen focus which the tommy gun is the emblem; it is (Dark Hunger). The sidelong glance of the aimed at a specific target but can hit anyone eyes indicates sexual desire but also a warp and it leaves its acne everywhere, particularly in that desire — sex for money, furtive on its companion machine, the motor car, secrecy, betrayal, the ‘sexpot’ pose of the shrouded in punctured chrome and glass, its femme fatale who is always unmarriageable slumped victims wreathed in sirens and lights. (Jackpot, Explorer, Breathtaking). The The morality of the sheriff or marshal has strong male, in his army uniform or in his difficulty in surviving such conditions; those rumpled tough-guy pose, with his cigarette who embody it, like Raymond Chandler’s in the corner of his mouth and his desire in Marlowe, are given to us as men who find the corner of his eyes, is presented in such themselves in a world where virtue itself has standard images as a dupe, trapped; yet his become archaic — and they with it. In the sexual success is indisputably one of the reversals of these stereotypes and locations, rewards for his toughness. between high morality and low technology, The sheer violence of the gangster or of high technology and low morality, the hero war makes a Wild West morality appear equipped with six-gun or tommy gun, the more archaic and, as a consequence, more soldier or sailor at leisure out of the war zone sentimentally prized. Killing is regularly where his moral solidarity can be challenged eroticized in all media, but the taste for (see Mate, Explorer), we can see the American violence cannot always be presented as movie and publishing industries forging an pathological. For it is a characteristic, as one ideology for American foreign policy. The
166 Snapped www.fieldday.ie
167 Field Day review www.fieldday.ieExplorer
critical and frail linkages between sexual that whole economy of action in which glamour, moral conduct and violence need to physical strength, usually allied with be soldered over and over again. moral straightforwardness (and thus not Violence is not disapproved of in these a characteristic of the male detective), is photos; it has an attraction that is obviously celebrated. Boxing (echoed in the fist-fight sexual and in which women — dames, that always leaves knuckles undamaged, broads, femmes fatales, ‘nice’ girls — play see Red) is the sport in which violence the assigned roles of the desired and of can best be legitimized, open-air brawls the desiring and provide the stimulus for turned into fenced rituals, with moral and
168 Snapped www.fieldday.ieBreathtaking
physical strength now menaced by intrigue, if the boxer is white (like Gene Tunney), he sexual temptation and urban corruption can avoid all this, he can be not only moral (Knockout, inside back-cover); the predators but gentlemanly, possessed of a textbook that surround a boxer wear big suits over expertise (Spar). He is really a sheriff or thin frames, big overcoats draped over the marshal; he needs to maintain his distance suits, drink and smoke a lot, and still survive from his opponent and from the world; so the boxer who usually finishes wheezing, he fights from the upright, open stance and shuffling, brain-dead, consumptive, his favours the punishing, stern straight left. morality as ruined as his health. Of course, In the conventional narratives where
169 Field Day review www.fieldday.ieMate
170 Snapped www.fieldday.ieRed
171 Field Day review www.fieldday.ieSpar
these images preside, the degradation fit defender of that orderly world. In the and complicity of women in a world of degraded world, the relationships of men unlawful violence is an inescapable, even and women are sheerly sexual, commercial, a stimulating, energy; whereas in a lawful understood as forms of violence in which world, where violence is much more discreet, the male always predominates because of then the function of women is to enforce his greater physical strength; whereas the discretion in that and in personal and social converse is (almost always) the case in the behaviour generally. It is the love of a good world of law and order. Gender is a value woman that provides the male with the system that works both ways, for and sentimental education that makes him a against the licit/illicit. We clearly recognize
172 Snapped www.fieldday.ie
Fathom cowboys, detectives and their dames or in the vertical riffling of the book pages and broads in today’s war propaganda, give or the theatre curtain, which merge into one take a few small changes in dress codes and another, forever seeks to surface, clasping the a huge transformation in technology. Or, it treasure box he has found, aiming for the may be that a deeper change has occurred. moment of breaking the surface, of waking, The belief that the reproduction of nature which is to break into where we are, through is more and more within our grasp revives the gloss (Fathom). But then that would the old belief in progress, now born again be ‘history’, not representation, and would in the light of new economies and new take away our treasured role as voyeurs, the technologies. This may have affected our watchers for whom the sharpest pleasure is notion of desire, turning it heliotropically not to be an agent. Let somebody else step towards the ambition to ‘become all we out into high noon and become a counter- can be’, making us admirers of what drives image of ourselves, one that we can watch people to be driven. The Big Sleep; the dream from our dark inner room as it emulsifies, out of which the diver, horizontally trapped clarifies, comes up into focus.
173 Field Day review www.fieldday.ie
174 Minding Ourselves A New Face for www.fieldday.ieIrish Studies Michael Cronin
The writer and critic Arland Ussher in the The Face and Mind of Ireland (1950) set about the not wholly original task of explaining Ireland to his English readers. Explanation and conflict are invariably the terrible twins of history, one arguing why the other is unavoidable. Thus, in Ireland and England, from Cambrensis to Céitinn, and from Fynes Morrison to Bernadette Devlin, the reasons for conquest or resistance are carefully rehearsed on the page, an indispensable counterpoint to the slaughter in the fields or the violence on the streets. Ussher is, however, writing in more peaceable times, his mid-twentieth-century Ireland a kind of Arnoldian haven of predictable unpredictability. The mood is more serene but
Ivan Armstrong, Ewa Skalska, etching, 29.3 x much still needs to explained. 20.6 cm; Belfast Print Workshop © the artist. In drawing up a psycho-social portrait of the Irishman, Ussher
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makes much of the former’s ‘artistic Mark Henry, Tourism Ireland’s director of 1 Arland Ussher, The Face temperament’. This is, in Ussher’s view, more central marketing, noted in his comments and Mind of Ireland (New York, 1950), 169; a question of attitude than achievement and on the results of the survey that for British his emphasis. the returns are more imagined than real: tourists, ‘Five or 10 years ago, Ireland 2 Barbara O’Connor and was greatly different from their domestic Michael Cronin, Tourism www.fieldday.ieThe Irishman is a bohemian and a je holidays. Now a lot of retail outlets in in Ireland: A Critical Analysis (Cork, 1993). m’en foûtiste [sic] in his way of living, Ireland are British, so tourists are less likely 3 Alison Healy, ‘Tourists somewhat of a play-actor (or ‘playboy’) to see the sort of uniquely Irish-run stores say Ireland not Unique alike in action and passion, seeing that they might have seen eight or 10 years Enough’, Irish Times, 2 existence as a show — while remaining ago.’3 If Irish cities looked remarkably like February 2006. 4 Joseph J. Lee, Ireland as far as possible uninvolved. No man is many other British and European cities, 1912–1985: Politics and more realistic or cynical conversationally what was so exceptional about Ireland any Society (Cambridge, than the artist type of man, but with all more? Had the arrival of the world of ‘facts 1989); Therese Caherty, his sense of reality he is usually a failure and duties’ in globalized Ireland meant ed., Is Ireland a Third World Country? (Belfast, in actual life, because he is not oriented to that the only exceptionable thing about 1992). a world of facts and duties; and the same Ireland in the developed world was that it is true of the Irishman — he is like the was unexceptionable? This crisis of Irish king who never said a foolish thing and exceptionalism is not, however, only a cause never did a wise one.1 of concern for tourism marketing executives anxiously seeking bed-nights but has equally Ussher is all too obviously drawing on fundamental implications for the present the time-worn binary of dreamy Celts and state and future growth of Irish Studies. practical Saxons but what is important in Research thrives on enigmas and good the context of any discussion of the future research questions are ones we are generally of Irish Studies is that he believes the Irish at a loss to answer. If there were easy answers, are different. His book is turned towards a there would be little point in expending time repeated affirmation of what we might term and energy trying to answer them. For this ‘Irish exceptionalism’, the ways in which the reason, Ireland for the last three decades of Irish are believed to be utterly distinct from the twentieth century was deeply attractive the English and other Europeans. One reason as a site of scholarly inquiry. The country for affirming the difference, though not one in the context of the developed world was Ussher had in mind, was to persuade tourists an anomaly. First, there was the economic to come and see what it was that made the anomaly of a country which despite proximity Irish so different. Indeed two years after the to British markets and membership of the publication of Ussher’s book the Irish Tourist European Economic Community consistently Board/Bord Fáilte was set up to see how the failed to achieve satisfactory levels of world of ‘facts and duties’ might profit from economic growth, had the highest net outward the reputation of the artistic type of men.2 migration rate of EEC member states and But what of Irish exceptionalism now? experienced record levels of public debt. Joe In a four-year survey of more than Lee’s Ireland: Politics and Society 1912–1985 28,000 holidaymakers, entitled Marketing was a forceful indictment of the scale of Insights —Image of the Island of Ireland independent Ireland’s economic failure, and produced in February 2006 by Tourism the title of a collection of essays edited by Ireland, the successor to Bord Fáilte, the Therese Caherty and published in 1992 was authors of the report found that what mainly eloquent, Is Ireland a Third World Country?.4 disappointed tourists was that Ireland was Second, there was the social anomaly of not ‘unique enough’. Compared to many a state in Western Europe that banned all Eastern European destinations, Ireland forms of artificial contraception, prohibited fared poorly in conspicuous exoticism. civil divorce, made sexual activity between
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David Connolly, St Petersburg View, lithograph, 41 x 31cm; www.fieldday.ieCork Printmakers © the artist.
consenting adult homosexuals a criminal the twentieth century. The discourse of Irish offence and tolerated high levels of clerical exceptionalism that sustained Ussher in interventionism in the educational and his musings on Irish history and character health services. The signal failure to separate was equally applicable to the seeming Church and state and the aggressive aberrations of late modern Ireland. In this policing of private morality made Ireland respect, then, Irish Studies did not have to conspicuously different from the more look far to see why it was different from general drift towards liberal legislation in other country studies. post-war Europe. The difficulty for Irish Studies in the early Third, there was the seeming political twenty-first century is that what is different anomaly of a country mired in ethnic is that Ireland is no longer so different. The conflict, linked to questions of religion and Economist declared in 2005 that Ireland territory, where thousands of people lost was the best place in the world to live, while their lives or were seriously injured and spectacular economic growth made Ireland where militarization was an inescapable by the dawn of the new century one of the fact of everyday life in Northern Ireland. wealthiest countries on the planet: The presence of these ‘wars of religion’ in the pre-Bosnia, pre-9/11 secular vision of Between 1991 and 2003 the Irish an Enlightenment world appeared both economy grew by an average of 6.8 per scandalous and perplexing. Therefore, as cent per annum, peaking at 11.1 per cent an economic, social and political anomaly, in 1999. Unemployment fell from 18 per Ireland was puzzling to the growing cent in the late 1980s to 4.2 per cent in numbers of students and scholars attracted 2005, and the Irish Debt/GDP ratio fell to Irish Studies in the last three decades of from 92 per cent in 1993 to 38 per cent
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Raymond Henshaw, Anushiya, screenprint, 40.2 x 29.3 cm; Belfast Print Workshop © the www.fieldday.ieartist.
in 1999. Throughout the 1990s Irish integrated into the global economy with the 5 Kieran Keohane and living standards rose dramatically to the standard freedoms of a liberal democracy, Carmen Kühling, Cosmopolitan Ireland: point where the country is now, at least is there any particular reason why Ireland Globalization and by some measures, one of the richest in should still remain worthy of investigation or Quality of Life (London, the world, and has the fourth highest analysis? Does the end to Irish exceptionalism 2007), 1. GDP per capita in the world.5 spell the end of Irish Studies?
If Ireland was no longer so anomalous in economic terms, changes to social legislation Disciplinary Expansion in the 1990s, permitting, for example, the sale of contraceptives, removing the Irish Studies needs to be reconfigured to take prohibition on divorce, and decriminalizing account of the new context in which Ireland homosexuality, meant that Irish legislation finds itself, and that new circumstances in areas of private morality was closer offer new opportunities. It is no surprise to the European norm. The ceasefires of that in trying to establish why Ireland was 1994 and 1997, the Good Friday and St. so different for so long, the disciplines that Andrews agreements, the decommissioning of occupied pride of place in Irish Studies were weapons and most recently the establishment history and literature. The historians could of a power-sharing assembly in Northern try and explain what had happened to make Ireland mean that military conflict is no the Irish the anomalous crew that they were longer a salient feature of political life on and the writers and literary critics could the island. But is what is good for Ireland, try and describe what it felt like to inhabit necessarily good for Irish Studies? If Ireland and make sense of this world of difference. becomes more and more like any country of Violent, political conflict involving a stand- comparable size in the developed world, fully off between British and Irish nationalism
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John Kelly, Alien (Belfast), lithograph, 41 x 31 cm; Belfast www.fieldday.iePrint Workshop © the artist.
6 Paul Gillespie, ‘World invested historians and literary critics with this context, the narrow disciplinary focus of more Integrated than even more authority as the polemicists on Irish Studies to date is no longer sustainable. ever in 2002 Despite Economic Turmoil’, Irish both sides sought to marshal the arguments This is not to say, for a moment, that history Times, 13 March 2004. of history and theory to lend credibility and or literature have nothing to say about these authority to their positions. However, as altered circumstances, quite the contrary. the economic, political and social anomalies However, it is now time for the full range begin to recede from view what becomes of the human and social sciences (examples more pressing are questions of typicality, might be economics, sociology, psychology, generality and comparability. In other words, business studies, modern languages, what becomes of increasing relevance is not anthropology, philosophy) to be brought to the way in which the Irish were radically bear on the subject matter of Ireland. In a different from everybody else but rather sense, the fundamental shift in thinking is now that they are like many other advanced moving from the figure of typicality emerging developed societies, what can be learned against the ground of atypicality (hunting from the similarities to these societies. for elements of the ‘modern’ in Irish life and The A. T. Kearney/Foreign Policy writing) to considering the figure of what Globalization Index ranks 62 countries is specific or atypical against the ground of (representing 96 per cent of the world’s GDP typicality. Examples of the latter might be the and 84 per cent of the world’s population) specific role of the Irish military in post-Cold for 14 variables in 4 groupings: economic War international politics or the particular integration; personal contact; technological constraints around the soap-opera genre in connectivity; and political engagement. minority-language broadcasting practices. Ireland emerged at the top of this index as the In a report on the future of Irish Studies the most globalized country in the world for three group examining Irish Studies in the non- years in a row, 2000, 2001 and 2002.6 In anglophone world identified the following
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core notions as needing the broader cross- Houses of the Oireachtas, the title of her 7 Christine Hunt Mahony, disciplinary investigation envisaged here: speech was ‘Cherishing the Diaspora’. This et al., eds., The Future of Irish Studies: Report of diaspora, remembered once a year in the the Irish Forum (Prague, • Transformation (eg moving from one photogenic bonhomie of St. Patrick’s Day, 2006), 26. kind of economy to another, moving from was largely marginalized in Irish life and 8 Olivia O’Leary and Helen www.fieldday.iea situation of violent conflict to one of did not impinge in any major way on the Burke , Mary Robinson: The Authorised relative peace etc.) consciousness of those living and practising Biography (London, • Hybridity (Ireland’s long experience of politics on the island. Robinson argued that 1998), 196–98. identity politics now more relevant than their role was more central than previously 9 O’Leary and Burke, Mary ever due to changing migration patterns) thought and that: ‘Our relation with the Robinson, 196. 10 Alan Gilsenan and • Diversity (the elements of Irish literature, diaspora beyond our shores is one which can David Roberts, The Irish culture and society that make a instruct our society in the values of diversity, Empire (London, 2000), distinctive contribution to European and tolerance and fair-mindedness.’9 broadcast on BBC (1999). world culture) By 1996, ‘Ireland and Its Diaspora’ was • Peripherality (the experience of a small the theme selected by the Irish Stand at the nation in the area of peacekeeping, Frankfurt Book Fair, the most important development aid, UN power politics, EU book fair in the world, where Ireland was the negotiations etc.).7 main guest. The diasporic theme dominated the 1990s, as researchers, columnists, These are all notions where an abundant politicians of various hues drew public body of research in the human and social and scholarly attention to the lives and sciences could both illuminate and invigorate contributions of the millions of people of Irish Studies and most importantly, ensure Irish descent who had settled in various parts the area’s continuing relevance to the major of the world. In 2000 Alan Gilsenan and debates of our time. David Roberts directed a five-part television series entitled somewhat misleadingly The Irish Empire, where they offered viewers a The Diasporic and the Diffusive summary account of the lives and fates of the Irish who had left the shores of Erin for a If the object of Irish Studies has changed better life elsewhere.10 Though the series did beyond all recognition, an embodiment of look briefly at the Irish presence in Africa, the change was Mary Robinson, whose India, the Caribbean and South America, the election as president of Ireland signalled the focus was overwhelmingly on the anglophone advent of a markedly different set of values countries of destination, namely Britain, on the Irish political scene. One consistent the United States, Canada and Australia. theme of her presidency was the Irish This in one sense is hardly surprising, since diaspora. If Éamon de Valera was doomed to that is where most of the Irish went. The be forever associated with twirling maidens anglophone hegemony has also traditionally dancing at crossroads hops, Robinson would been a feature of Irish Studies, where outside be linked to the candle in the window of of Ireland itself scholars from Britain and Áras an Uachtaráin symbolically lighting North America have by and large tended to the way at Christmas for millions of Irish dominate the area. emigrants to their island point of origin.8 The second major challenge for Irish The gesture was not merely symbolic, Studies, therefore, in addition to disciplinary however, and related to a desire to retrieve expansionism is to engage in a shift from a lost or largely ignored dimension to Irish diasporic to what I would term diffusive culture: the existence of a substantial Irish perspectives on Irish culture. What is diaspora living outside of Ireland. In 1995, intended by the term diffusive is a way of when President Robinson addressed the joint capturing the influence of Irish cultural
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Amelia Norman, Mé Féin/Myself, photo intaglio, 34.5 x 25 cm; www.fieldday.ieCork Printmakers © the artist.
activity on the different literatures, languages most readers on the planet would not be and polities of the world outside of the aware of the writings of a Joyce, a Beckett, increasingly well-documented networks of a Yeats, a Ní Dhomhnaill or a Doyle. The an Irish anglophone diaspora. The focus Irish themselves are generally unaware of the of a diffusive perspective would in fact extraordinary amount of translation activity be exclusively on the Irish presence in the of Irish writing in English and Irish into non-anglophone world. It is of course the other languages which is and has been going non-anglophone world where most of on over many centuries. In addition, the humanity live, thus offering obvious growth labours of those who do so much to promote opportunities for Irish Studies as an area Irish writing abroad through translation are of scholarship and inquiry. What then generally unsung. might research from a diffusive perspective In 2002 a group of researchers in the look like and what kinds of things might Centre for Translation and Textual Studies it investigate? We might begin to answer at Dublin City University decided to build this question by asking another. What do a public, freely available, online resource one of Spain’s greatest living writers, a that would give the first true picture of the former president of Hungary and a German extent of the translation of Irish literature bankrupt all have in common? Javier abroad and also give a public profile to the Marías, Árpád Göncz and Felix Paul Greve translators of the literature. The purpose was have all translated works by Irish writers not only to provide information to scholars and contributed to the strong international but to help organizers of Irish literary reputation that Irish literature enjoys in the festivals in other countries with compiling world today. One of the often forgotten reading lists and bibliographies, to assist paradoxes of writing is that it is translation literary translators in identifying whether rather than the originals themselves that a work had already been translated and make writers famous. Without the work what works needed to be translated, to help of translators in many different languages strengthen the growth of Irish Studies in non
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Terence Gravett, The Wearing of the Green, screenprint, 28.7 x 21 cm; Belfast Print Workshop www.fieldday.ie© the artist.
English-speaking countries and to highlight Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Greek, Polish, domestically an often invisible dimension Dutch, Turkish, Portuguese, Urdu, Serbian, to Irish writing. The project was named Croatian, Catalan, Icelandic, Assamese, TRASNA from the Irish word for ‘across’, Sinhala, Gujarati, Bengali, Georgian, as the aim was to emphasize the way in Persian, Romanian, Norwegian, Hungarian, which literature goes across the boundaries Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Swedish, Lithuanian, of nation, language and geographical region. Danish, Galician, Finnish, Macedonian, There were two parts to the project, the Kirghiz, Azeri, Telugu, Malayalam, Tadjik, online bibliography, which lists all the details Kannada, Basque, Albanian, Tamil, relating to Irish works in translation, and Indonesian, Moldovan, Slovak, Slovenian, the online biographical database known Czech, Flemish, Scots Gaelic, Glosa, Hebrew, as TRASNABIO, which gives biographical Korean, Latin, Latvian, Marathi, Occitan, information on translators of Irish literature. Welsh and Uzbek. The scale of what the research team The 200 plus online biographies that has unearthed shows just how extensive have been compiled of the translators show the impact of Irish literature has been in that the translators have come from all translation. The online bibliography as it sectors of society, from national presidents currently stands includes over 16,000 entries to full-time revolutionaries, and are often on 350 writers who have been translated into acutely aware of the importance of bringing more than 60 languages. It is now the largest Irish writing to their own country in their national database of its kind in the world. own language. As TRASNABIO was the Jonathan Swift, for example, with 1,161 first translator biographical database of its entries, has been translated into a total of 47 kind anywhere, it was important to provide different languages. Among the languages as much information as possible on the into which Irish writing has been translated translators who do so much for the literature are French, Spanish, German, Italian, of a country that only rarely acknowledges
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Veronica Wallis, Gold is the New Green, drypoint and aquatint, 31.3 x 22 cm; Belfast Print www.fieldday.ieWorkshop © the artist.
11 Rose-Marie Vassallo, their achievement or their contribution to stories and celebrities that appear on Irish private e-mail the spread of Irish literature. As Rose-Marie television screens and the kinds of literature communication to Rita McCann, 17 January Vassallo, a French translator of Peadar that get into Irish bookshops. As a result, 2005. O’Donnell and Siobhán Parkinson, put it in Irish people’s interest in how others respond an e-mail to one researcher: to them tends to focus almost exclusively on British and American reactions or opinions. ... what I think is crucial is to make All this may be understandable because of translation visible at long last! Dammit, language economy (no need for translation) people read translated texts everyday but it does the country and its literature and never realize that those were born a great disservice, in that other forms of in another language! Our little persons reaction, other kinds of feedback, other are not that important, although, of ways of interpreting Ireland and its writing course, translation being a living thing, remain largely invisible in the public sphere we translators certainly are part of the in Ireland. context.11 Part of this problem is to do with a lack of awareness, simply not knowing what is Part of the context of how we think about out there in other languages about Ireland Ireland must be how Ireland appears in and its culture. An aim of the TRASNA different contexts. Over the last decade project was to bridge the information there has been much talk about the Irish gap, so that absence of knowledge about diaspora and subsequently about Ireland what others are doing was no longer a as one of the most globalized countries barrier to cultural self-understanding. on the planet. However, a great deal of But what the project also showed is that the attention on Ireland’s relations with the literary history of any country is at a elsewhere is bound up with the anglophone very deep level not so much national as world, as can be seen in the kinds of news transnational. In other words, there was
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a need to move away from an obsessive altered nature of Ireland’s linguistic present 12 Martin Ruhs, Emerging concern with what happened to Irish has brought in its wake a revisiting of Trends and Patterns in the Immigration and writing on the island of Ireland and look Ireland’s multilingual past. Evidence for this Employment of Non-EU more closely at what happened when can be seen in two volumes of essays: The Nationals: What the Data it travelled elsewhere. Looking at how Languages of Ireland, co-edited by myself Reveal (2004); http:// www.fieldday.ietranslated Irish literature influenced Czech and Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin; and Language www.policyinstitute. tcd.ie, accessed 23 May responses to totalitarianism, for example, and Tradition in Ireland, co-edited by Maria 2007. 14 or the development of the Brazilian novel, Tymoczko and Colin Ireland. Tymoczko 13 Michael Cronin, ‘Babel would reveal as much about Home as and Ireland stress the flexible, adaptable and Átha Cliath: The about Away. As changed economic and inventive nature of tradition, which they Languages of Dublin’, New Hibernia Review, 8, political circumstances have made Ireland contrast with the tendentious reduction of 4 (2004), 9–22. think again about its position in the the term by Eric Hobsbawm and others to 14 Michael Cronin and world, it is important to show that in the essentialist, timeless immobility and go on Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, very substantial body of Irish literature in to trace the outlines of a history of linguistic eds., The Languages of Ireland (Dublin, 2003); translation there was an unique opportunity mixing for Ireland, which is explored in Maria Tymoczko and to move away from a predominantly detail for a number of languages in The Colin Ireland, eds., Anglocentric diasporic purview to a more Languages of Ireland: Language and Tradition inclusive diffusive perspective. in Ireland: Continuities and Displacements From the pre-Celtic languages and the (Amherst and Boston, various dialects of the Celtic invaders 2003). Extrinsic and Intrinsic Alterity to the integration of Latin after the 15 Tymoczko and Ireland, conversion of the Irish to Christianity by Language and Tradition in Ireland, 1. Disciplinary expansion, the broadening out British clerics, from the linguistic diversity from a diasporic to a diffusive perspective, encountered by Irish missionaries abroad suggests the third major transformation for to the assimilation of Scandinavian Irish Studies, which is to do with the shift dialects introduced by the Vikings, from extrinsic alterity to intrinsic alterity. the early history of Ireland is rich in What I understand by this move is a greater multilingualism. The Anglo-Norman attention in the study of Irish culture to conquest brought still other languages to those elements within the culture that speak Ireland at the end of the twelfth century, of contact with the wider world rather than with armies and settlers speaking more seeing foreignness, difference or alterity as than one dialect of French, Occitan, elements without, or external to, the culture. Welsh, Flemish, and English.15 In a sense, this paradigm shift mirrors the demographic shift in Ireland itself where Thus, an effect of the marked increase a country with the highest net emigration in multilingualism in Ireland over the last rate in the European Union in the 1980s decade has been to make visible elements of found itself with the highest net immigration the Irish multilingual past, so that language rate by the start of the new century.12 The change is presented less as a threat to the foreign is no longer over there or beyond founding languages of the nation (to borrow the waves (extrinsic alterity) but next a Canadian term) and a more as part of an door, across the street, in the local corner Irish multilingual tradition that has been shop (intrinsic alterity). One immediate largely, though not exclusively, overshadowed consequence of the arrival of new migrants by the rivalry between English and Irish. in Ireland has been a dramatic increase in Developments in the present, then, are likely the number and size of foreign-language in the future to further bring to the fore the communities in Ireland and there are now particular variety and richness of Ireland’s estimated to be approximately 160 different multilingual past. Significantly, as part of the languages spoken in the country.13 The events to mark Ireland’s presidency of the EU
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16 Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Travelling in 2004, the European Commission building of movement are privileged in analysis. between the Wars (New in Brussels hosted an exhibition curated by The permanent move to Canada but not York, 1980), 11. the poet Peter Sirr, which had as its theme the the sojourn in Sicily, the emigrants’ letters 17 Bernard Share, Far Green multilingual heritage of the island of Ireland. home from Australia but not the visit to Fields: Fifteen Hundred Years of Irish Travel In this way, the growing emphasis on internal Berlin, become objects of critical inquiry. www.fieldday.ieWriting (Belfast, 1992). alterity, on already existing instances of Irrevocability risks becoming a talisman of internal interlingual and intercultural contact, authenticity (real travel [exile] v. superficial opens up new areas of research and offers travel [tourism]) and concentration further cross-disciplinary for researchers in on the Irish in New Communities may Irish Studies. narrow the world to encounters with A further dimension to internal alterity varieties of anglophone Irishness and is the post-Independence tradition of Irish neglect individual Irish experiences of a travel writing. Paul Fussell, in Abroad: multilingual and multicultural planet. And British Literary Travelling between the Wars, yet one of the striking features of Irish speaks of the diasporic conditions of inter- writing in the modern period has been war literary modernism, the many English- the continual presence of the travel genre, speaking writers who decided I Hate It Here: from Jane Francesca Wilde’s Driftwood from Scandinavia (1884) to Kate O’Brien’s This diaspora seems one of the signals Farewell Spain (1937), Monk Gibbon’s Swiss of literary modernism, as we can infer Enchantment (1950) to Seán O’Faoláin’s A from virtually no modern writers Route to Sicily (1953) and Colm Tóibín’s remaining where he’s ‘supposed’ to be The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic except perhaps Proust — we think of Europe (1994). With the notable exception Pound in London, Paris and Italy; Eliot in of Bernard Share’s anthology of Irish travel London; Joyce in Trieste and Paris; Mann writing, Far Green Fields: Fifteen Hundred ultimately in the United States.16 Years of Irish Travel Writing, this is writing in the English and Irish language in Ireland For the American critic, literary modernism that has been almost singularly absent as a and twentieth-century travel writing owe distinct category from books, dictionaries, their common origin to this unhousedness, guides and anthologies of twentieth-century this compulsive desire to be elsewhere. Irish literature.17 Thus, rather than focusing It is of course the permanency of being continually on how others have seen the elsewhere that underscores the drama of Irish, much remains to be done on how the exile, the condition of a Joyce or Beckett on Irish have seen others, a task that is all the the European Continent. Travel, however, more urgent as the others have now come to defines itself in the moment of return, in live amongst the Irish. the sighting of Ithaca after the trials of A changed Ireland of necessity means difference. This dimension to Irish nomadic a changed Irish Studies. It means that experience in the twentieth century has, Irish Studies must not only deal with a however, been curiously disregarded. Travel transformed present but must look afresh writing about Ireland has been the focus at the Irish past, both near and remote. The images that accompany this essay were exhibited in 10 of critical attention, whether this writing Broadening the disciplinary range, embracing x 10: Identity in Contemporary has been work of Irish or foreign travel the diffusive dimension to Irish cultural Ireland, in the Lavit Gallery, writers but, in contrast, commentary on impact and bringing experiences of internal Cork, in March 2008. The travel writing by Irish writers travelling alterity to the fore would mean, if nothing exhibition featured works by artists attached to the Belfast elsewhere in the modern period has else, a new Portrait for the Irish Artist. Print Workshop and Cork been relatively sparse. The oversight is Printmakers. significant and points to a danger in Irish diasporic studies where only certain forms
185 Field Day review www.fieldday.ie
186 The Lane Bequest Giving Art to www.fieldday.ieDublin Fintan Cullen
1 Irish Times, 17 June Rumour has it that in May 1915, 1998. See also Robert O’Byrne, Hugh Lane when Sir Hugh Lane went down 1875–1915 (Dublin, 2000), 242–43, and with the Lusitania off the Old Senan Molony, Lusitania: An Irish Tragedy (Cork, Head of Kinsale, he had with 2004), 45. 2 Robert O’Byrne, Hugh him a selection of Old Master Lane’s Legacy at the paintings, perhaps ‘stored in National Gallery of Ireland (Dublin, 2000); protective lead cylinders’.1 see also Peter Somerville- Large, 1854–2004: The According to one story, Lane, at Story of the National Gallery of Ireland the time director of the National (Dublin, 2004), ch. 20. Gallery of Ireland, was returning from New York with a Rubens and a Titian; another account claims that he was transporting a crate of paintings by French Impressionist artists such as Claude Monet and Pierre- Auguste Renoir. We will probably never know. In 1914 Lane had placed on loan Titian’s Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione at the National Gallery (fig. 1), which in 1917, two years after his death, became part of a generous bequest of over forty Fig. 1. Titian, Baldassare 2 Castiglione, detail, 1523, oil on Old Master paintings. In 1908, canvas, 124 x 97 cm, National in the expectation that the city of Gallery of Ireland. Dublin would erect a purpose-
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Fig. 2. Sir Hugh Lane in court uniform as Director of the National Gallery of Ireland, c. 1914, Dublin City Gallery/The Hugh Lane. www.fieldday.ieFig. 3. John Butler Yeats, George Moore giving his memorial lecture at the RHA, 1904, pencil on paper, Berg Collection, New York Public Library.
built art gallery, Lane (fig. 2) had deposited great philanthropic gesture of giving it away, 3 The term ‘a suitable thirty-nine paintings, including works by and the ensuing cultural/political problems building’ appears in the Monet and Edouard Manet, in a temporary arising from his disputed bequest — have the famous codicil, written in 1915, in which Municipal Gallery of Modern Art. A makings of a stirring national tale. Lane’s Lane bequeathed the couple of years later, annoyed by Dublin attempts to create a gallery of modern art pictures to Dublin, see Corporation’s failure to provide ‘a suitable for Dublin and bequeath it with some key Thomas Bodkin, Hugh building’ for his paintings in the city,3 he French paintings from recent decades has Lane and His Pictures (Dublin, 1956), 43. In his bequeathed all thirty-nine works to London’s been seen as a determinedly modernist act, Prefatory Notice to the National Gallery.4 Controversially, however, which fits perfectly with the Celtic revival first Illustrated Catalogue after Lane’s death an unwitnessed codicil to of the late nineteenth and early twentieth of the Municipal Gallery his will reversing this decision was found in centuries.7 Roy Foster in his biography of of Modern Art (Dublin, 1908), ix, Lane had called his desk in the National Gallery of Ireland. W. B. Yeats neatly explains the city’s loss of for ‘a suitable site’ for Despite this ‘codicil of forgiveness’, as his the pictures in terms of the ‘pusillanimity’ ‘the promised permanent aunt Lady Augusta Gregory represented of the Dublin Corporation, the ‘enmity’ building’. This catalogue it, the paintings are still legally owned by of William Martin Murphy, a wealthy was reprinted by the Friends of the National 5 London. However, a number of sharing newspaper proprietor and the ‘arrogance’ of Collections of Ireland and agreements have been struck between the Lane himself.8 In time, for Yeats and others, the Hugh Lane Municipal two cities, the most recent, dating from 1993 the saga became a stick with which to attack Gallery of Modern Art, (updated in 2007), preventing the intolerable the British establishment and also Catholic Dublin, in 1984. 4 Lane’s problems in situation suggested by the Burlington middle-class Dublin, with the poet declaring persuading Dublin Magazine that the paintings should be that the Lane pictures were ‘something that Corporation to take an ‘shuttled from one [gallery] to the other like all Ireland wanted’.9 But Yeats’s remark interest in supporting the children of divorced parents’.6 was not made until five months after Lane’s a gallery of modern art were not unique. In the The Lane saga — his collecting of art, the death. first decade and a half
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Fig. 4. Édouard Manet, Eva Gonzalès, 1870, oil on canvas, 191 x 133 cm, National Gallery, London. www.fieldday.ieFig. 5, overleaf: detail.
of the century, many prominent curators in Germany, from Hugo von Tschudi in Berlin and Munich to Gustav Pauli in Bremen, ran into difficulties with civic authorities. The situation was no better in England, where, in Leeds and Brighton, supporters of modernism, such as Frank Rutter and Henry Roberts, were ‘driven to fury’ by conservative aldermanic taste. See James J. Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World from the End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism (Oxford and New York, 2000), 167; Michael F. Zimmerman, ‘A Tormented Friendship: French Impressionism in Germany’, in Charles W. Haxthausen, ed., The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University (New Haven and London, 2002), 162–82; Giles Waterfield, ‘For an Excellent Purpose: Museums and Their Publics in Britain 1850–1914’, I in support of Lane’s gallery plans. The other Paul Mellon Lectures, comments are by Éamon de Valera, first in 2007, No. 6, delivered Comments by two individuals who supported a letter to Lady Gregory on 15 June 1928, at the National Gallery, London, 14 February Lane’s pictures being given to Dublin provide when he was leader of the opposition party 2007 (unpublished). useful starting points for an appraisal of Fianna Fáil, and then as Taoiseach a decade See also John House, Lane’s reasons for making his gift. One later, as recorded in a memorandum by Sir Impressionism for statement on what became known as Lane’s Edward Harding, permanent undersecretary England: Samuel Courtauld as Patron ‘Conditional Gift of Continental Pictures’ is at the Dominions Office in London. and Collector (London, by the writer George Moore (fig. 3), which he In his lecture, Moore proclaimed that 1994). made in a public lecture in December 1904 Manet’s portrait of Eva Gonzalès (fig. 4) ‘is
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what Dublin needs’.10 The 1870 painting, 5 Lady Gregory, Sir Hugh had been borrowed in 1904 by Lane from Lane: His Life and Legacy (Gerrards Cross, the Parisian dealer Paul Durand-Ruel for 1973 [1921]), ch. 17. exhibition in Dublin at the Royal Hibernian 6 Editorial, Burlington Academy (RHA) in Lower Abbey Street and Magazine, 126 (1984), www.fieldday.ieto form the nucleus of a gallery of modern 131. For a brief account of the various art. Two years later, Lane bought the agreements, see Barbara painting from Durand-Ruel and it became Dawson, ‘Hugh Lane one of the most famous of the thirty-nine and the Origins of the contested pictures.11 Kenneth McConkey Collection’, in Images and Insights (Dublin, has referred to Moore’s statement as an 1993), 30. My thanks 12 ‘extraordinary utterance’, and of course to Barbara Dawson we must understand Moore’s claim as part for clarifying the latest of a campaign for the creation of a gallery of agreement. 7 This is certainly the thrust modern art. But why did Moore think that of Jeanne Sheehy, The the Manet was a picture that Dublin needed? Rediscovery of Ireland’s For his lecture, delivered in the Large will be Mademoiselle Gonzales that will Past: The Celtic Revival Exhibition Room of the RHA, and published be purchased, for it will perhaps bring 1830–1930 (London, 1980), ch. 7. two years later in 1906, Moore had been about the crisis we are longing for — that 8 R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: asked to choose between two Manets then spiritual crisis when men shall begin once A Life. I. The Apprentice on loan to Dublin and suggest which one more to think out life for themselves, Mage (Oxford and New should be purchased for the city. The two when men shall return to nature naked York, 1997), 497. 9 Quoted in R. F. Foster, paintings were Eva Gonzalès and The Old and unashamed.13 W.B. Yeats: A Life. II. Musicians, the latter now in the National The Arch Poet (Oxford Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Turning to When first shown at the Paris Salon in and New York, 2003), Eva Gonzalès, Moore said: 1870, Manet’s portrait was severely criticized 26. 10 George Moore, for representing the contemporary and not Reminiscences of the To anyone who knows Manet’s work the ideal body, and the artist was accused on Impressionist Painters it possesses all the qualities which we that account of ridiculing the respectable. A (Dublin, 1906), 20; see associate with Manet; the eye that sees lot of attention focused on what one critic also Adrian Frazier, George Moore, 1852– clearly and quickly is as apparent in one referred to as the ‘impossible’ arms of the 1933 (New Haven and picture as in the other ... Mademoiselle sitter (fig. 5), which indicate ‘inappropriate London, 2000), 339. Gonzales’ rounded white arm is ... nakedness and the unseemly sexualisation 11 Martin Davies (and Cecil courageously stated, for it is entirely of an identifiable contemporary woman’,14 Gould), National Gallery Catalogues: French without sexual appeal, and I am afraid which, interestingly, is at odds with Moore’s School, Early 19th- the picture will to many people seem observation that the ‘rounded white arm ... is Century, Impressionist, vulgar for that very reason ... That entirely without sexual appeal’. Post-Impressionists etc. portrait is an article of faith. It says: To Moore, Manet was fundamentally (London, 1970), 90. See also Caroline Durand- ‘Be not ashamed of anything, but to be revolutionary, and he greatly upset many Ruel Godfroy, ‘Durand- ashamed.’ Never did Manet paint more in his 1904 Dublin audience by his candid Ruel’s Influence on the unashamedly. There are Manets that I like admiration of the portrait and its painter. Impressionist Collections more, but the portrait of Mademoiselle Adrian Frazier, in his recent biography, has of European Museums’, in Ann Dumas and Gonzales is what Dublin needs. In Dublin argued that Moore regarded Eva Gonzalès as Michael E. Shapiro, eds., everyone is afraid to confess himself. Is a suitable painting for Dublin city to purchase Impressionism: Paintings it not clear that whosoever paints like for its new gallery precisely because it showed Collected by European that confesses himself unashamed; he ‘courage, candor, and shamelessness, with Museums (New York, 1999), 34–35. who admires that picture is already half an almost childish innocence’. In suggesting 12 Kenneth McConkey, free — the shackles are broken, and that the portrait exhorted the viewer to ‘Some Men and a will fall presently. Therefore I hope it ‘Be not ashamed of anything, but to be Picture’, in Memory
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and Desire: Painting in ashamed’, Moore appeared to his audience public. Moore took this further; he regarded Britain and Ireland at the to be avowing a form of freethinking, hostile Lane’s conditional gift to Dublin of Manet’s Turn of the Twentieth to Roman Catholicism and, indeed, to all portrait, in its singular shamelessness, as a Century (Aldershot, 2002), 224. forms of Christian bourgeois respectability. subversive act. In his 1904 lecture, Moore 13 Moore, Reminiscences The presence of Manet’s great portrait in would also exclaim: www.fieldday.ieof the Impressionist Dublin would, for Moore, aid the spread Painters, 19–20. of a welcome ‘atheism and instinctual I believe that a gallery of Impressionist 14 Tamar Garb, The Painted 15 Face: Portraits of Women liberation’. pictures would be more likely than any in France 1814–1914 In 1928 de Valera was being encouraged other pictures to send a man to France, (New Haven and by Lady Gregory to take an interest in the and that is the great point. Everyone London, 2007), 86 and Lane case. He wrote to her, claiming to be must go to France. France is the source ch. 2. 15 Frazier, George Moore, fully committed to founding a gallery to of all the arts ... We learn in France to 338–44. R. F. Foster house the foreign paintings, a facility, he said, appreciate not only art – we learn to discusses Moore’s 1904 ‘which in its architecture and in its content appreciate life, to look upon life as an lecture and what Moore [would express] that love for the arts which incomparable gift. In some café, in some has to say about Manet 16 in ‘“Old Ireland and has ever been a characteristic of the Gael’. Nouvelle Athènes, named though it be Himself”: William Orpen In a decade when deep social conservatism not in Baedeker nor marked on any and the Conflicts of stifled innovation in the visual arts,17 what traveller’s chart, the young man’s soul will Irish Identity’, Estudios did de Valera mean by this comment? Its be exalted to praise life. Art is but praise Irlandeses (2005), 43–44 (www.estudiosirlandeses. insincerity becomes clear a decade later, when of life, and it is only through the arts that org, accessed 30 October de Valera, then in power, acknowledged to we can praise life.20 2007). Harding, an English civil servant, that, while 16 Quoted in Foster, W. B. he advocated the return of the Lane pictures De Valera, on the other hand, had no Yeats: A Life. II, 302. 17 See, for example, the to Ireland, he himself ‘knew nothing about sympathy for the Lane campaign per se. treatment of Mainie pictures, and did not know whether these His interest was in politics, not in art. Jellett when she exhibited were good or bad ones’.18 As his comments to Lady Gregory and some abstract paintings Despite Moore’s and de Valera’s support to Harding imply, when it came to the in Dublin, Fintan Cullen, Visual Politics: The of the return of Lane’s paintings to Dublin, repatriation of the thirty-nine Lane pictures, Representation of Ireland neither man had much understanding of their importance was entirely political. 1750–1930 (Cork, what Lane had been trying to do. In 1904, In the 1938 memorandum, de Valera is 1997), 166–67. See also when Lane spoke to Moore about his wish recorded as admitting his ignorance of John Turpin, ‘Visual Culture and Catholicism to create a modern collection for Dublin, it art. In paraphrasing Harding’s comments, in the Irish Free State, was, he said, because, ‘I am Lady Gregory’s Anne Kelly has written that de Valera had 1922–1949’, Journal of nephew, and must be doing something for suggested to London that: Ecclesiastical History, 57, Ireland.’19 Lane’s motives were romantic 1 (2006), 55–77. 18 Quoted in Anne Kelly, and admirable. In the summer of 1904 ‘artistic circles’ in Dublin were very ‘The Lane Bequest: A he organized a major exhibition of Irish anxious for the return of the pictures and British–Irish Cultural art, both historical and contemporary, in their return would have an excellent effect Conflict Revisited’, London’s Guildhall Art Gallery. A few on opinion in Ireland. He [de Valera] Journal of the History of Collections, 16, 1 (2004), years later, in 1908, he organized a more was assured that privately there was 102; quoting from modest display of recent Irish art at the ‘considerable sympathy’ that the pictures National Archives, Kew, model Irish village of Ballymaclinton in should go to Dublin. It was hoped to take DO35/899/3, Dominions London’s White City. Lane believed that the matter up but that legislation would Office Memorandum, Sir 21 Edward Harding, 19 May he was doing something for Irish art by be required. 1938. organizing exhibitions, alerting people to 19 George Moore, Hail and what was being produced, and that, in Lane’s gift (and Dublin wanting or Farewell: Vale (London, purchasing recent French art, he was also not wanting the pictures) has been much 1933), 93. For the 22 background to Moore’s making available a wider range of visual discussed by art and cultural historians. 1904 lecture, see F. S. L. stimuli to both Irish artists and the Irish However, his reasons for wanting to give
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certain pictures to Dublin remain obscure. Lyons, ‘George Moore Here, an effort is made to relate his wish to and Edward Martyn’, Hermathena, 98 (1964), gift works of art to Dublin to similar acts of 9–32. philanthropy in the city, prior to the great 20 Moore, Reminiscences controversy over the building of a designated of the Impressionist www.fieldday.iegallery in Dublin. But such philanthropic Painters, 42–43. 21 Harding’s Memorandum, activity needs to be seen in the context of a paraphrased by Kelly, wider history — that of the display of and ‘The Lane Bequest’, 102. access to art, most especially contemporary 22 Bodkin, Hugh Lane and art, in Ireland in the period dating from His Pictures; Sheehy, The Rediscovery of the great Irish Industrial Exhibition held in Ireland’s Past, ch. 7; S. Dublin in 1853. B. Kennedy, Irish Art and Modernism, 1880– 1950 (Belfast, 1991), ch. 1; Marta Herrero, II Irish Intellectuals and Aesthetics: The Hugh Lane’s efforts to bring contemporary Making of a Modern art to Dublin were by no means Art Collection (Dublin, 2007), ch. 2. unprecedented. In the aftermath of London’s 23 Leon Litvack, ‘Exhibiting Great Exhibition of 1851 there had been Ireland, 1851–3: Colonial comparable if smaller-scale exhibitions Mimicry in London, in several Irish cities.23 Notably, in 1852 Cork and Dublin’, in Glenn Hooper and Leon Cork’s Exchange Building was enlarged Litvack, eds., Ireland in to host a National Exhibition of the Arts, the Nineteenth Century: Manufactures and Products of Ireland, in Regional Identity which 567 works were displayed.24 A year (Dublin, 2000), 57. In the same volume, see also, A. Jamie Saris, ‘Imagining Ireland in the Great Exhibition of 1853’, 66–86. 24 Ann M. Stewart, ed., Irish Art Loan Exhibitions 1765–1927, 3 vols. (Dublin, 1990), vol. 1, xv. 25 Aluin C. Davies, ‘Ireland’s Crystal Palace, 1853’, in J. M. Goldstrom and L.
Fig. 6. John Hogan, Hibernia with a bust of Lord Cloncurry, 1844, marble, 148 cm ht., University College Dublin.
Fig. 7. James Mahony, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in the Fine Arts Hall of the Dublin Industrial Exhibition 1853, 1853, watercolour on paper, 62.8 x 81 cm, National Gallery of Ireland.
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A. Clarkson, eds., Irish later, on 12 May, Dublin launched a huge HAS EVER BEEN BROUGHT TOGETHER Population, Economy, Irish Industrial Exhibition on Leinster Lawn, UNDER ONE ROOF’. The journal and Society: Essays in where 1,356 works were shown. Commonly claimed the ‘indefatigable zeal’ of Dargan’s Honour of the Late K. H. Connell (Oxford, 1981), known as the Dargan Exhibition after secretaries ‘in bringing together so large and 251. William Dargan, ‘Ireland’s leading railway excellent an assemblage of works of modern www.fieldday.ie26 The bringing together of magnate’ and the event’s chief patron,25 it art to be absolutely astonishing’.27 In turn, the names of Dargan and was dominated by paintings and sculpture. Dargan’s generous backing of the exhibition Lane in terms of their art philanthropy was The Dargan Exhibition is a key event in acted as a stimulus to others to support mentioned in 1924 in the the historical development of art institutions public access to the visual arts.28 Most First Annual Report, The in Ireland, not least as it led directly to obviously, a public testimonial to thank him Friends of the National the creation of the National Gallery of for his patronage raised £5,000 towards the Collections of Ireland, quoted in Harold Clarke Ireland and its emergence as the major erection of a Public Gallery of Art, which in and Aidan O’Flanagan, depository of Old Master (as distinct from 1864 became the National Gallery.29 eds., 75 Years of Giving: contemporary) paintings in the country. Like the Great Exhibition in London, The Friends of the Importantly, however, the Dargan Exhibition Dublin’s 1853 spectacle included an National Collections of Ireland. Works Donated had included a large collection of Irish and array of contemporary statues by Irish by the Friends to the foreign contemporary works.26 In 1853 the sculptors; indeed, contemporary sculpture Public Collections of London-based Art Journal frequently lauded had a particularly dominant presence in Ireland (Dublin, 1999), Dargan’s ‘patriotism’ and noted that ‘several the exhibition. This interest in exhibiting 11. 27 Art Journal, 5 (1853), schools of modern Europe will be worthily recent art was especially emphasized in the 117, 162, 262, 302. represented; and we repeat our conviction accompanying exhibition catalogue, which 28 Dargan is reported to that the collection will be THE BEST THAT invited ‘the Irish public to make themselves have offered £20,000 to the Royal Dublin Society to stage the Dublin Industrial Exhibition (about €6 million in today’s money), see Somerville-Large, Story of the National Gallery of Ireland, 39. 29 Davies, ‘Ireland’s Crystal Palace’, 269. See also, Catherine de Courcy, The Foundation of the National Gallery of Ireland (Dublin, 1985).
Fig. 8. Philip Henry Delamotte, The Dublin Exhibition, 1853, 1853, collodion negative, Swansea Museum, Wales.
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acquainted with the Modern Schools, almost as can be seen in Philip Henry Delamotte’s 30 J. Sproule, ed., The Irish all of which were represented by examples of contemporaneous photograph (fig. 8).36 Industrial Exhibition of 1853: A Detailed considerable excellence’.30 In its discussion Amidst the bog-oak furniture, Catalogue of Its Contents of the display of modern sculpture, the reproduction Celtic jewellery, and examples (Dublin, 1854), 422. catalogue could claim that among of Irish industry, the Dublin exhibition 31 Sproule, ed., Irish www.fieldday.iemade recent Irish and continental art easily Industrial Exhibition, 422. these examples it is with no slight accessible to the viewing public.37 Indeed, 32 John Turpin, John satisfaction that the Irish critic finds himself in the two categories of sculpture and Hogan: Irish Neoclassical not merely attracted, but compelled to painting, modern works dominated by a Sculptor in Rome 1800– give the first place to one or two works ratio of at least 2 to 1. Large works, such 1858 (Dublin, 1982), 77–78, 179–80. of Irish artists, — men, too, who are not as the imperialist Last Stand of the 44th at 33 Valentine Browne mere accidental offshoots of our people, Cabul, in 1842, by Michael Angelo Hayes, Lawless, second Baron but really and thoroughly Irish in whatever or Francis Danby’s biblical extravaganza Cloncurry (1773–1853), part of the world they reside.31 The Deluge were on display, but one could Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, also view much smaller and more intensely www.oxforddnb.com, Works by John Hogan (fig. 6) and many national images, such as Joseph Patrick accessed 6 October 2007. other Irish artists were on display and can Haverty’s Irish Piper dating from the mid- 34 Letter from Cloncurry to be seen on the left- and right-hand side of 1840s (fig. 9) and Nicholas Crowley’s Hogan, 27 May 1853, in W. J. Fitzpatrick, James Mahony’s large watercolour, which portrait Daniel O’Connell, Painted during The Life, Times and celebrates Queen Victoria’s visit to the His Imprisonment in Richmond Prison, in Contemporaries of Lord Fine Arts Hall (fig. 7). Hogan’s Hibernia 1844.38 Of the foreign art on display, loans Cloncurry (Dublin, with a Bust of Lord Cloncurry, visible on were organized from Prussia, Belgium, 1855), 582. 35 Sproule, ed., Irish the immediate left of Mahony’s painting, France and the Netherlands. Amongst these Industrial Exhibition, offered a suitably national theme: a coronet- exhibits was work by one of the leading 428. See also Paula and laurel-crowned female allegorical German sculptors of the time, Christian Murphy, ‘British representation of Ireland affectionately Daniel Rauch, who was especially celebrated Sculpture at the Early Universal Exhibitions: places her left arm around the bust of in the exhibition catalogue for his plaster- Ireland Sustaining Cloncurry, while her right hand quietly cast representation of Victory (About to Britain’, Sculpture plucks the strings of an Irish harp as she rests Throw a Garland), the original of which Journal, 3 (1999), 64–73, a foot on an Irish wolfhound.32 A former had been completed in 1844.39 German esp. n57. 36 For the Hogan bust of United Irishman and occasional supporter painting was represented by Andreas O’Connell, see Turpin, of Daniel O’Connell’s movement to repeal Achenbach, a leading landscape artist, two John Hogan, 156 and the Act of Union, Cloncurry, who died in of whose works were loaned by the crown 161. The statuary after October 1853, ‘did his best to cultivate and prince of Prussia.40 the antique include Spinario, or Boy reward Irish talent’.33 He lived to see the If the Dargan Exhibition brought Extracting a Thorn great exhibition in Dublin and was delighted contemporary Irish and foreign art to wider from His Foot, and the to lend Hogan’s marble group, which, attention in Dublin in the mid-nineteenth Crouching Venus, both he informed the sculptor, ‘will cause the century, the RHA also made its contribution. by Giacomo Vanelli, see Sproule, ed., Irish artist’s fame to stand unrivalled in your own The Village Scribe (fig. 10), a painting by Industrial Exhibition, 34 country’. The exhibition catalogue went James Brenan exhibited at the academy in nos. 101 and 102, both so far as to suggest that Hogan’s sculpture 1882, can stand as an exemplary statement now in the National ‘might well adorn the Hall of an Irish on the acceptability of contemporary Gallery of Ireland (nos. 8085 and 8186), National Gallery, if we had one’.35 Smaller indigenous Irish scenes in public exhibitions presented in 1863. The pieces by Hogan of an equally ‘national’ for much of the late nineteenth and early contemporary paintings type were displayed in a room adjoining the twentieth centuries.41 The RHA was a have not, as yet, been Fine Arts Hall, where an idealized bust of bastion of conservative values with a strict identified. the recently deceased Daniel O’Connell was adherence to academic norms and it had no shown amongst marbles on display after distinctly ‘Irish’ agenda. Yet the academy’s the antique and contemporary paintings, exhibition lists for the nineteenth century
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Fig. 9. Joseph Haverty, The Blind Piper, c. 1845, oil on canvas, 76 x 59 cm, National Gallery of www.fieldday.ieIreland.
37 Nancy Netzer, ‘Picturing an Exhibition: James Mahony’s Watercolors of the Irish Industrial Exhibition of 1853’, in Adele M. Dalsimer, ed., Visualizing Ireland: National Identity and the Pictorial Tradition (Boston and London, 1993), 88–98. For wood engravings of the exhibited bog-oak furniture and Celtic jewellery, see ‘Appendix with an Illustrated Catalogue to the Exhibition of Art and Industry in Dublin’, Art Journal, 5 (1853), 39 and 47. 38 Stewart, ed., Irish Art Loan Exhibitions, vol. 1, 166, 174, 310, 315. 39 Sproule, ed., Irish Industrial Exhibition, 425–26, illustrated, 427; marble, with wings, now in the National Gallery, Berlin, see, Nationalgalerie Berlin. Das XIX. Jahrhundert. Katalog der Ausgestellten Werke (Berlin, 2001), 329. 40 Sproule, ed., Irish Industrial Exhibition, 442–43. 41 On Brenan’s paintings, see Claudia Kinmonth, Irish Rural Interiors in Art (New Haven and London, 2006), 256–58.
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Fig. 10. James Brenan, The Village Scribe, 1881, oil on canvas, 24 x 29 cm, Brian P. Burns Collection.
42 For more on this, see www.fieldday.ieFintan Cullen, ‘Union and Display in Nineteenth- Century Ireland’, in Dana Arnold, ed., Cultural Identities and the Aesthetics of Britishness (Manchester and New York, 2004), 120. For the RHA and its nineteenth- century problems, see Walter Strickland, A Dictionary of Irish Artists, 2 vols. (Dublin, 1913), vol. 2, 613–18; Peter Murray, ‘Trouble at Mill: George Petrie and the Royal Hibernian Academy’, Martello Arts Review, Special Issue on the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts, 1991 (Dublin, 1990), 14–22; also, Cyril Barrett and Jeanne Sheehy, ‘Visual Arts and Society, 1851– 1900’, in W. E. Vaughan, ed., A New History of Ireland, VI, Ireland under the Union, II, 1870–1921 (Oxford, 1996), 443–44. reveal many Irish subjects, although they You have fine clean paper See also Ann M. Stewart, are by no means in the majority.42 The You have your pay in your fist Royal Hibernian exhibition of Brenan’s painting in 1882, And may you get on with your job.43 Academy of Arts, Index of Exhibitors and Their when Irish nationalists were enjoying Works, 1826-1979, 3 vols. unprecedented electoral success, reflected a Based in Cork in the 1880s, Brenan was (Dublin, 1986). marked shift in the cultural mood. A rural well versed in international developments 43 Translation from Adele interior, it shows a people culturally confident in the art world. Earlier, he had worked M. Dalsimer and Vera Kreilkamp, eds., and at ease in their own environment. in England, and indeed had worked as America’s Eye: Irish Indeed, Brenan’s inclusion of a quotation a decorator on the Pompeian Room at Paintings from the in Irish in the catalogue entry underscores the Great Exhibition in London.44 His Collection of Brian P. that self-assurance; the village scribe is being subsequent paintings of rural interiors Burns (Boston, 1996), 88. 44 Strickland, Dictionary of addressed by the seated woman: owe a debt to a fellow Irish artist, William Irish Artists, vol. 1, 77, Mulready, who had died in 1863 but whose and Anne Crookshank Dubhairt an bhean — work Brenan would have seen in London. and the Knight of Tá lá fada geal agad Mulready was a mainstay of the annual Glin, Ireland’s Painters 1600–1940 (New Haven Tá páipear breagh glan agad exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts and London, 2002), 231. Ta do phagha ar do bhos agad and his fame rested on his scenes of rural See also Peter Murray, Agus bidheadh do gnó a gceart agad. incidents — a schoolroom, boys fighting, ‘Artist and Artisan: lovers exchanging verses. His work is James Brenan as Art Educator’, in Dalsimer The woman said — tinged by romance, an idyllic rural world and Kreilkamp, eds., You have a long bright day untroubled by modern realities. Brenan’s America’s Eye, 40–46.
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45 Illustrated Catalogue, vii. rural interiors of forty or more years later provided that the promised permanent For a useful discussion on have definite formal comparisons with his building is erected on a suitable site the relationship between Irish predecessor — the box-like room with within the next few years. This collection ‘Patriotism and the Art Exhibition’, see Francis similar lighting, the arrangement of the includes a selection of the Forbes and Haskell, The Ephemeral characters — but his vision is more specific, Durand Ruel pictures, bought by me after www.fieldday.ieMuseum: Old Master more localized. In The Village Scribe, the the Royal Hibernian Academy Winter Paintings and the Rise of Irish-speaking and most probably illiterate exhibition, and some important examples the Art Exhibition (New Haven and London, standing man and his seated wife are of Manet, Renoir, Mancini, etc., which 2000), ch. 6. dictating a letter in Irish to a scribe who is I have purchased to make this Gallery 46 Illustrated Catalogue, ix. presumably writing in English. This cultural widely representative of the greatest 47 On Lane’s portrait transformation is occurring because of the painters of the nineteenth century.46 commissions, see Fintan Cullen, The Irish Face: harsh reality of emigration: the child of Redefining the Irish the Irish-speaking parents has left Ireland Exhibited in a Georgian terraced house, Portrait (London, 2004), and may never return. The letter written formerly known as Clonmell House, on 65–69. by the village scribe is thus a vital means of Dublin’s Harcourt Street, the paintings 48 ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’, 1937; maintaining family and cultural ties. were arranged in distinct sections — Irish Peter Allt and Russell Painters, British Schools, French Barbizon K. Alspach, eds. The School and French Impressionists. They Variorum Edition of the III included Manet’s Eva Gonzalès and Renoir’s Poems of W.B. Yeats (New York, 1957), 602. Umbrellas (Les Parapluies), which were 49 For Mancini and Lane, Like his nineteenth-century predecessors, only on loan to the new gallery. Other see O’Byrne, Hugh a key ingredient in the development of exhibits were unconditional Lane gifts, Lane, 94–97. For Lady Lane’s plans for a gallery of modern art with examples of work by Irish, British and Gregory’s account of sitting for Mancini, see was a patriotic desire to build a collection American artists such as Frank O’Meara, Gregory, Lane: His Life for Ireland. In the opening paragraph of Walter Osborne, Albert Moore, George and Legacy, 79–80. For his Prefatory Notice to the 1908 Illustrated Frederic Watts, Wilson Steer and James Mancini’s technique, Catalogue of the Dublin Municipal Gallery McNeill Whistler as well as gifts of some see Ulrich W. Hiesinger, Antonio Mancini: of Modern Art, he stated that the Constables and Corots from the prince Nineteenth-Century and princess of Wales. On the staircase, Italian Master (New project of founding a Gallery of Modern Lane hung a selection of portraits, mainly Haven and London, Art in Dublin is no longer an idea, it is by John Butler Yeats and William Orpen. 2007), 66–67. now an accomplished fact. Till to-day The former was represented by portraits of Ireland was the only country in Europe his son, W.B. Yeats, and John Millington that had no Gallery of Modern Art. There Synge, while Orpen’s subjects ranged from is not even a single accessible private the Fenian Michael Davitt to the Unionist collection of Modern Pictures in this J. P. Mahaffy.47 One of Lane’s favourite country. That reproach is now removed.45 contemporary artists, the now forgotten and distinctly odd Italian painter Antonio Lane went on to say that he planned to hand Mancini, was represented in this collection over his ‘collection of pictures and drawings of portraits by an oil of Lady Gregory, of the British Schools ... and Rodin’s which years later W. B. Yeats would refer Masterpiece, ‘L’Age d’Airain’ ... a group to, rather generously, as a ‘great ebullient of portraits of contemporary Irishmen and portrait’.48 Viewing his sitter through his women … [and] my collection of pictures distinctive perspective grid (he called it a by Continental artists’. And it was here that graticola or grille), Mancini represented he also warned of the conditional nature of Lane’s aunt on a canvas heavily encrusted his gift: with impasto.49 The new Municipal collection also contained a small number [I] intend to present the most of them, of prints and drawings and sculpture. The
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Fig. 11. Auguste Rodin, The Age of Bronze, 1876–77, original plaster work; bronze, 1904, 170 cm, ht, Dublin City Gallery/The Hugh Lane. www.fieldday.ie50 See Neil Sharp, ‘The Wrong Twigs for an Eagle’s Nest? Architecture, Nationalism and Sir Hugh Lane’s Scheme for a Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, 1904–13’, in Michaela Giebelhausen, ed., The Architecture of the Museum: Symbolic Structures, Urban Contexts (Manchester and New York, 2003), 38–39. 51 For Mancini’s portrait of Lane, see Hiesinger, Mancini, 85, 87, for the Portrait of the Artist’s Father or The Maker of Figures, plate 25. 52 Giles Waterfield, Palaces of Art: Art Galleries in Britain 1790–1990 (London, 1991), 61–62. For Ricketts and Shannon remembering Lane’s penchant for interior design, see Gregory, Lane: His Life and Legacy, 168–69. Lane had included Shannon in his 1904 exhibition of Irish artists at London’s Guildhall (Gregory, Lane: His Life and Legacy, 54) and both Shannon and Ricketts presented paintings to the Municipal Gallery, see Illustrated Catalogue, 8 and 15. 53 For Tschudi, see works on paper included drawings by all intents and purposes it was an exercise in Françoise Forster- Giovanni Segantini, Jean-François Millet, cultural reconciliation. Its aim was to bring Hahn, ‘Shrine of Art or Signature of Augustus John, Max Beerbohm, Edward contemporary Ireland and Europe closer a New Nation? The Burne-Jones and prints by Alphonse Legros, together, just as Dargan had done in 1853, National Gallery(ies) Whistler and George Clausen. The sculpture by attracting loans from the newly formed in Berlin, 1848–1968’, collection was dominated by Rodin’s Age Prussian museums in Berlin and other in Gwendolyn Wright, ed., The Formation of of Bronze (fig. 11), a silhouette of which European centres. National Collections of also graced the vivid green cover of the The day after the opening of the gallery, Art and Archaeology catalogue. It was an eclectic collection and to the Irish Independent carried a series of (Washington, DC, 1996),
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93–95. For photographs hand-drawn sketches of the interior of the In the Dublin gallery and in keeping of Tschudi’s installations building.50 The Age of Bronze is visible with the cultural influences of the time — a and a list of the paintings at the turn of the stairs leading to the first portrait of Douglas Hyde, the founder of and sculpture on display in Berlin in 1908, see floor and looking out towards the portraits the Gaelic League, by John Butler Yeats was Barbara Paul, Hugo of Irish celebrities. On the first floor, and in displayed on the staircase — the cover and www.fieldday.ievon Tschudi und die what the Independent refers to as ‘A Corner section headings in the Illustrated Catalogue Moderne Französische of the French Room’, the paper’s sketch appeared in both Irish and English. Such Kunst im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Mainz, shows Manet’s Eva Gonzalès balanced bilingualism was later explained by Lane’s 1993), 221–23. From with Mancini’s full length portrait of Lane friend Tom Bodkin as ‘typical of Lane ... for 1902, in the Museum himself, with another, smaller, Mancini he sought quite sincerely to conciliate every Folkwang in Hagen, portrait of the artist’s father hanging in kind of opinion that might be used to further North-Rhine Westphalia, 51 55 Karl Ernst Osthaus also between. In his preference for showing his work’. The juxtaposition of portraits of placed Rodin’s Age of different Schools in distinct sections, old Land Leaguers such as Davitt and Trinity Bronze and a Renoir full displayed in relatively uncluttered suites Unionists such as Mahaffy was yet another length (now in Essen) of rooms, with each work of art given its demonstration of a movement towards within a contemporary hang; see Dumas and own space, Lane’s Dublin hang was in conciliation. On a grander scale, Lane was Shapiro, Impressionism, keeping with avant-garde fashions for the attempting to satisfy the newly empowered 60–61. Today there are exhibition of pictures. In the early years of Catholic middle class who dominated Dublin more than fifty bronze the twentieth century, Lane’s London friends Corporation and were owners and managers casts of Rodin’s Age of Bronze, see Antoinette Charles Ricketts and Charles Hazelwood of the gallery, while also placating his own le Normand-Romain, Shannon were experimenting in their particular caste, the Anglo-Irish community. Rodin (London, 2006), apartment in Holland Park, which Lane is Although he organized the display of the 206. In 1906 Lane had known to have visited, with neutral colours 1908 gallery, he was but its honorary arranged for the casting 52 through Rodin himself, and a well-spaced aestheticism. Equally, in director. The chairman of the Committee see O’Byrne, Hugh Lane, the new Municipal Gallery, with its gently of Management was an alderman, Thomas 1875–1915, 83–84. classical interior, the single row of hanging Kelly, a member of Sinn Féin who, along Tschudi had done much paintings, and most especially the privileging with fellow city representatives, sat around the same in 1903, see Paul, Tschudi, 361. of Manet and Renoir, one is reminded of the table with grandees such as the earl of 54 Arsène Alexandre, ‘L’art the virtually contemporaneous hang created Drogheda, at the time a representative Irish de donner un musée,’ by Hugo von Tschudi in Berlin’s National peer who took the Tory whip. As an example Le Figaro, 20 March Gallery. Despite official opposition, Tschudi of what F. S. L. Lyons has termed the 1908: ‘Seulement, si M. de Tschudi a créé hung paintings by Manet and Renoir in ‘cultural fusion’ that was current in Irish life à la Galerie nationale single lines above the dado and placed in the first decade of the twentieth century, de Berlin une section Rodin’s Age of Bronze in the centre of the the list of subscribers to the new gallery d’art moderne très room.53 Only two months after the opening included the prince and princess of Wales, remarquable, et cela avec le concours d’amis très of the Dublin gallery, this similarity between the earl of Mayo and many other Irish peers, riches … Hugh Lane, lui, Lane and Tschudi in the hanging of modern but also United States President Theodore a créé un musée entire à paintings was remarked upon by the art Roosevelt, and independent thinkers such as Dublin, sans le secours critic of Le Figaro.54 Both curators were Countess Markievicz, George Bernard Shaw, de personne.’ [While Mr 56 de Tschudi has created a using modern art, and in both cases that George Russell and Jack B. Yeats. very remarkable section meant Manet, Renoir and Rodin, to offer Just as the Irish Independent had carried of modern art at the new aesthetic solutions to the display of the a story on the opening of the gallery, the National Gallery in visual. Given that he was operating out of Irish Times also offered an analysis of Lane’s Berlin, and with the help of very rich friends… an eighteenth-century town house, Lane’s achievement: Hugh Lane, himself, innovations in display were quite modest. has created an entire Rugs, vases of flowers and period furniture Assembled in one of the great old houses museum in Dublin, featured throughout the Harcourt Street which recall the former glories of Dublin, without anyone’s help.] In Gregory, Lane: His Life gallery, while Tschudi’s rooms in Berlin were this gathering of peers, professors, Sinn and Legacy, 23. less obviously domestic. Feiners, and Gaelic Leaguers felt the true
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inspiration of citizenship, and forgot their disregard for the local and the indigenous. 55 Bodkin, Hugh Lane and daily differences. It would be hard to find Equally, given de Valera’s preoccupation His Pictures, 19. See also Lucy McDiarmid, The three men who look at life from more with nationalism, his attitude to the fate of Irish Art of Controversy different points of view than Dr Mahaffy, the Lane pictures was dominated by what (Dublin, 2005), ch. 1. Alderman Kelly, and Mr Stephen Gwynn. Lyons has referred to as ‘a single criterion — 56 The Illustrated Catalogue www.fieldday.ieYesterday, however, they were joined by whether it helped or hindered the breaking lists the Committee of Management and the the spirit of citizenship. Their theme was of the English connection’.59 subscribers, v, 60–61. See the future greatness of Dublin, and the Although the gallery was open until 10 F. S. L. Lyons, Culture duty of civic pride, and we sincerely hope p.m. every weekday and to 6 p.m. on a and Anarchy in Ireland that their words will find an echo in the Sunday, and although W. B. Yeats could later 1890–1939 (Oxford, 1979), 57; see also Sharp, hearts of all our people.57 claim that it was ‘well attended, and among ‘The Wrong Twigs for an the rest by working people’, wider support Eagle’s Nest?’, 37. Such themes of reconciliation also appear was not easy to obtain.60 In his memoirs, 57 Irish Times, 21 January years later in Lady Gregory’s hagiography, the English critic and curator Frank Rutter 1908. For further newspaper accounts Hugh Lane’s Life and Achievement (1921). recalled being invited to Dublin for the of the January 1908 She wrote of how her nephew had hoped that gallery opening and being asked to lecture: opening of the gallery, see Herrero, Irish someone might from time to time give a My chief recollection of this visit was Intellectuals and Aesthetics, 51–55. picture in memory of one who had been the utter incredulity on the part of the 58 Gregory, Lane: His Life dear in friendship or near in blood. And citizens of Dublin that the pictures given and Legacy, 70. The this in Ireland would be a happy thing to them could be of any real value. The Stott in question was An to do, rather than to place a monument view generally entertained was expressed October Morning, see Illustrated Catalogue, 13, before the eyes of a congregation of one or by some Irish cousins of mine who came illustrated, no. 72. The other creed, as though — and this, thank to see me after my lecture. ‘Of course,’ portraits were by John God, is not customary — Protestant could said they, ‘we understand you’ve got to Lavery, see his The Life not hold Catholic, or Catholic Protestant, crack them up in public. You are Lane’s of a Painter (London, 1940), 208. in honour and affectionate regard. The friend. But you can tell us. They aren’t 59 Lyons, Culture and Gallery knows no such divisions, but any good really, are they? They can’t be. Anarchy, 82. is wide and liberal for all. A tranquil If they were any good they wouldn’t be 60 Illustrated Catalogue, landscape by Stott of Oldham was thus in Dublin.’ Nothing I could say would ix; W. B. Yeats, letter to Observer, 21 January given by me and my son to the memory of remove these suspicions, and they went 1917, quoted in Gregory, an old friend who had been kind to us ... away telling me I was ‘very loyal’ to my Lane Life and Legacy, And lately, to Hugh’s own memory, and friend, and wondering to themselves 235. as a symbol of ultimate reconcilement, a exactly what his ‘little game’ was.61 61 Frank Rutter, Since I was Twenty-Five (London, friend who had stood by him through all 1927), 175. his work for the Gallery has given and put Despite Dublin Corporation having 62 Bodkin, Hugh Lane and up their portraits of John Redmond and made him an honorary freeman of the city His Pictures, 24, and Edward Carson, those stout fighters for in 1908 and that in the following year he O’Byrne, Hugh Lane, 109, 117. South and North.58 received a knighthood in the king’s Birthday 63 For criticism of the Honours list, Lane never succeeded in porch, see Maurice Craig, Unfortunately, such reconciliation was uniting the various Irish camps.62 As such, Dublin 1660–1860 illusory. It just did not happen. The reactions Lane’s ‘little game’, as Rutter’s Irish cousins (Dublin, 1980), 224. An added indication of George Moore and Éamon de Valera called it, failed. The municipal authorities of municipal change to Lane’s intended gift to Dublin of recent never built the gallery he wanted and the in 1933 was that the French paintings indicate the great divisions French pictures are still officially owned by former Rutland Square between the two cultural groups. Although London’s National Gallery. Moore might became Parnell Square, see Yvonne Whelan, born a Catholic, Moore’s 1904 comments have thought that Manet’s Eva Gonzalès was Reinventing Modern on the welcome subversiveness of Manet’s the picture that Dublin needed but Dublin Dublin: Streetscape, Eva Gonzalès represented an Ascendancy did not listen. And when de Valera claimed Iconography and the
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Politics of Identity that he was fully committed to founding a city of Dublin and to the Irish nation, it is (Dublin, 2003), 221. gallery that would reflect a characteristic certain that one has to move beyond the 64 Barbara Dawson, ‘The Irish love for the arts, the ‘promised’ uncritical partisanship of Lady Gregory, Hugh Lane revisited’, in Margarita Cappock, ed., building never materialized. Instead, in who, as McDiarmid entertainingly puts Dublin City Gallery: The 1933, a year after Fianna Fáil came to it, ‘devoted hours to taking tea with the www.fieldday.ieHugh Lane (London and power, Charlemont House, an eighteenth- wives of powerful men, begging them to New York, 2006), 11. century town house designed by William convince their husbands of Ireland’s right 65 McDiarmid, Irish Art of 67 Controversy, 12. Chambers, was refitted as the Municipal to the paintings’. Lane did give and Lane 66 Bruce Arnold, ‘A Gallery of Modern Art, an inappropriate did make money but his efforts to establish Controversial Bequest’, porch was added to its Parnell Square a gallery in Dublin were comparable to the Irish Book Review, 1, 1 façade, and a room was made available for stance taken by his contemporary, the ever (2005), 25. 63 67 McDiarmid, Irish Art of the Lane pictures. To add insult to injury, pragmatic intellectual nationalist Tom Kettle. Controversy, 39. as one of the most recent books on the In wanting to give a Manet to Dublin, 68 Senia Pašeta, Before the gallery informs us, the gallery ‘did not have a Lane, like Kettle, was of the opinion that Revolution: Nationalism, purchasing budget until 1974’, seventy years in order for Ireland to become ‘deeply Irish Social Change and Ireland’s Catholic Élite, after Lane had first exhibited Eva Gonzalès she must become European’. Expanding on 1879–1922 (Cork, 1999), in Dublin.64 that, in the first issue of his newspaper, the 132–33. In a recent essay on the Lane controversy, Nationist, Kettle in 1905 urged his readers Lucy McDiarmid has suggested that ‘Giving ‘to accept Ireland as a great complex fact; was the great central fact of Lane’s life: an organism with all the complications of it took him away from luxury goods and modern society’. 68 gained him entrance into a public realm of philanthropy.’65 Bruce Arnold has rejected A shorter version of this essay was delivered that statement, claiming that the ‘central at the conference ‘Art, City, Spectacle: fact of [Lane’s] life was getting, not giving. The 1857 Manchester Art-Treasures He was a superbly gifted dealer ... dedicated Exhibition Revisited’, held at the University to the art and craft of trading in works of of Manchester, 9–10 November 2007. For art. He made money, acquired paintings, comment and information, I am grateful and then gave them away.’66 To a degree, to Helen Rees Leahy, Giles Waterfield and both views have credit. In reviewing the Anthony Hamber. I am also grateful to Roy details of Lane’s gifting paintings to the Foster, Anne Kelly and Ruth Kenny.
201 Field Day review www.fieldday.ie
202 ‘A statue’s there to mark the www.fieldday.ieplace’ Cú Chulainn in the Gpo Robert Tracy
From the central window of Dublin’s General Post Office, a bronze statue faces passers- by on O’Connell Street. A little less than life size, it depicts an athletic young man, nearly naked. His head and body have slumped forward, but he is still almost upright, held up by a strip of cloth across his chest, which binds him to a pillar-stone. His right arm holds a sword, his left a round shield, but he can no longer raise them. He is exhausted, clearly dead or dying, pierced by many wounds, lapsing into unconsciousness for the last time. A carrion crow, bird of ill omen, is settling on his right shoulder, sensing that death has come. The figure suggests Éamon de Valera leads his cabinet in saluting the colours at a 1916 commemoration, General conventional images of Christ on Post Office, Dublin, Easter 1940. Photo: Hans the Cross. Wild/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.
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Those who pause to read the tablets in prominent member of Fianna Fáil, recalled 1 Padraic H. Pearse, English and Irish that flank the statue meeting Pearse in 1914 and hearing him Collected Works: Political Writings and Speeches learn that the subject is The Death ‘propounding clearly his doctrine of the (Dublin, 1922), 238. of Cuchulain, by the sculptor Oliver need for the blood sacrifice and the necessity 2 Pearse, Collected Works, Sheppard. They learn also that the statue for the re-baptism of the country for the 205. www.fieldday.ieis ‘a memorial to the participants in the salvation of the national soul’.4 3 Pearse, Collected Works, 216. 1916 Rising’. It commemorates the rebels There had been practical arguments 4 Joseph Connolly, who seized the GPO on Easter Monday, for a rebellion at Easter, but in Catholic Memoirs of Senator 1916, and proclaimed Ireland a sovereign Ireland the chosen date also suggested a Joseph Connolly republic, independent of British rule. symbolism of heroic sacrifice, of defeat 1885–1961: A Founder of Modern Ireland, ed. Here Patrick Pearse, provisional president that might eventually turn into a victory. J. Anthony Gaughan of the republic, and soldiers of the Irish When he led his force into the GPO on (Dublin, 1996), 94. Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army, held that Easter Monday, Pearse knew that the 5 R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: off units of the British army for five days, Rising was almost certain to fail and would A Life. I: The Apprentice Mage 1865–1914 until the building was in flames around lead to his own death. The planned muster (Oxford and New York, them. Survivors who escaped to a house in of Volunteers all over Ireland, which was 1997), 36. nearby Moore Street continued the battle to result in the capture of police barracks 6 W. B. Yeats (14 until Saturday, when Pearse surrendered to and other public buildings, had been September 1898), Collected Letters of W. avoid further bloodshed. He was tried by countermanded. The national Rising he had B. Yeats 2 (1896-1900), a British military tribunal and executed a planned had already been thwarted. eds. Warwick Gould, few days later, as were most of the other The passer-by who does not already know John Kelly, and Deirdre leaders of the Rising, an act that the British the heroic legends of ancient Ireland, and the Toomey (Oxford 1997), 269–70. government hoped would put an end to reworking of those legends by W. B. Yeats Irish rebellion for the foreseeable future. and his associates during the Irish literary Members of the rank and file from the revival in the early years of the twentieth Post Office and the other rebel positions century, reads that the dying warrior of in Dublin were sent to prison in England. Sheppard’s statue is Cú Chulainn, the great It was one more failed Irish rebellion, a doomed hero of the Táin Bó Cuailnge, seventh added to the six previous rebellions, and the sinister crow on his shoulder is which Pearse had cited in the Proclamation the Morrigu, or Great Queen, goddess of and in an earlier political pamphlet, The battles and feaster on the bodies of the dead. Separatist Idea, had called ‘the chain of the Surrounded and outnumbered in his last Separatist tradition ... never once snapped battle, Cú Chulainn, the tablets explain, during the centuries’,1 a sacred tradition fastened himself upright to a pillar-stone that each Irish generation must re-enact. with a strip of cloth, that he might die facing Pearse had argued the necessity of his enemies; ‘only when a raven perched on rebellion, whether or not there was much his shoulder did they dare approach’. chance of success. Each failed rebellion Oliver Sheppard (1865–1941) was Yeats’s kept alive ‘the Fenian flame’ of resistance fellow student and friend at the Dublin to British rule2 and so would inspire its Metropolitan School of Art in 1884–85.5 successor, thus keeping alive ‘the Spirit His Bard Oisin and Niamh (1895) depicts of the Nation’. His poems, plays, and the protagonists of Yeats’s The Wanderings political pamphlets frequently refer to of Oisin (1889). Yeats would later champion blood sacrifice. ‘The old heart of the earth Sheppard’s work in a letter to the Dublin needed to be warmed with the red wine of Daily Express.6 In 1901, he wrote urging the battlefields,’ he wrote, late in 1915,3 Sheppard to leave England and return celebrating the bloodshed of the First to Dublin to teach modelling at the World War. Joseph Connolly, leader of Metropolitan School of Art and take part in the Irish Volunteers in Belfast and later a the new cultural movement:
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7 Quoted in John Turpin, I feel it is our duty to get as much talent on Douglas Hyde’s A Literary History of Oliver Sheppard 1865– into Ireland as we can in the present crisis Ireland (1899).10 1941: Symbolist Sculptor ... Our country’s course feels certain ... After Cú Chulainn defeated Queen of the Irish Cultural Revival (Dublin, 2000), The artistic and literary movement, in Maeve’s attack on Ulster, as recorded in 19. which I include the Gaelic movement, has the Táin, Maeve plotted revenge. She led www.fieldday.ie8 Turpin, Oliver Sheppard, changed the face of the town. There is another army against Ulster when she knew 23. quite a strong little group of writers and that Cú Chulainn alone would be capable 9 Irish Times [hereafter, IT], 27 April 1935. artists now ... Thus in Ireland you would of fighting, and sent witches to entice him 10 Lady Gregory, Cuchulain be known, the living forces of Ireland with visions of an invading army. He resisted of Muirthemne (Gerrards shaped and shaping.7 their spells for a time, but finally refused to Cross, 1973 [1902]), 272; wait for reinforcements and went against Douglas Hyde, A Literary History of Ireland Sheppard settled in Ireland for the rest of his united enemies with only his charioteer. (London, 1980 [1899]), his life, teaching sculpture, carrying out Mortally wounded at last, unable to stand, 341–53; ‘Brislech Mór private commissions, and producing public he tied himself to a Maige Muirtheimne [The art: memorials in Wexford and Enniscorthy Great Defeat on the Plain of Muirthemne]’, Gaelic to the republican rebels of 1798; portrait pillar-stone ... with his breast-belt, that Journal, 11, 128, 132–35 busts of, among others, John O’Leary, way he would not meet his death lying (May, September– James Clarence Mangan, George Russell down, but would meet it standing up. November 1901), (Æ), Patrick Pearse and Cathal Brugha; and Then his enemies came round about him, 81–83, 145–47, 161–64, 177–80. ‘Dergruathar subjects from Irish mythology. but they were in dread of going close to Chonaill Chearnaig, Sheppard had been drawn to Cú him for they were not sure but he might The Bloody Raid of Chulainn as early as 1897, when he be still alive. Conall Cearnach’, Gaelic exhibited The Training of Cuchulain at the Journal, 11, 123–27 (December 1900–April Royal Hibernian Academy. Once resettled Only when ‘a bird came and settled on his 1901), 1–3,17–19, 33–36, in Dublin, he became a regular at the Abbey shoulder’11 do they realize he is dead, and 49–52, 65–67; Whitley Theatre,8 and so presumably came to know cut off his head and right hand. Stokes, ed. and trans., Yeats’s early plays about Cú Chulainn, On Sheppard’s statue, then, depicts the end ‘Aided Conculaind, The Death of Cuchulain’, Baile’s Strand (1904) and The Green Helmet of a heroic fight against overwhelming odds, Révue Celtique, 3 (1877), (1910). He certainly knew Lady Gregory’s but also an imprudent fight, which the hero 175–85. Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902) a version failed to postpone until allies could join him. 11 Gregory, Cuchulain, 256. of the Táin. The statue in the GPO was, in He went into battle to obey a complex code 12 Francis Shaw, ‘The Canon of Irish History fact, modelled in 1911–12, and embodied of honour and to become a heroic exemplar, — A Challenge’, Studies, Sheppard’s enthusiastic response when he knowing that to do so would bring about 61 (1972), 124. first read Lady Gregory’s book and ‘was his own death. It is thus an appropriate 13 William Irwin Thompson, struck by [Cú Chulainn’s] suitability as a memorial to Pearse and the other leaders of The Imagination of an 9 Insurrection: Dublin, sculptor’s theme’. the Easter Rising, but especially to Pearse, Easter 1916 (New York, The particular episode that Sheppard who had refused to postpone the Rising 1972), 75. chose to depict is not, in fact, from the Táin. despite the near certainty of failure. He had ‘Death of Cuchulain’, the last chapter of often spoken of death in battle as redemptive Cuchulain of Muirthemne, draws on legends of Ireland’s honour and described the about Cú Chulainn after the great battles of death of Cú Chulainn as symbolizing ‘the the Táin were over. Lady Gregory cites as redemption of man by a sinless God ... it is her sources ‘Brislech Mor Magh Muirthemne like a retelling (or is it a foretelling?) of the and Deargruatar Conaill Cearnaig — story of Calvary’.12 published in Gaelic Journal, 1901; S[tandish] Pearse was fascinated by the legend of Cú Hayes O’Grady in Miss [Eleanor] Hull’s Chulainn. He had taken an oath at the age of Cuchullin Saga [1898]; Whitley Stokes, ten to emulate Cú Chulainn in the fight for Révue Celtique; an unpublished MS in Dr. Irish freedom.13 At St. Enda’s, the bilingual [Douglas] Hyde’s possession.’ She also drew school for boys he founded in 1908, Pearse’s
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students performed in dramatic pageants For the first ten years of the Free State, the 14 Ruth Dudley Edwards, which he wrote for them: Mac-Ghníomharta Dáil, or parliament, was dominated by the Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure Chuchulain (The Boy Deeds of Cuchulain, pro-Treaty party, Cumann na nGaedheal, led (Dublin, 1990 [1977]), 1909), and a pageant from the Cú Chulainn by William T. Cosgrave. Éamon de Valera 123, 172. saga in 1913.14 Just inside the school and his fellow republicans, who had rejected 15 Edwards, Patrick Pearse, www.fieldday.ieentrance a painting by Edwin Morrow the Treaty, continued to seek and win election 117. 16 Martin Daly [Stephen depicted an episode from the Táin: the young to the Dáil, but were unable to take their McKenna], Memories of Cú Chulainn taking arms for the first time, seats because they refused to take the oath of the Dead (Dublin, n.d. after he had learned that the man who took loyalty to the British king, which the Treaty [1919 or 1920]), 17. arms on that day would earn great fame, but imposed. De Valera and most of his followers 17 Edwards, Patrick Pearse, 135 would also die young. Around the hero ran finally took the oath in 1927, however, and 18 Desmond Ryan, A Man the words of Cú Chulainn’s response: ‘I care entered the Dáil. In February 1932, his party, Called Pearse (Dublin, not though I were to live but one day and Fianna Fáil, won the general election, and he 1919), 83. one night provided my fame and my deeds became president of the Executive Council, live after me.’15 That response became the or prime minister, a position he would soon school’s motto. rename with an old Irish word for leader, Pearse’s ‘ideal Irishman,’ his friend taoiseach. He would be Taoiseach until Stephen MacKenna remembered, ‘whom he 1948, and again from 1951 until 1959. In thought might become a living reality in our September 1933, his Cumann na nGaedheal day, was a Cuchulain baptized.’16 Pearse opponents merged with the short-lived Centre wrote that in the early days of St. Enda’s, ‘I Party and Eoin O’Duffy’s fascist Blueshirts to spoke oftenest to our boys of Cuchulainn form the United Ireland Party, better known and his compeers of the Gaelic prime’. as Fine Gael. Once in power, de Valera After 1910, when the school moved to quickly moved to make the role of the British Rathfarnham, he began to speak more often king and government meaningless in Ireland. of Robert Emmet and his brave, futile effort Without repudiating the Treaty, or explicitly to provoke a rising in 1803.17 But Desmond violating it, he worked to make Ireland in Ryan noted that ‘Cuchulain moved’ with all but name the republic he had fought for the school and ‘settled down’ as ‘an invisible in 1916 and had campaigned for since. In a member of the school staff’.18 series of carefully planned steps towards a The Easter Rising and its suppression left republic completely independent from Britain, the GPO a gutted wreck, and so it remained the loyalty oath was the first to go, soon for some years, during Ireland’s War of followed by the crown representative, the Independence (1919–21) and Civil War right of appeal to the British Privy Council, (1922–23), and throughout the 1920s. The and other relics of imperial rule. Civil War was fought between those who The reopening of the restored GPO in accepted the 1922 Treaty with Great Britain, 1929 gave de Valera an opportunity to which established the Irish Free State as an remind his countrymen of the events of independent dominion under the British 1916, to stress the republican ideal for which crown, and those who would accept only Pearse and his followers had fought, and the independent Irish republic that Pearse especially to lay claim to 1916 for himself had proclaimed in 1916. It was fought with and his own party. In March 1933, the that intense bitterness engendered when men first modest references to a 1916 memorial who have been united in a successful struggle appeared in the letter column of de Valera’s then disagree about the way to use their own newspaper, the Irish Press. One John victory. The division over the Treaty and the Brennan declared: ‘it is about time that the subsequent Civil War defined Irish politics G.P.O. in Dublin bore some memorial to for many years, and shaped modern Ireland’s the men who fought for us there in 1916’. two main political parties. Brennan suggested that the text of Pearse’s
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19 Irish Press [hereafter, IP], Proclamation of the Irish Republic ‘should in his evaluation of the poems of Thomas 6 March 1933. certainly be engraved on a tablet outside Davis: ‘His poetry accomplished the stirring 20 IP, 8 March 1933. the G.P.O., and a memorial tablet bearing of the people and thus it was good poetry.’23 21 Tim Pat Coogan, Éamon de Valera: The Man Who the names of all who fell in action in the De Valera’s only recorded comments on Was Ireland (New York, G.P.O., and those of the garrison who the writers of the revival are attacks on www.fieldday.ie1993), 649. were executed, should be placed inside the Sean O’Casey for ‘defam[ing] our values’ 22 Coogan, de Valera, 698. building’.19 ‘John Brennan’ was the pen in The Plough and the Stars (1926), and 23 Coogan, de Valera, 501. 24 Coogan, de Valera, 394, name, or nom de guerre, of Madame Sidney misrepresenting ‘the struggle for national 501–05. Gifford Czira, who wrote frequently for the independence’. In the Irish Independent (7 Irish Press at the time. Her sister Muriel April 1934), he was quoted as declaring that was the widow of Thomas MacDonagh, ‘he had never set foot in the Abbey Theatre’ and her sister Grace the widow of Joseph and ‘had no knowledge whatever of the Plunkett; both men were among the signers plays produced there’.24 Apart from politics, of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic his only interest was abstruse mathematical and had been court-martialled and executed speculations. by British firing squads after the defeat of The suggestion that Sheppard’s statue the Rising. Long a fervent nationalist, Czira of the dying Cú Chulainn be cast in bronze clearly also had strong personal reasons for and placed in the GPO came from John Leo wishing to honour the men of 1916, but it Burke, de Valera’s close friend, personal is probable that she wrote her letter at de legal adviser, and perhaps his only link Valera’s instigation. with literary and artistic Dublin. Burke, Brennan’s letter was immediately seconded a prominent Dublin solicitor, advised the by a letter from Liam Mac Fhionnlaoigh government in 1932–33 in its complex (William McGinley), writing as secretary of negotiations with Great Britain over the the Associated Easter Week Men from the collection and payment of land annuities organization’s Eustace Street headquarters, owed to the British government by Irish and by an editorial headed ‘Memorials’, farmers. For a time he was solicitor to the commending Brennan’s letter and supporting attorney general. Among the leaders of ‘the proposal that this historic building the new Ireland, there were few with any should carry on its walls for our people and knowledge of literature or art. Burke made for foreign visitors a memorial to mighty himself a kind of ambassador between days’.20 The editorial, which also suggested the new men and Ireland’s artists. He that an original copy of the Proclamation be persuaded de Valera and his wife, Sinéad displayed, was probably written by de Valera, Ní Fhlannagáin, to sit for portraits by Seán and certainly reflected his views. O’Sullivan, and to commission drawings of We can only speculate as to what went their children. Burke himself commissioned on in de Valera’s mind as he considered a O’Sullivan to sketch a number of suitable memorial. He knew little of the distinguished contemporaries; these drawings visual arts, and he already had developed are now in the National Gallery of Ireland, the vision problems that would make an where Burke was for many years a member eye operation necessary in 1936.21 Nor of the board of governors. His artist friends did he know much about literature, even included Sheppard, Evie Hone, Albert Power, Irish literature — a close associate, Maurice Patrick Hennessy, and Jack B. Yeats. Moynihan, doubted whether ‘he ever read Burke was also a regular at the Abbey a serious novel in his life’.22 Though eager and Gate theatres. Among his literary to revive Irish as the nation’s language, he friends were Lennox Robinson, Padraic had no interest in either the ancient heroic Colum, and especially T. C. Murray, who literature of Ireland or the Irish literary usually included Burke among those he revival. His aesthetic theory is summed up invited to hear him read a new play. In the
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diary that preserves so much information and have it cast in bronze. He was also 25 Holloway’s diary entry, 9 about Dublin’s theatre world, Joseph able to remind de Valera that Willie Pearse, January 1943, National Library of Ireland (NLI) Holloway describes Burke as ‘the centre executed with his brother after the Rising, MSS 2009, 62. of the literary and artistic gossip of the had studied sculpture with Sheppard at the 26 IP, 8 March 1933. town’.25 Burke’s other friendships included Metropolitan School of Art. De Valera may 27 An Claidheamh Soluis, 8, www.fieldday.iethe famous tenor Count John McCormack, have been aware that he himself had recently 22 (1906), 7 (unsigned; original in English). and members of both sides in the great been described by Seán O’Faoláin as ‘A 28 Seán O’Faoláin, The Life 28 political division: Maud Gonne MacBride, Cuchulain of Easter Week’. Story of Éamon de Valera Seán MacEntee, Seán T. O’Kelly, and How much Burke may have said about (Dublin, 1933), 28–30. Arthur Clery among the republicans; Cú Chulainn’s rash heroism, and how much 29 IT, 22 April 1935. 30 IT, 26 April 1935. William T. Cosgrave and John A. Costello de Valera knew about the ancient hero, is 31 Letter dated 30 May on the other side. unknown, but it is curious that de Valera 1934, to Rúnaí [private Burke often visited Sheppard’s studio, never mentioned Cú Chulainn’s name — or secretary] to Minister, and he had long admired The Death of Oliver Sheppard’s — in his dedication speech Posts and Telegraphs, National Archives of Cuchulain, which had remained there, cast at the statue’s unveiling. He spoke only of Ireland [hereafter, NAI], in plaster but unsold, for many years. When a ‘beautiful piece of sculpture, the creation S6405. proposals were first floated in the Irish of Irish genius, symbolizing the dauntless 32 Dáil Éireann Debates Press for placing a tablet to 1916 in the courage and abiding constancy of our people [hereafter, DÉD], vol. 53, 10 August 1934, 2505– GPO, there were discussions about a 1916 ... [that] ... will commemorate “1916” 10. 26 29 memorial in the Executive Council. These modestly, indeed, but fittingly’. 33 DÉD, vol. 53, 10 August discussions presumably prompted Burke’s Burke brought de Valera to Sheppard’s 1934, 2505–10. suggestion to de Valera that The Death of studio to view the statue, where, according 34 DÉD, vol. 53, 10 August 1934, 2505–10. Cuchulain would suitably commemorate to the Irish Times, he ‘immediately decided 35 NAI, S6405; Cabinet 30 Pearse and his comrades. He was able to to secure it for the nation’. No doubt the 7/177 12.10.34, item 1. cite Pearse’s own admiration for Sheppard’s decision was a little more considered, but on work, expressed in comments on the 29 May 1934, the Executive Council agreed sculptor’s Inis Fáil, shown at the Royal ‘to have Oliver Sheppard’s The Death of Hibernian Academy in 1901 and again at the Cuchulain cast in bronze for erection in the Gaelic League’s 1906 Oireachtas: G.P.O. as a 1916 memorial’.31 The letter was accompanied by seven letters of support, Oliver Sheppard is the greatest poet and which Burke had obtained from prominent one of the most creative minds in Ireland Irish artists; unfortunately these letters have to-day; he dreams beautiful dreams of disappeared. On 10 August 1934, late in Eire, he has tender reveries of her past, the afternoon of the last day of the 1933–34 ambitions mighty things for her future: session, de Valera’s minister of finance, and all these dreams, and reveries, and Seán MacEntee, announced the Executive ambitions he has the power of fixing Council’s decision to the Dáil, described in bronze or marble, giving enduring the arrangements for casting the statue expression as well to the most evanescent in Belgium, and moved that the Dáil vote fancies of a singularly emotional and £1,000 for the project. changeful temperament as to the deeper The opposition was quick to object to and stronger yearnings of an earnest what it saw as an attempt by de Valera and man’s heart ...27 his party to hijack the potent memory of the Rising and its symbolism. Cosgrave, who had Burke was aware of this passage from himself fought in the GPO in Easter Week, Pearse’s review of the 1906 Oireachtas art complained that Sheppard’s statue had been exhibition, and would quote it in a leaflet chosen in secret and that the timing of the Oliver Sheppard’s The Death of he issued in 1937, as part of his successful request for funds on the last day of session Cuchulain. Photo: An Post. campaign to purchase Inis Fáil for the nation made any serious discussion impossible:
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When there are divisions — and bitter divisions — amongst the people is not the time to initiate a proposal of this sort. ... It is certainly treating the House with scant courtesy, and the people with no www.fieldday.ieconsideration at all, to produce at the end of a session and practically without a moment’s notice a fait accompli in connection with this matter.
He also objected to the site, and questioned whether ‘the time is actually ripe for the erection of a single monument or memorial to the exclusion of others’.32 MacEntee, conscious that his party enjoyed a comfortable majority, blandly described the statue ‘as by no means a national monument to the men of 1916’ but intended ‘merely to commemorate the fact that in 1916 the headquarters of the Provisional Government of the Second Irish Republic was situated in the Post Office’. He gave his assurance that ‘people who are competent to judge’ had declared Sheppard’s work to be ‘of outstanding artistic merit’ and insisted that it
... is intended to be merely a feature of the building and not, as I have already said, in any sense a national monument to commemorate 1916 in general. I think it is fitting that something should be erected in the Post Office to mark its special relationship to the events of 1916.33
Cosgrave was not mollified. ‘There is a Party and there is a Party view,’ he declared: ‘those fellows are out of office now. Let us show some form to the public in connection with this. This is ours, and so on.’34 The Dáil then voted the requested sum. With the casting under way, the Executive Council appointed a committee in October35 to choose a suitable inscription for a tablet beneath the statue. Committee members included de Valera and his vice-president, Seán T. O’Kelly, and the ministers of finance (Seán MacEntee), agriculture (James Ryan), post and telegraphs (Gerald Boland), and lands (Joseph Connolly). All save Connolly
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had been ‘out’ in 1916, O’Kelly and Fine Gael’s Richard Mulcahy, who had led 36 NAI, S6405, Cabinet Ryan as members of the GPO garrison. the armed forces that defeated de Valera’s 7/101 22.1.35, item 4. 37 Proclamation of the Irish In January 1935, they recommended that republicans in 1922–23, formally asked de Republic, Irish Historical the tablet contain the third paragraph of Valera for information about ‘a body calling Documents since 1800, Pearse’s Proclamation,36 followed by the itself the Easter Week Memorial Committee’, eds. Alan O’Day and www.fieldday.ienames of its seven signatories, all executed which was inviting, with advertisements in John Stevenson (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, after the Rising: Thomas J. Clarke, Seán the Irish Press, ‘all national organizations to 1992), 160. MacDiarmada, Thomas MacDonagh, P. H. participate in the unveiling ceremony of the 38 NAI, S6405. Pearse, Éamonn Ceannt, James Connolly, Easter Memorial to the men and women of 39 DÉD, vol. 55, 4 April and Joseph Plunkett. The chosen text could 1916’, to be ‘unveiled by President de Valera 1935, 1889–92. be read as an implicit rebuke to those who on Easter Sunday, the 21st April next’.39 had accepted the 1922 Treaty: His question was probably provoked by that morning’s Irish Times, which We declare the right of the people of described at some length the arrangements Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and for unveiling The Death of Cuchulain in the to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, GPO. De Valera and his ministers would to be sovereign and indefeasible. The attend an open-air Mass at Portobello long usurpation of that right by a Barracks with the troops. There would be foreign people and government has not a parade from Parnell Square to the GPO, extinguished the right, nor can it ever be headed by ‘officers and men of the 1916 extinguished except by the destruction garrison’ marching in units according to their of the Irish people. In every generation stations during the Rising. De Valera and the the Irish people have asserted their right other members of government would arrive to national freedom and sovereignty: at eleven thirty with a mounted escort, and six times during the past three hundred the statue would be unveiled on the stroke years they have asserted it in arms. of noon, the moment when Pearse began to Standing on that fundamental right and read the Proclamation in 1916. ‘All classes again asserting it in arms in the face of of organized associations’ were again invited the world, we hereby proclaim the Irish to participate in the parade. Invitations to Republic as a Sovereign Independent the actualunveiling inside the GPO, where State, and we pledge our lives and the space was limited, would go to government lives of our comrades-in-arms to the ministers and their parliamentary secretaries, cause of its freedom, of its welfare, and of ministers from all previous governments back its exaltation among the nations. 37 to 1919 and the first Dáil, all present Dáil deputies and senators, former Dáil deputies At the end of March 1935, the Department who had fought in 1916, relatives of those of Public Works reported that The Death of killed in action or executed, and ‘Volunteers Cuchulain had been set up in the GPO and who actually participated’ in the Rising. A approved by de Valera and by Sheppard. The bugle call and drum roll from inside would pedestal was about to be installed, as was announce the moment of unveiling, to be the tablet, ‘in accordance with the views of followed by a fanfare of trumpets from the the President.’ 38 Statue, tablet, and marble roof, the firing of afeu de joie, the playing pedestal had cost £820. With the completion of the national anthem, ‘The Soldier’s Song’, of the project, de Valera prepared for an and three rifle volleys from 1916 men indoor ceremony to unveil the statue and stationed on the roof. The ceremony would present it to the Irish people. be followed by a parade of the Free State The planned ceremony, its purpose, and Defence Forces, 2,000 Regulars and 4,500 its guest list immediately became an issue for Volunteers, the largest military display in the opposition party in the Dáil. On 4 April, Dublin since the departure of the British. 40
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40 IT, 4 April 1935. Aware of all this planning, Mulcahy equally dismissive: ‘Madame Gonne 41 DÉD, vol. 55, 4 April demanded to know whether the Easter MacBride regrets that for reasons the 1935, 1889–92, and 11 Week Memorial Committee was an official President and the Government of the Free April 1935, 2313–16, 2435–62. government committee, who its members State are aware of, she cannot accept their 42 42 IT, 18 April 1935. were, who had formed it, and to whom invitation to be present at the ceremony at the www.fieldday.ie43 43 IT, 15 April 1935. invitations were to be issued. De Valera was General Post Office on Easter Sunday, 21st 44 IT, 17 April 1935; last evasive about the committee’s nature and April, 1935.’45 Unlike the resentful supporters sentence omitted in IT but in original, NAI: membership and rejected Mulcahy’s charge of the opposition party, who distrusted de S6405/C. that a public monument paid for with public Valera’s republican leanings, she scorned 45 NAI, S6405/C. money had been taken over by the Fianna him for betraying the ideals of the Rising by 46 IT, 15 April 1935. Fáil party. De Valera, Mulcahy complained, not being republican enough, by taking the ‘tells us what he does not know but he does oath and working within the framework of not tell us what he knows’. Mulcahy and the Treaty. She told the Irish Times that she other opposition members raised the issue ‘hoped all true Irish Republicans would not again, and at length, on 11 April, without go near the General Post Office on Sunday much success. 41 next’, where their presence would ‘desecrate De Valera eventually sent invitations the memory’ of 1916.46 ‘on behalf of the Government of the Irish United Ireland, the paper of Fine Gael, Free State’ to attend ‘the unveiling of fired a final salvo on 20 April. A lengthy front- Oliver Sheppard’s statue “the Death of page editorial celebrated the extraordinary Cuchulain”’ at the General Post Office on heroism of 1916 as a ‘blood sacrifice’ that Easter Sunday (21 April) 1935. In the event, had saved ‘the flickering flame of that intense Cosgrave, Costello and other members of national self-consciousness and enthusiasm the opposition declined invitations to attend which had survived the defeats and what they considered to be both a co-option disappointments of centuries’ from dying out. of the 1916 legacy and a Fianna Fáil party ‘The men of 1916 ... not only freed Ireland rally. ‘The time is not yet ripe for an adequate but preserved Ireland.’ A partisan effort to commemoration of 1916,’ Cosgrave ‘exploit’ their memory was ‘AN UNSEEMLY declared, citing ‘division’ and contemporary SCRAMBLE’ when ‘the Communistic I.R.A.’ political ill will in the statement he released did so, but this year ‘the men who for the to the Irish Times: ‘It is not possible to hide time being constitute the Government of these national humiliations today, or to cover the State ... have decided to outdo all that them with a veil lifted from the bronze statue has heretofore been done by partisan bodies of Cuchulain.’42 Mulcahy simply announced, to desecrate the memory of Easter Week’. ‘I am not going.’43 The chief justice pleaded The paper complained that The Death of illness, and the president of the High Court Cuchulain ‘was not even specially designed, found that he would be away from Dublin. [but] ... was made many years ago. It lay De Valera also received spirited refusals, for ready to hand, however, and could be unveiled vastly different reasons, from Oliver Gogarty when it suited the political purposes of the and Maud Gonne MacBride. ‘Sir, I have Government, whereas, a specially sculptured received your invitation to a commemoration piece might not have been completed for some of a proclamation of a Republic in the years.’ As for Cú Chulainn, he was hardly ‘a G.P.O.,’ wrote Gogarty on 15 April, with suitable symbol’ of 1916: studied distaste: ‘I must refuse to assist you in playing Hamlet when your Republicans He did not even fight, as Finn are howling for Macbeth. In view of my MacCumhaill is reputed to have fought at experience of them, I consider your invitation times, against foreigners ... HE FOUGHT to me personally an impertinence.’44 ONLY IRISHMEN ... WHY THE 19TH Maud Gonne was more formal, but ANNIVERSARY? ... If political tactics
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were not the deciding factor … one typescript, a sign that he took considerable 47 United Ireland, 20 April would expect any special celebration to pains with it.49 Those members of the 1935. 48 IT, 22 April 1935. be timed for the twentieth or the twenty- opposition who declined to attend the 49 Information from the late fifth anniversary. dedication and unveiling would find in the Breandán Mac Giolla speech much to disturb them when they Choille, Franciscan www.fieldday.ieThe editorial also complained that the read it over breakfast on Easter Monday. It House of Studies, Dublin. 50 IT, 22 April 1935. committee in charge of the event did not was a subtle but emphatic assertion that de include anyone from the ‘great Opposition Valera and his party were the legitimate heirs Party’, despite its many ‘leading members’ of 1916, and were determined to preserve who had ‘actually fought in 1916’ and that and extend their legacy. Though speaking ‘[w]orst of all’, Fianna Fáil would also treat as the Irish Free State’s head of government, the occasion as a chance to raise money; de Valera suggested that the government there would be ‘the jingle of collecting itself was a work in progress, a stage that boxes’ as well as the military parade and would lead eventually to the achievement the firing of salutes. The United Ireland of Pearse’s republic. Given the steps he was declined to urge a boycott of the whole taking and would take to evade the Treaty affair, but suggested that ‘all who have any and gradually distance Ireland from Great sense of fitness will take part, if they do take Britain and the crown, it is, in hindsight, a part, with a certain repugnance and a deep clear statement of intentions: feeling of sorrow that what might have been a great national manifestation of love and From this place nineteen years ago the reverence should have been cheapened and Republic of Ireland was proclaimed degraded’.47 ... the beginning of one of Ireland’s De Valera’s Executive Council was of most glorious and sustained efforts for course present on Easter Sunday, as were independence. It has been a reproach Fianna Fáil deputies and relatives of the to us that the spot has remained so 1916 leaders, Pearse’s mother prominent long unmarked. To-day we remove among them. John Leo Burke was there, the reproach. All who enter this hall described on the official guest list as henceforth will be reminded of the ‘Originator of the Memorial’. Sheppard deed enacted here. A beautiful piece of was unfortunately ill with pneumonia and sculpture, the creation of Irish genius, could not attend.48 None of the writers and symbolizing the dauntless courage and artists then working in Dublin was invited, abiding constancy of our people, will not even W. B. Yeats, despite his Nobel commemorate it modestly, indeed, Prize and the several plays he had written but fittingly. The time to raise a proud about Cú Chulainn. Given his increasingly national monument to the work that was conservative politics after 1922, he might here begun and to those who inspired and well have declined. participated in it has not yet come. Such The Free State army duly marched on a monument can be raised only when the Easter Sunday morning, bands played, work is triumphantly completed. 50 drums rolled, bugles and trumpets sounded, volleys and salutes were fired, and no In this speech, de Valera clearly doubt collecting boxes jingled. De Valera’s responded to Cosgrave’s recent claim that dedication speech was fully reported next the time for a memorial to 1916 had not day in the Dublin papers. The text from yet arrived, because of the enduring bitter which he read survives in the de Valera political divisions that now separated those archive at Dublin’s Franciscan House of who had earlier fought side by side in the Studies. He wrote the speech himself, had War of Independence. De Valera agreed that it typed, and then made revisions on the the time for ‘a proud national monument’
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1941: Éamon de Valera inspecting troops outside the General Post Office on the 25th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising. Photo: Keystone/Getty www.fieldday.ieImages.
51 51 T. D., A. M. and D. B. had not arrived, but he implied a different nations of the earth, then, and not till Sullivan, eds., Speeches reason: the Free State was only a provisional then, let my epitaph be written.51 from the Dock (Dublin, arrangement, the result of a flawed Treaty. 1968), 42–43. His listeners, well versed in Irish patriotic De Valera went on to read the third oratory, would have recognized in his words paragraph of the Proclamation, as quoted an echo of a speech then memorized by most on the yet unveiled tablet. He recalled the Irish schoolchildren, Robert Emmet’s defiant 1918 parliamentary elections, when the Irish words to the court that condemned him to people voted overwhelmingly for Sinn Féin death in 1803: candidates, who pledged that they would not enter the British parliament, but would meet Let no man write my epitaph; for as in Dublin as Dáil Éireann, the independent no man who knows my motives dare parliament of Ireland. He left unsaid the now vindicate them, let not prejudice or charge that the members of that assembly ignorance asperse them. Let them and me who voted to accept the Treaty had betrayed rest in obscurity and peace, and my tomb their trust, and again he implied that the Free remain uninscribed, and my memory in State government was only a provisional oblivion, until other times and other men arrangement, a framework within which the can do justice to my character. When vision of 1916 could be realized: ‘here again my country takes her place among the to-day, proud of our association with ... [the
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signers of the Proclamation] ... and with their participate in the official celebrations’, IRA 52 IT, 22 April 1935. The work, once more as the elected representatives members and ‘extreme Republicans’ who newspaper notes that de Valera finished his speech of the majority of the Irish people, we proclaim shared Maud Gonne MacBride’s scorn for de at 11.57. our unchangeable devotion to their ideals, and Valera’s compromises, and marched past the 53 Edwards, Patrick Pearse, dedicate ourselves anew to their uncompleted GPO on their way to the republican plot in 254; Pearse, Collected www.fieldday.ietask’. He quoted again from the Proclamation, Glasnevin cemetery. Works, 300–01. noting its guarantees of civil and religious And so Sheppard’s Death of Cuchulain freedom and equality, and its promise to ignore was set up, dedicated, and unveiled. Thanks ‘the differences carefully fostered by an alien to John Leo Burke, the men and women of government, which have divided a minority 1916 are not unworthily commemorated, from the majority in the past’— differences by a monument infinitely preferable to the that the provisions of the Treaty perpetuated. kind of Republican pietà then in vogue, with Ireland could be united again behind the ‘lofty Erin or Cathleen Ní Houlihan cradling a aims’ of 1916, he claimed: fallen Volunteer on her knees. The Death of Cuchulain is certainly preferable to The work of Easter Week can never be Sheppard’s Inis Fáil, which is overburdened undone. Even those who do not feel any with symbolic content. yearning for independence themselves The choice and placement of The Death must realize that there can never be of Cuchulain as the 1916 memorial had a turning back. Before 1916 Ireland another consequence. Yeats would have seen might have been content for a time with the plaster cast of the statue in Sheppard’s something less than independence. After studio. We do not know if he ever saw it 1916 that is impossible. cast in bronze and in place at the GPO. But at the end of his life he was brooding on In his peroration, de Valera shifted into 1916, and his own possible responsibility ‘the language to which the leaders of the 1916 for the Rising. ‘Did that play of mine send rising were so faithful, and from which there out / Certain men the English shot?’ he asks came to them the real spirit of nationhood’. in ‘The Man and the Echo’, published in Speaking in Irish, he declared that January 1939, the month and year of his death. He was thinking of his Cathleen ni Ireland will not be satisfied until the Houlihan (1902), in which Cathleen, played country is absolutely free of foreign in the first production by Maud Gonne, calls domination, North, South, East and West. on young men to die for Ireland even when … It is for us to prepare ourselves, not there is no chance of victory. Pearse certainly alone to win freedom, but to ensure that had ‘that play’ in mind as he planned the we shall be worthy of it ... I now unveil Rising, and he responded to Cathleen’s this memorial to the men who gave their appeal in an almost literal way. ‘When I was lives for Ireland in the rising of 1916, and a child I believed that there was actually to commemorate also the proclamation a woman called Erin,’ he tells us in The of the Irish Republic at that time. I hope Spiritual Nation, written in January 1916: that it will serve to keep in the minds of the youth of this country the great deeds and had Mr. Yeats’ ‘Kathleen Ni Houlihan’ of those who went before us, and that it been then written and had I seen it, I will also serve to spur us on to emulate should have taken it not as an allegory, but their valour and their sacrifice.52 as a representation of a thing that might happen any day in any house. This I no The Irish Times also records that there longer believe as a physical possibility. ... was a parade ‘after a fairly long wait’, of But I believe that there is really a spiritual about a thousand ‘persons who refused to tradition which is the soul of Ireland.53
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54 W. B. Yeats, For Yeats, who had celebrated Cú to which he gave the name of Sheppard’s Autobiographies, ed. Chulainn in plays and poems, the presence sculpture: The Death of Cuchulain. In the William H. O’Donnell of Sheppard’s The Death of Cuchulain in play, written October–December 1938, he and Douglas N. Archibald (New York, the Post Office as a memorial to Pearse follows the version of the hero’s death that 1999), 90–91. and his comrades acted to associate the had inspired Sheppard when he read Lady www.fieldday.ie55 W. B. Yeats to E.S. Heald, ancient hero’s determination to fight against Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne. Here 28 June 1938, in The overwhelming odds with Cathleen Ni too Cú Chulainn ties himself upright to a Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London, Houlihan’s call to fight even though victory pillar-stone to face his enemies alone. Yeats’s 1954), 911. is unlikely. Pearse shared these commitments. play ends after Cú Chulainn dies, with 56 W. B. Yeats, ‘The Statues’, The statue also recalled Yeats’s own three shabby street singers mourning the in The Variorum Edition days in the Metropolitan School of Art physical disappearance of the great ‘ancient of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, eds. Peter Allt and modelling class, where he had learned about race’ of such heroes, their survival only as Russell K. Alspach (New proportional measurement and the sculptor’s emanations; however, it suggests that there York, 1957), 610–11. use of the plummet, with Sheppard as fellow are dimensions beyond ordinary reality, 57 W. B. Yeats, The Death student.54 Late in June 1938, he sent a that the thought of Cú Chulainn infused the of Cuchulain, in The Variorum Edition of the new poem, ‘The Statues’, to his last lover, fighters of 1916 with his reckless heroism. Plays of W. B. Yeats, ed. Edith Shackleton Heald, explaining in the Sheppard in bronze, Yeats in verse have given Russell K. Alspach (New accompanying letter that ‘Cuchulain is in the form to that thought: York, 1966), 1063. last stanza because Pearse and some of his followers had a cult of him. The Government Are those things that men adore and loathe has put a statue of Cuchulain in the rebuilt Their sole reality? post office to commemorate this.’55 What stood in the Post Office ‘The Statues’ celebrates the physical With Pearse and Connolly? specificity and precise calculations of What comes out of the mountain Graeco-Roman sculpture and the European Where men first shed their blood? tradition it establishes, in contrast to ‘Asiatic Who thought Cuchulain till it seemed vague immensities’: He stood where they had stood? No body like his body When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his Has modern woman borne, side But an old man looking on life What stalked through the Post Office? Imagines it in scorn. What intellect, A statue’s there to mark the place, What calculation, number, measurement By Oliver Sheppard done. replied?56 So ends the tale that the harlot Sang to the beggar-man.57 Yeats implies that Cú Chulainn, given physical form, the ‘lineaments of a plummet- measured face’, by the ‘calculation, number, measurement’ of the unnamed Oliver Sheppard, makes manifest that spirit, source of energy, emanation, that Pearse was able to summon from literature, from art, to sustain him and his followers in their time of crisis. Pearse, Cú Chulainn, and Sheppard’s careful craftsmanship, combine as the matrix of the poem. Yeats returned again to this complex merger of artistic form, heroic energy, and the actual fighting at the GPO, in his last play,
215 Field Day review www.fieldday.ie
216 Idir Dhá Chomhairle/ www.fieldday.ieBetween Two Minds Interculturality in Literary Criticism in Irish Máirín Nic Eoin
Two interlinked debates — one about linguistic standards and another about literary form — have animated Irish- language literary criticism since the commencement of the revival movement in the late nineteenth century. They have both played a role in shaping a modern literature in Irish and they have also defined two key features of criticism in the language: its commitment to, and vested interest in, the fate of the language itself; and its anxiety about the bilingual and intercultural context in which writers of the language have been
Máirtín Ó Cadhain. working. Photo: courtesy Cló Iar-Chonnachta. There would not be a modern
Field Day Review 4 2008 217 Field Day review
Seosamh Mac Grianna. Photo: www.fieldday.iecourtesy Cló Iar-Chonnachta.
literature in Irish without the language critical responsibility or engagement resulting revival movement. Indeed, that very in a perceived need to exhort and encourage literature is one of the most tangible writers, to predict future trends and thereby cultural achievements of that movement to play an active role in the shaping of what and, depending on one’s commitment to was, or what has, yet to come. multilinguality, arguably one of the most At the same time, Irish-language positive. One gets the sense from Irish- criticism, while it tends to revolve around language criticism, however, that modern a number of clearly recognizable cultural literature in Irish remains in a constant state themes and preoccupations, has never of emergence. Its continued existence can been monological. It was marked from the never be taken for granted — and writers’ outset by the most intense and passionate awareness of the endangered nature of their of debates, sometimes about issues (such literary medium is reflected in a sense of as font, orthography and the authority of
218 Idir Dhá Chomhairle/Between Two Minds
1 See Philip O’Leary, dialect forms) which would seem trivial to reiterated both the condemnation of English The Prose Literature a contemporary reader but which were of influence and the message of de-anglicization.4 of the Gaelic Revival, huge cultural importance to those directly Almost eighty years later, Ó Crualaoich, in a 1881–1921: Ideology and Innovation (University involved in them and are typical of the kinds controversial article in the poetry magazine Park, Penn., 1994) and of issue facing the literature of language Innti, made a similar judgement about www.fieldday.ieGaelic Prose in the Free communities that have become minoritized.1 contemporary poetry in Irish: State 1922–1939 (Dublin, Some cultural positions, such as association 2004); Gearóid Denvir, ‘Ó Shíolteagasc go Critic: of the language with rural communities and ‘Béarla a fhoghlaim ar dtúis’ an Litríocht Dhioscúrsúil traditions, were articulated so often that chomhairle is críonna a chuirfeá ar an na Gaeilge san Aois Seo’, they became synonymous with the Irish- Seapáineach aonteangach a dteastódh Léachtaí Cholm Cille, 26 language literary movement, yet there was uaidh é/í féin a chur in oiriúint chun (1996), 178–218; Brian Ó Conchubhair, ‘The always room for dissenting voices and a brí a bhaint as an gcuid is mó ar fad de Gaelic Font Controversy: suspicion about critical consensus. Over the nualitríocht na hÉireann idir Ghaeilge is The Gaelic League’s ‘long’ twentieth century, it is the work of Bhéarla, idir bhéarsaíocht agus phrós.5 (Post-Colonial) Crux’, those who challenged the dominant ideology Irish University Review, 33, 1 (2003), 46–63. of their own period that has best survived. ‘Learn English first’ would be the best 2 Richard Henebry, ‘A Plea Moreover, criticism has never been in danger advice you could give to a monolingual for Prose’, Gaelic Journal/ of becoming institutionalized or cut off from Japanese person who wished to prepare Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge, the realities of practising writers. Literary himself/herself for an understanding of 4, 40 (1892), 143. 3 Henebry, ‘Plea for Prose’, criticism was for long seen to be on the most modern Irish literature, both in Irish 143. periphery of academic scholarship in the and in English, both verse and prose. 4 Richard Henebry, language, and it was the creative writers, ‘Revival Irish’, Leader, both within and outside the academy, who Most Irish-language poets are functioning 17 (1908–09), 302–05, 326–27, 351–54, 378–80, were to the fore in creating and sustaining a outside of what Ó Crualaoich terms 398–402, 423–34, vibrant critical discourse. dioscúrsa na Gaeilge (Irish-language 446–47, 470, 492–93, discourse), and the exceptions he cites, 522–24, 543–44, 564–65, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Michael Hartnett, 587–88, 613–14; ‘Revival Irish’ Leader, 18 (1909), Language Quests and Language Questions illustrate his understanding of ‘truly 14–15, 39–40, 58–59, Gaelic’ contemporary poetry as poetry in 84–86, 110–11. Over more than a century, one can trace communion with a historical Irish-language 5 Gearóid Ó Crualaoich, a strand of anxiety about the nature and poetic tradition. While both Henebry and ‘An Nuafhilíocht Ghaeilge: Dearcadh standard of language acceptable in a modern Ó Crualaoich in essence reach the same Dána’, Innti, 10 (1986), literature in Irish. This is visible from the critical conclusion, Ó Crualaoich’s greater 64. 1890s, in say, the writings of Waterford- understanding of the sociolinguistic context 6 Ó Crualaoich, ‘An born linguist, critic and controversialist Dr. of modern writing in Irish allows him Nuafhilíocht Ghaeilge’, 66. Richard Henebry through to the work of to conclude with a recognition that the contemporary critics such as Gearóid Ó biculturality of the contemporary poet in Crualaoich. In the Gaelic Journal in 1892, Irish is a biculturality of the marginalized: Henebry attacked the poetry of the Gaelic revival as nothing but ‘Correct, commonplace Is é cás an fhile Ghaelaigh, sa mhéid gur English sentiment, thought, expression ... with ann dó/di in aon chor ar na saoltaibh a miserably tortured poor shred of Irish for seo, bheith ‘bicultural’, stractha idir dhá veneering.’2 Henebry commanded prospective shaol, dhá theanga, dhá mheon, bheith writers of Irish to reject such an amalgam: ‘But ‘as riocht’ go mór, bheith eolgaiseach there must be no foreign admixture. English ar imeall na beatha, ar bhuile, ar thost idiom, mannerism, style, system of thought, síoraí, ar an neamhní.6 must be rigidly eschewed.’3 He published a more sustained treatise on ‘Revival Irish’ It is the fate of the Gaelic poet, in so seventeen years later in the Leader; in it he much as he or she exists at all at present,
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to be ‘bicultural’, torn between two writings of non-native speakers, but his 7 For a discussion of that worlds, two tongues, two minds, to be linguistic purism extended so far as to lead particular debate, see Cathal Ó Háinle, ‘Ó greatly ‘out of kilt’, to know the margins him to claim as early as 1908 that it is only Chaint na nDaoine go dtí of life, to know madness, endless silence, ‘one possessing P. Canon O’Leary’s marked an Caighdeán Oifigiúil’, nothingness. gift of the language sense that can prevail in Kim McCone, Damian www.fieldday.ieagainst the overpowering dominance of McManus, Cathal Ó Háinle, Nicholas Henebry’s ‘decolonizing’ stance was a foreign idiom’.8 Gaeltacht writers, acutely Williams and Liam dominant one in critical practice in Irish aware of the changing speech styles in their Breatnach, eds., Stair na for much of the twentieth century. Indeed, own native districts, used their work as a Gaeilge (Maigh Nuad, it faced no significant challenge until the bulwark against, and as a critique of, such 1994), 745–93, esp. 754–64. 1960s when it was acknowledged that tendencies. Ó Grianna was an extreme 8 Henebry,‘Revival Irish’, the cultural values on which it was based example. In the words of critic Ailbhe Ó Leader, 17 (1908-09), hindered a proper critical evaluation of the Corráin: 302–03. work of many of the most accomplished 9 Ailbhe Ó Corráin, ‘Language as a Reflection Irish-language writers. Henebry himself is He modelled his language on the diction of Changing Ireland: best remembered for the arguments that of the most idiomatic speakers from his Developments in Modern he lost. His most controversial proposal own area and refused to countenance Irish Prose Writing’, in — that contemporary writers should return anything in his work which was not Birgit Bramsbäck, ed., Homage to Ireland: to the literary standard of classical Irish native to his own dialect. Indeed, it is Aspects of Culture, — was firmly rejected from the outset in perhaps true to say that he wrote the Literature and Language favour of the more pragmatic position language not of his own generation (Uppsala, 1990), 100–01. taken by an tAthair Peadar Ua Laoghaire, but rather that of his parents’ and See also Ó Corráin ‘Teanga Mháire’, in a highly influential Cork-born native grandparents’ generation and he was Nollaig Mac Congáil, speaker and revivalist who believed that highly critical of the Irish of younger ed., Jonneen Khordaroy a modern literature should be based on people from the Gaeltacht, which he Answers Critics (Baile caint na ndaoine, or the language as it was regarded as already to some extent Átha Cliath, 1992), 94–107. spoken in the Irish-speaking districts.7 This corrupt and debased.9 10 See Máirín Nic Eoin, emphasis on caint na ndaoine made a quite ‘Íonghlaineacht Teanga: different version of linguistic authenticity This concern about the spoken language Fadhb an Bhéarla i and linguistic purity the central and of native speakers was expressed regularly gCritic Liteartha na Gaeilge’ and ‘“Idir overriding concern of literary criticism in throughout the twentieth century and has Dhá Theanga”: An Irish for decades. Among the consequences come to the fore in recent work by linguists, Chruthaitheacht Liteartha was a fetishization of the native speaker, a creative writers and critics.10 But the context agus an Contanam privileging of filiation over affiliation, and of the debate has changed utterly, however, Dátheangach’, in ‘Trén bhFearann Breac’: An an unresolved tension between centre and as more Gaeltacht writers ignore the Díláithriú Cultúir agus periphery, between the urban and the rural, strictures of former generations of revivalists Nualitríocht na Gaeilge between standard and dialect. Gaeltacht and attempt more realistic depictions of (Baile Átha Cliath, 2005), writers such as Ua Laoghaire and Séamus Ó language as spoken in Gaeltacht regions. chs. 2 and 8 respectively. Grianna were hailed as exemplars and non- These depictions include code-mixing, code- native speakers were assessed on their ability switching and other manifestations of the to disguise their learner status by successfully language contact situation in which Irish mimicking a particular regional idiom. has for centuries been written and spoken. Very few second-language writers escaped Critical response to these developments has criticism on linguistic grounds, but the been wary, mainly because of the critics’ preoccupation with linguistic purity was vested interest (as teachers, college lecturers, also limiting for Gaeltacht writers, perhaps publishers) in the survival of the purer demonstrating that demotic standards are forms and in the survival of a sustainable rarely acceptable to literary élites. Most and distinguishable Irish-speaking language of Henebry’s criticism was directed at the group. Certain fundamental questions,
220 Idir Dhá Chomhairle/Between Two Minds
Máirtín Ó Direáin. Photo: arising from the position of Irish as a courtesy Cló Iar-Chonnachta. minoritized language, cannot be avoided. For example, can one have an Irish- language literature that goes against the grain of revivalist ideology? Can one afford www.fieldday.ieto jettison the authority of literature as standard-bearer in the face of what some commentators now see as a process of creolization? For an endangered language, victim of an unequal linguistic encounter, is there a viable alternative to literary purism? There has also been a considerable shift in relation to another aspect of this 11 See O’Leary, Gaelic Prose concern about linguistic standards. For in the Irish Free State, 37–69. long, a concern with linguistic authenticity 12 Daniel Corkery,‘On came hand in hand with a preoccupation Anglo-Irish Literature’, with the appropriateness of certain subjects in Synge and Anglo-Irish and themes for Irish-language literature. Literature (Cork, 1931), 1–27. Concern for purity of expression often 13 Domhnall Ó Corcora, masked a predilection for romanticized, ‘Filidheacht na Gaedhilge heroic or moralistic narratives of humble However, most of the nativist — A Cineál’, in Risteárd Irish-speaking life on the economically commentators whom O’Leary discusses Ó Foghludha, ed., Éigse na Máighe (Baile Átha impoverished western seaboard. A large are known today only in scholarly and Cliath, 1952), 7–29; and repetitive body of literary commentary academic circles, while the work of the ‘Smaointe Fánacha ar developed (particularly in the 1920s and most significant of the modernizers is still an bhFilíocht’, Feasta 1930s) around the concept of ‘Gaelachas’ being read, discussed, taught and enjoyed (Eanáir 1954), 9; (Feabhra 1954), 10; and what constituted a truly Gaelic by a contemporary audience. It is significant (Márta 1954), 5, 19, world-view,11 so that Daniel Corkery’s also that those literary works that were to (Aibreán 1954), 10, 20; formulations on what constituted ‘the become canonical examples of Gaelic Ireland (Bealtaine 1954), 9–10; Irish national being’ in Synge and Anglo- in all its purity and nobility of spirit — the (Meitheamh 1954), 13; 12 (Iúil 1954), 13–14; (Meán Irish Literature and on what constituted Blasket Island autobiographies — carried Fómhair 1954), 2–3. truly Gaelic literature in his various essays within them the material for the most radical 14 For a discussion of An in Irish13 were merely a reiteration of of post-colonial parodies, that of Myles na Béal Bocht as post- what were widely believed to be defining gCopaleen’s An Béal Bocht (1941), where the colonial critique, see Louis de Paor, ‘Myles characteristics of Gaelic life and culture. huge gap between the ideals and obsessions na gCopaleen agus What Philip O’Leary’s ground-breaking of the language movement and the economic Drochshampla na volumes have revealed is the sheer volume realities of Gaeltacht life are brilliantly nDealeabhar’, Irish of nativist propaganda faced by the captured.14 After that, nativist assumptions Review, 23 (1998), 24– 32; Sarah E. McKibben, modernizers, among whom can be counted were never again so secure. Furthermore, ‘An Béal Bocht: Patrick Pearse and Pádraic Ó Conaire in even Tomás Ó Criomhthain, whose An Mouthing off at National the early years of the century, through to tOileánach (1929) was the key text parodied Identity’, Éire-Ireland, Seosamh Mac Grianna, Donn Piatt, Liam Ó in An Béal Bocht, was himself very aware of 38, 1–2 (2003), 37–53. 15 See, in particular, his Rinn, Brian Ó Nualláin/Myles na gCopaleen, the gap between the efforts of the language 1930 essays ‘Teanga na Máirtín Ó Cadhain and many significant movement and the economic reality of Tíre’ and ‘Gaeil agus others in the later post-Independence period. Gaeltacht life in independent Ireland.15 Gaelainn’, in Breandán Ó For decades, writing in Irish strove to live Such an awareness informs the work of all Conaire, ed., Bloghanna ón mBlascaod (Baile Átha up to the expectations and prescriptions of the significant twentieth-century Gaeltacht Cliath, 1997), 170–71, a cultural nationalist agenda that was both writers, including Ó Criomhthain’s son Seán 183. limiting and pervasive. and his grandson Pádraig Ua Maoileoin.
221 Field Day review
Máire Mac an tSaoi. Photo: www.fieldday.iecourtesy Cló Iar-Chonnachta.
There was another irony here, in that the work of Cork-born poet Seán Ó Ríordáin. 16 Máire Mhac an tSaoi, ideology that laid the basis for a national Ó Ríordáin was deprived, by the span of a ‘Filíocht Sheáin Uí Ríordáin’, Feasta (Márta attempt to revive Irish did not include generation, of a ‘true’ Gaeltacht upbringing. 1953), 17–19. a strategy for dealing with the creative Born in 1916 to an English-speaking mother, 17 Seán Ó Tuama, ‘An endeavours of those who were the success he spent his earliest years in the bilingual Forum: Filíocht Sheáin stories of that attempt — those who, breac-Ghaeltacht community of Baile Uí Ríordáin’, Feasta (Aibreán 1953), 16. through the efforts of the school system in Bhuirne in West Cork before the household 18 Máirtín Ó Direáin, the post-Independence period, became active moved to Cork city when he was in his mid- ‘Ríordánachas agus eile’, bilinguals, competent and confident enough teens. His embrace of Irish, as articulated in Feasta (Bealtaine 1953), to consider writing in Irish a real possibility. his poetry and prose writings, can be seen, 14–15. 19 Tomás Ó Floinn, ‘Filíocht Yet it was the work of these accomplished on the one hand, in essentialist and nativist Sheáin Uí Ríordáin’, in non-native, or semi-native, speakers that terms as an attempted decolonization of Liam Prút, ed., Cion Fir: fundamentally challenged the decolonizing the mind, a linguistic homecoming and a Aistí Thomáis Uí Fhloinn thrust of much early twentieth-century retrieval of a sense of lost personal and in Comhar (Baile Átha Cliath, 1997), 144; first critical commentary. A classic example can national identity. It can, on the other hand, published in Comhar be found in the early critical response to the also be interpreted as part of a lifelong (Bealtaine 1953).
222 Idir Dhá Chomhairle/Between Two Minds
20 Declan Kiberd, ‘Seán Ó spiritual journey, a conscious act of identity who was not raised fully through Irish Ríordáin: File Angla- construction and cultural positioning. It but who wishes, nevertheless, to compose Éireannach?’, in Eoghan is indicative of the critical climate still poetry in that language. Ó hAnluain, ed., An Duine is Dual: Aistí ar prevailing in Ireland in the early 1950s that Sheán Ó Ríordáin (Baile when the young poet Máire Mhac an tSaoi It was not until the late twentieth www.fieldday.ieÁtha Cliath, 1980), attacked what she held to be Ó Ríordáin’s century that critics would openly celebrate 90–111. misuse of language in his first collection Ó Ríordáin’s creative achievement in terms 21 Eibhlín Nic Ghearailt, Seán Ó Ríordáin agus Eireaball Spideoige — exhorting him, with of his interculturality and his attempts to ‘An Striapach Allúrach’ the conviction of the true nativist, to cease marry a personal voyage of discovery with (Baile Átha Cliath, 1988). writing until he had filled his head with a process of linguistic retrieval and cultural 22 Frank Sewell, ‘Seán the kind of Gaeltacht Irish necessary for re-affirmation. Declan Kiberd, writing in Ó Ríordáin: Joycery- Corkery-Sorcery’, Irish him to be accepted as a true Irish-language 1980, termed him an ‘Anglo-Irish’ poet, so Review, 23 (1998), poet16 — one of his strongest defenders, marked were the influences of the English 42–61. Seán Ó Tuama, felt it necessary to stress his poetic tradition on his work,20 and Eibhlín Nic 23 Stiofán Ó Cadhla, Cá Gaeltacht filiation.17 Others defended his Ghearailt subsequently undertook a study of bhfuil Éire? Guth an 21 Ghaisce i bPrós Sheáin use of language on the grounds of artistic Ó Ríordáin’s major non-Gaelic influences. Uí Ríordáin (Baile Átha freedom, the poet Máirtín Ó Direáin (himself Frank Sewell has since written very perceptively Cliath, 1998). a native speaker) in particular challenging of Ó Ríordáin’s engagement with the language any critic who would impose limitations in terms of a spiritual journey, a search for on the work of the imagination.18 Only ‘the true self and true self-expression’ where one critic at that time articulated a more language could function as bedrock of identity nuanced understanding of Ó Ríordáin’s only if the concept of dúchas (nativeness) cultural position. That was Tomás Ó Floinn could be extended so that the poet would who, writing in May 1953, responded to the be concerned less with successfully locating critical reception of Eireaball Spideoige thus: himself within a predefined cultural and linguistic tradition than with devising means Tá sé míréasúnta a bheith ag éileamh ar whereby he could extend that tradition in new dhuine nach cainteoir ó dhúchas é filíocht directions.22 Ó Ríordáin was himself very a scríobh faoi mar a scríobhfadh cainteoir aware that the extension of the concept of dúchais í. Agus ní fios cé acu is measa dúchas he was suggesting, though necessary, lucht a cháinte nó lucht a chosanta mar was extremely problematic as long as the is é an ní céanna atá á éileamh ag an dá language was so threatened. Ó Ríordáin’s prose dhream. Ní hé go bhfuilim ag cosaint a works are important for an understanding lochtanna, ach go bhfuilim ag glacadh of his creative and political dilemma. Stiofán leo mar chuid dá dhéantús, mar chuid Ó Cadhla’s penetrating analysis of his de dhlúth agus d’inneach an fhile nár journalism explores Ó Ríordáin’s attempt to tógadh go hiomlán le Gaeilge ach gur reconcile a decolonizing politics of cultural mian leis, ar a shon san, a chuid filíochta affirmation with an acceptance of post-colonial a cheapadh sa teanga sin.19 interculturality.23 For Ó Ríordáin — as for most Irish-language writers — the most urgent It is unreasonable to demand of a non- question was: how does one come to terms native speaker that he write poetry as with the minoritization and marginalization of if he was a native speaker. And I don’t a language regarded as key to cultural identity know who is worse, those who fault him and effective self-expression? or those who defend him, because they are both looking for the same thing. It • is not that I am defending his faults, but that I accept them as part of his work, as The 1960s saw a change of direction in an integral part of the make-up of a poet Irish-language writing, with the emergence
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Louis de Paor. Photo: courtesy www.fieldday.ieCló Iar-Chonnachta.
of a new kind of non-Gaeltacht writer. of the cultural position of Irish writers in 24 For an excellent insight Notably, the young poets who established both languages in a 1975 article on Patrick into the change of direction in Irish- the poetry magazine Innti while students in Kavanagh’s poem ‘Stony Grey Soil’, where he language poetry marked University College Cork, although inspired articulated a theory of post-colonial hybridity by the Innti generation, by Ó Ríordáin, shared none of his anxieties almost a decade before Homi Bhabha was to see Eoghan Ó hAnluain, about their own linguistic and cultural publish his oft-cited essays on the subject: ‘Nuafhilíocht na Gaeilge 1966–1986: Úire agus backgrounds. Poets such as Cork-city born Buaine’, Léachtaí Cholm Michael Davitt embraced the language with Tá an fhadhb chéanna le fuascailt i Cille, 17 (1986), 7–24. a greater sense of self-confidence, associating nduibheagán ár n-anama againn go léir: For a discussion of the it with 1960s freedoms rather than with conas is féidir an tSacsainis atá d’inneach work of two key figures to emerge in that period, post-Independence pieties and recognizing ionainn (mandril, plough, coulter, bank, Michael Davitt and Liam in it the potential for new kinds of cultural burgled ...) a chomhghaolú leis an Ó Muirthile, see Tadhg and linguistic fusion. Their journey west to Ghaeilge a shaolaítear i gcuisle na cuimhne Ó Dúshláine, ‘Michael the Gaeltacht was experienced as a voyage linn (Mullahinsha, Drummeril ...)? Davitt: Pontifex Maximus Poesis Corcagiensis’, in of discovery, never as a homecoming, and Níl gar againn cultúr amháin acu a Micheál Ó Cearúil, ed., their political commitment to the language shéanadh agus luí go hiomlán leis an An Aimsir Óg (Baile Átha was motivated more by the civil rights chultúr eile. Níl gar againn an Phlandáil a Cliath, 1999), 134–50; movements of the period than by the cultural chur ar ceal: ní acmhainn dúinn ach oiread ‘Mearú Uilix Chorcaí’, in 24 Micheál Ó Cearúil, ed., nationalism of a former generation. Also an oidhreacht Cheilteach a ligean le gaoth. Aimsir Óg: Cuid a Dó in the same decade other writers, such as Tá an dá oidhreacht fite i bhfíodóireacht (Baile Átha Cliath, 2000), east Galway-born Eoghan Ó Tuairisc and ár n-aigne, agus níl dul astu. 360–70. West Cork-born Diarmaid Ó Súilleabháin, Maidir le réiteach, ní mian liom a 25 ‘Stony Grey Soil: Dándearcadh ar Éigean challenged the critical orthodoxy by openly bheith dogmach. Tógfaidh sé cúpla an Dá Chultúr’, in proclaiming that their standards could not céad bliain eile, mo thuairim, chun Eoghan Ó Tuairisc, be those of the Gaeltacht and by demanding an scitsifréin (an chríochdheighilt Religio Poetae agus Aistí a creative freedom that would acknowledge phearsantachta atá de smior ionainn) a Eile, ed. Máirín Nic Eoin (Baile Átha Cliath, 1987), hybridity and reject the strictures of the leigheas agus an tÉireannach a fhuineadh 163; first published in linguistic purists. Ó Tuairisc outlined his view as an nua.25 Feasta (Samhain 1975).
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26 Diarmaid Ó Súilleabháin, We are all confronted with the same review of a collection by Armagh-born poet ‘Bí Tú Féin, a Úrscéalaí’, problem: how to reconcile the Saxon Réamonn Ó Muireadhaigh, he gives voice Comhar (Iúil 1965), strain within us (mandril, plough, coulter, to the dilemma of the critic who finds he is 19–22. 27 See Diarmaid Ó bank, burgled ...) with the Irish language dealing with an Irish-language poetry whose Súilleabháin, ‘An Uain which lives on in the pulse of memory idiom and metaphorical structure is often www.fieldday.ieBheo’, Irisleabhar Mhá (Mullahinsha, Drummeril ...)? based on English. He doesn’t have the critical Nuad (1972), 65–69; We cannot deny one of those cultures apparatus to evaluate such poetry. And yet, Éamon Ó Ciosáin, ‘Diarmaid Ó Súilleabháin and adhere solely to the other culture. We when he poses the general question at the end — Geit as an nGaeilge?’, cannot undo the Plantation: we cannot of the review whether poetry produced by a Nua-Aois (1979), 25–36. afford either to throw our Celtic heritage non-native speaker can be effective or not, 28 Tomás Ó Floinn, ‘Filíocht to the winds. The two heritages are his response is definitively positive: idir dhá Theanga’, in Prút, ed., Cion Fir, 306; entwined in the weave of our minds and first published in Comhar we cannot avoid them. ... cén éifeacht is féidir a bheith le filíocht (Meán Fómhair 1964). As for a solution, I don’t mean a scríobhtar i dteanga a d’fhoghlaim 29 Pádraigín Riggs, ‘Caint to be dogmatic. It will take several an file? Ardéifeacht, in ainneoin ceataí na nDaoine: An Chaint agus na Daoine’, in Ó hundred years, in my view, to heal the agus laigeachtaí, bac agus bacadraíl, Cearúil, ed., Aimsir Óg: schizophrenia (the psychic partition mí-labhairt, claonlabhairt agus dearbh- Cuid a Dó (Baile Átha which goes to our core) and to reshape éigeart labhartha na teanga idir dhá Cliath, 2000), 78–90. the Irish person. theanga: in ainneoin an Bhéarla ina Ghaeilge agus na Gaeilge ó Bhéarla.28 Ó Súilleabháin had already gone a step further when, in an 1965 essay, he ... how effective can poetry be when it is encouraged non-Gaeltacht writers to written in a language the poet learned? forget about aping Gaeltacht language or Very effective, despite the awkwardness Gaeltacht themes and to be, above all, ‘true and weaknesses, the barriers and to themselves’.26 Ó Súilleabháin put this hindrances, the bad speech, perverse decidedly non-nativist concept of cultural speech and out and out incorrectness of a authenticity into practice in his own work. language between two languages: despite His highly individual narrative style attracted the English being Irished and the Irish attention from the outset and came to be from English. seen as part of a very conscious attempt to ‘startle the Irish language’ by extending the The Irish-language critic can no longer scope of expression in new directions. A ignore the presence of both languages in the major motivation for such innovation was Irish-language text. In the words of critic Ó Súilleabháin’s determination to depict Pádraigín Riggs: ‘Ní féidir aontíos an dá through Irish those social situations and theanga a shéanadh’ (One cannot deny the relationships that would not normally be coexistence of the two languages).29 Critics are associated with the language.27 Dozens now beginning to analyse the literary styles of of writers have followed his lead and the both Gaeltacht and non-Gaeltacht writers in critical climate of condemnation with which the context of the particular social situations he was faced in the sixties has been replaced depicted and the ideological stances adopted by a greater acceptance of all kinds of in their writing, and both writers and critics linguistic experimentation. have acknowledged, with varying degrees of Tomás Ó Floinn too was a key figure enthusiasm or reluctance, the creative potential in this critical shift. He was one of the first of the mixed or in-between forms. critics to openly acknowledge and discuss Still, the early concern with linguistic the difficulty of responding to literary standards remains and is frequently works that were, in his own words, idir dhá expressed by publishers and editors anxious theanga (between two tongues). In a 1961 to develop Irish-language readerships. A
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number of important critical issues have of a minority language as a modern medium 30 Michael Davitt, been raised in recent years. In his capacity of expression involves a constant process ‘Eagarfhocal’, Innti, 15 (1996), 3–4. as poetry editor of Innti, Michael Davitt, of translation, and that awareness in turn 31 Caoilfhionn Nic Pháidín, himself one of those poets who has been accounts for a growing critical interest in the ‘“Cén Fáth Nach?” — Ó acclaimed for his ability to creatively practice and theory of translation. Chanúint go Criól’, in www.fieldday.ieincorporate a range of linguistic styles Róisín Ní Mhianáin, ed., Idir Lúibíní: Aistí ar an and registers in his depictions of the Léitheoireacht agus ar an Irish bilingual continuum, expressed his In Search of Form Litearthacht (Baile Átha anxiety about a perceived gap between Cliath, 2003), 115–29. the highly cultivated literary style of much In Irish-language criticism concern 32 Henebry, ‘Revival Irish’, Leader, 17 (1908-09), contemporary poetry and the anarchic mixed with literary form revolves around the 564. forms now common in the Gaeltacht. Should relationship of the Irish language historically 33 Séamas Ó Duilearga, the writer be a conservative, a defender to the development of particular genres. ‘Ó’n bhFear Eagair’, of standards, an exemplar, or should the Richard Henebry, being a traditionalist and Béaloideas, 1 (1927– 28), 3–6. For critical literary text reflect the changes occurring in nativist, saw no room for innovation in the commentary, see Máirín 30 the spoken tongue? Likewise, critic and Irish literature of his time. His best-known Nic Eoin, ‘Béaloideasóirí, publisher Caoilfhionn Nic Pháidín has raised critical judgement was his condemnation Cainteoirí Dúchais agus the question of the role of the printed word of the unconventional (in terms of the Irish Scoláirí’, in An Litríocht Réigiúnach (Baile Átha at a time when electronic media have given storytelling tradition) opening of Patrick Cliath, 1982), 33–41; 31 32 public recognition to the less pure forms? Pearse’s short story ‘Íosagán’. For Henebry, O’Leary, ‘The Real and Issues of minoritization and of language a modern Irish literature should be based Better Ireland: Rural endangerment are recurring preoccupations on native models, and where prose was Life in Gaelic Prose’, in Gaelic Prose in the Irish in contemporary writing in Irish. Post- concerned, such models as were provided by Free State, 90–164, esp. colonial critical theory, especially on topics the folk tradition. This was a view supported 119–22. such as hybridity and cross-culturality, enthusiastically by folklorists such as Séamas 34 Aisling Ní Dhonnchadha, helps us to understand the complex cultural Ó Duilearga and by many of those involved An Gearrscéal sa Ghaeilge 1898–1940 context of such preoccupations. However, in the creation and publication of literature (Baile Átha Cliath, 1981), 33 the uneven power relations between imperial in Irish. Critic Aisling Ní Dhonnchadha esp. 30–127. and indigenous languages, which make has documented the influence of the folktale hybridity and cross-culturality problematic on the development of the short story in for minoritized linguistic groups, are seldom Irish — and the gradual movement (inspired given due recognition in post-colonial particularly by the critical writings of Pearse, criticism. Writing from a position of Ó Conaire and Thomas MacDonagh) minority, Irish-language writers are aware of away from the folk models.34 Much early the precariousness of their cultural position. revivalist publication was motivated by While they may celebrate and exploit the a desire to provide suitable models for both/and position of having idir Ghaeilge prospective writers. Énrí Ó Muirgheasa, in agus Bhéarla (both Irish and English), there his introduction to the song collection Céad is still a strong tendency amongst writers, de Cheoltaibh Uladh in 1915, for example, especially non-native speakers, to feel that outlined his view of the exemplary nature of they are floundering somewhere idir Gaeilge the material therein: agus Béarla (between Irish and English). In the context of forced hybridity, most This is the first volume of modern Irish Irish-language writers feel their cultural Ulster poetry ever published. Collections mission is to challenge the hegemony of the of songs and poems by living Irish writers world-dominant language by developing have, no doubt, appeared in recent (and thereby revalorizing and protecting) years, but their contents can not be the minority language. There is, moreover, regarded as Irish poetry. In their ideas, a palpable awareness that the development their metres, their petty end-rhyme, and
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35 Énrí Ó Muirgheasa, Céad above all, in the complete absence of ionta. Agus dá fheabhas iad, níl ionta ach de Cheoltaibh Uladh (Baile internal assonance — that most essential caitheamh aimsire.37 Átha Cliath, 1915), ix. characteristic of modern Irish verse — 36 Pádraig de Brún, ‘Ars Scribendi’, Humanitas they are as English as Moore’s Melodies, But we are mistaken if we think that (Márta 1930), 2–5; and are merely Irish in the accident of we should translate modern English www.fieldday.ieDomhnall Ó Corcora, ‘Na the words being Irish. Their writers or European stories or poetry. All they hEorpaigh Seo Againne’, — good Irishmen and ardent lovers of contain, usually, is the decadence and Humanitas (Meitheamh 1930), 2–6; Pádraig de the Irish Language — are not, withal, weariness of the civilised mind. They Brún, ‘An Sean-Rud men steeped in the wealth of Irish poetic are not general exemplars; they have Séidte’, Humanitas (Meán literature of the last three hundred years, no educational content. And however Fomhair 1930), 3–7; and their productions are not a new and good they may be, they are merely of Domhnall Ó Corcora, ‘Buailim Sciath — natural leafing and branching of that once recreational value. An Sean-Rud Séidte’, luxurious tree, but are rather shoots of Humanitas (Márta English origin grafted on to it, and never Translator and classicist Stephen 1931), 3–8. destined to bear either flowers or fruit.35 McKenna, as portrayed by his intellectual 37 de Brún, ‘Ars Scribendi’, 4. 38 Liam Ó Rinn, Mo Chara soul-friend Liam Ó Rinn in Mo Chara Stiofán (Baile Átha Daniel Corkery took up this theme with Stiofán (1939), similarly considered Cliath, 1939), 34–35. his nativist interpretation of what a modern European languages and the European 39 Seán Ó Tuama, An Grá literature in Irish should be. Corkery’s literary tradition as bulwarks against (what in Amhráin na nDaoine (Baile Átha Cliath, 1960); confrontation with Pádraig de Brún in the he saw as) the pervasive influence of English Mícheál Mac Craith, short-lived journal Humanitas (1930–31) is and of English literature on contemporary Lorg na hIasachta ar typical of critical debate in the early 1930s.36 Irish-speaking Ireland.38 No translation na Dánta Grá (Baile Where Corkery rejoiced in what he saw as project could seriously diminish the force of Átha Cliath, 1989). See also Mícheál Mac the independence of the Gaelic tradition such influence, however, and it is ironic that, Craith, ‘Gaelic Ireland from European influence — the fact that the while Humanitas was progressive enough to and the Renaissance’, in Renaissance never impinged on literature encourage an interest in European literature Glanmor Williams and in Irish was a fact to be celebrated — de and a comparative approach to literary Robert Owen Jones, eds., The Celts and the Brún lamented the consequent insularity of studies, subsequent comparative literary Renaissance: Tradition Irish literature and proposed a project of studies have led to a radical reinterpretation and Innovation (Cardiff, translation so that Irish writers and readers of de Brún’s initial premise. (Seán Ó Tuama’s 1990), 57–89. could gain access to the classics of the findings in his seminal study An Grá in European tradition without having to rely Amhráin na nDaoine [1960], for example, on English versions. De Brún was as much where he traced the origins of the love-song concerned with defending modern Gaelic tradition in Irish to medieval French, has literature from contemporary European subsequently been substantially revised by influence as he was with exposing the Irish Mícheál Mac Craith, who has demonstrated, language to the humanistic values of Greek through detailed textual analysis, the or Renaissance literature. Referring to the influence of English Elizabethan poetry and type of literary text that should be translated Renaissance ideas on late medieval Irish into Irish, for example, de Brún rejected love poetry.39) The attraction of Corkery’s modern fiction and poetry: position at the time may have been that it was clear and unequivocal. The rejection Ach tá dearmhad mór orainn má of all outside influence was hardly a much mheasaimid gurab iad nua-scéalta agus more extreme position than the rejection of nua-fhilidheacht Shasana agus na hEorpa that which was, for the twentieth-century is ceart dúinn d’aistriú. Ní bhíonn ionta writer in Irish, clearly the most powerful soin, do ghnáth, ach críonacht agus tuirse and unavoidable of literary and cultural na haigne síbhialta. Ní haon tsamplaí influences. De-anglicization was still the geinearálta iad; níl adhbhar oideachais dominant critical stance at mid-century and
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it affected all aspects of critical commentary, the persistence of a poetic voice that is truly 40 Séamas Ó Céileachair, especially questions of literary form and Gaelic, in tune with a mentalité he sees as ‘Brollach’, Nuafhilí (1942-1952) (Baile Átha style, as is clear from the values expressed by embedded historically in the Gaelic poetic Cliath, 1956), vi. poet and editor Séamas Ó Céileachair in his tradition. 41 Ó Direáin, 1956 anthology Nuafhilí (1942–1952): ‘Ríordánachas’, 14. www.fieldday.ie• Toisc a leithne is atá an Béarla labhartha agus scríofa níl aon ní is contúirtí dúinn Corkery’s concept of dúchas and his views ná é. Ní ceart do na filí a gcuid tinfidh that Gaelic literature was and should be (inspioráide) a thógáil ó fhilíocht an dúchasach (especially in the sense of being Bhéarla. Caithfidh siad bheith aireach, non-derivative) ran counter to certain leis, ar rithimí a thiocfadh ina gceann important strands in revivalist thinking ar eagla go mba mhacallaí ón mBéarla about the function of a modern literature iad. Ba cheart dóibh bheith seachantach, in Irish. Whatever chance existed that a freisin, ar léirmheas ó dhaoine ag a bhfuil modern poetry in the language could evolve an Béarla mar shlat tomhais.40 uninfluenced by developments in English, the situation where prose was concerned Because of the all-pervasiveness of spoken was different, in that there was no unbroken and written English, nothing is more chain of native literary models. With the dangerous to us than it. Poets should not oral storytelling tradition as the only readily take their inspiration from English poetry. available exemplar, the critical question They must be careful too lest the rhythms was not whether one should borrow or that enter their heads are echoes from the not, but how to facilitate a process that English. They must avoid also the critical would rapidly produce those literary genres, opinions of people whose yardstick is especially the novel and the play, which were English. absent from the Gaelic literary tradition. There is an inherent irony running Perhaps such hard-held cultural positions through the debates about the form and masked an underlying acceptance that what content of these new genres as they were was being proposed was a kind of mission to enter the Irish-language tradition for the impossible. Certainly, most modern poets first time at the beginning of the twentieth were to depart dramatically from the native century. As long as Gaelachas was to be forms, metres and rhythms to develop their associated solely with the lives and lifestyles own individual versions of free verse, and of peripheral rural communities, the language most would have been in general accord was doomed. Unless the language could with Máirtín Ó Direáin when, in defence of produce plays, novels, short stories, which Ó Ríordáin, he rejected as impractical the would satisfy the standards laid down by suggestion that the modern poet can follow majority languages such as English, its in the footsteps of the Irish-language poets literature was fated to remain in the realm of of former times because: ‘Tá an bhearna the folkloristic, the rustic, the pre-modern. ró-mhór’ (The gap is too wide).41 As late as The revivalist potential of what were widely 1986, however, Ó Crualaoich’s discussion recognized as popular genres was also of dioscúrsa na Gaeilge still displays a acknowledged. If writers could satisfy the nativist concern with contemporary poets’ tastes of urban readers by providing them engagement with the native tradition. While with the kinds of urban realist novel they he acknowledges the biculturality of the desired, then literature would be functioning Irish-language poet, and the fact that many as a genuine revivalist tool, producing a contemporary practitioners are not native readership, reclaiming the urban landscape speakers of the language, his concern is with for Irish, developing lexical fields suited
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42 Patrick Pearse, ‘About to the depiction of traditionally non-Irish- … Writers of plays in Irish want to Literature’, An speaking environments. To be truly modern, produce dramas of a certain kind — very Claidheamh Soluis (26 literature in Irish would have to open itself distinctively Irish, very characteristic Bealtaine 1906), 7. 43 Thomas MacDonagh, to outside influence, a position held almost in the right sense, but still of the same Literature in Ireland: from the outset by the most significant kind as certain plays in other languages www.fieldday.ieStudies Irish and Anglo- critical voices. The first of these was Pearse, — to take the example nearest home, Irish (Nenagh, 1966 who by 1906 had rejected the narrow nativist as certain plays about Ireland written [1916]), 113–14. position in favour of a cultural openness to in English. They want to produce such European and contemporary influences: dramas, but they have not studied the models which have been followed by the Irish literature, if it is to live and grow, writers of the plays in English. They have must get into contact on the one hand done little or nothing towards mastering with its own past and on the other with their craft, and they have failed in their the mind of contemporary Europe. It endeavour. … Judging from all but one must draw the sap of its life from the soil of the plays sent in for the Oireachtas of Ireland: but it must be open on every some years ago, when I was adjudicator, side to the free air of heaven. the authors have no conception of what We would have our literature modern a play is. It is unfortunate that the one not only in the sense of freely borrowing exception, which was the work of a every modern form which it does not man who does understand the craft, possess and which it is capable of and was in every way admirable, was of assimilating, but also in texture, tone and a cosmopolitan description, not at all outlook. This is the twentieth century; so Gaelic in character as several plays and no literature can take root in the written in English. The others were for twentieth century which is not of the the most part stories or essays written in twentieth century.42 the form of dialogues or catechisms. They had no dramatic sequence or balance. It was recognized very early on that such The situations did not flow from the a process of borrowing was not going to characters, as they do inevitably in all be an easy one, and the views expressed good drama. There is such a thing as by MacDonagh in his Literature in Ireland stage-craft. The dramatist must learn his (1916) demonstrated a concern with how craft as a dramatist over and above his the language movement could encourage craft as a writer, and before he begins writers to depart from the native forms in he must have in him the makings of a the direction of bourgeois literary values. dramatist and a conception of dramatic His discussion of Gaelic drama is indicative art.43 of the cultural contradictions in the critical climate of the period: The irony here is that what is being rejected is the influence of the same native One cannot, with all the good will and oral tradition hailed by other commentators. all the good money in the world, produce The difficulties faced by those concerned literature to order, but one can lay down with the creation of a modern literature are canons of criticism, one can strive to keep reflected in the titles of certain Oireachtas the way clear for the coming of a good competitions, where writers are challenged thing by correcting false impressions, to break away from established forms and and — what is more to the point in this to write Gearrscéal de shaghas ar bith ach matter — one can set up good models béaloideas (Any sort of short story except and display them, when the models folklore, 1899), Scéal bunaithe ar an saol are at hand and the pedestals empty. in Éirinn faoi láthair (A story based on
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contemporary Irish life, 1900), Gearrscéal and yet, when such a view was reiterated in 44 See Donncha Ó faoi shaol na linne in Éirinn (A short story a negative review of a novel by well-known Súilleabháin, ‘Cruthú Litríochta agus Freastal on life in Ireland at present, 1913).44 In such journalist Breandán Ó hEithir in 1989, ar Éilimh’ and ‘Buaiteoirí a context, it is hardly surprising that critical it generated a public debate in which the Duaiseanna Liteartha an writings became prescriptive, exhorting tensions associated with the representation Oireachtais 1897–1924: www.fieldday.iewould-be writers to produce short stories, of English-speaking Ireland through Irish Gearrscéalta agus Úrscéalta’ in Scéal an novels, plays in Irish in a manner in keeping were rehearsed once again.49 Oireachtais 1897–1924 with the contemporary expectations of One outcome of critical anxiety about the (Baile Átha Cliath, 1984), English-speaking readers. Books such as vitality or otherwise of particular genres was 58–67; 172–76. Seoirse Mac Clúin’s An Litríocht (1926) and a preoccupation with literary convention. 45 Seoirse Mac Clúin, An Litríocht: Infhiucha Liam Ó Rinn’s Peann agus Pár (1940) were Again there are ironies associated with this ar Phrionnsabail, produced as textbooks or manuals for the approach, especially in relation to the novel, Fuirmeacha agus reader or would-be writer.45 Mac Clúin’s where few of the most significant works Léirmheastóireacht na examples are almost all taken from the to emerge have escaped the kind of genre Litríochta (Baile Átha Cliath, 1926); Liam Ó English literary canon, while Ó Rinn’s book criticism — based largely on English critical Rinn, Peann agus Pár — the work of one of the most perceptive texts such as Ian Watt’s The Rise of the (Baile Átha Cliath, 1940). critics of his period — is modelled on Novel (1957) and E. M. Forster’s Aspects 46 ‘Drámaíocht Ghaeilge popular handbooks in English. A minority of the Novel (1927) — which would place san Am atá le Teacht’ [1940], in Micheál Mac of critical voices actually grappled with doubt on their categorization as novels Liammóir, Ceo Meala Lá the contemporary sociolinguistic reality in the first place. It took the critic Alan Seaca (Baile Átha Cliath, and suggested creative means to surmount Titley, himself an accomplished novelist, 1952), 227–40. it. For example, Micheál Mac Liammóir, to point out that the most characteristic 47 Seán Ó Tuama, ‘The Other Tradition: Some writing in 1940 about the future of Irish- feature of the novel is its novelty and that Highlights of Modern language drama, proposed a rejection of it should not be expected that any genre Fiction in Irish’, in realism in favour of an expressionism that would develop in a minoritized language Patrick Rafroidi and might facilitate the development of an like Irish as it did in the literatures of the Maurice Harmon, eds., The Irish Novel altogether new Irish-language theatre of the major world languages.50 A greater critical in Our Time (Lille, 46 imagination. understanding has been developing of the 1976), 31–47, and Concern about the limitations of realism various forces which affected (and which ‘Úrscéalta agus Faisnéisí — and the difficulties associated with the still affect) the development of particular Beatha na Gaeilge: Na Buaicphointí’, Scríobh, development of an urban realist strand in genres in Irish: the forces determining 5 (1981), 148–60; modern Irish literature — were reiterated the prevalence of autobiography, for Breandán Ó Doibhlin, throughout the twentieth century. The example, or the circumstances that have ‘Smaointe ar Chúrsaí fate of the realist novel became the central led to a preponderance of introspective, na Próslitríochta’, Comhar (Lúnasa 1984), focus of an ongoing debate. Critics Seán Ó philosophical or psychological novels.51 22–24, and ‘Glasnost nó Tuama and Breandán Ó Doibhlin applied Recent criticism seeks to engage with the Perestroika? Inspioráid sociological and psychological insights to literary and linguistic reality and to develop agus Ceird an Úrscéalaí their discussions of the modern literature, critical paradigms that will account for Ghaeilge’, Léachtaí Cholm Cille, 21 (1991), accounting for the prevalence or otherwise the evolution of particular forms in the 139–53. of certain literary genres in terms of Irish context of the language’s marginalized and 48 Ó Tuama, ‘The Other social life in general and in terms of the minoritized status. Examples can be found Tradition’, 47. increasingly marginal position of the in the work of Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith 49 For an account of this debate, see Máirín language and the language community.47 Ó and Máire Ní Annracháin and particularly Nic Eoin, ‘“Ar Thóir Tuama’s suggestion in 1976 — ‘It may also in their mutually illuminating explorations na Foirme”: Idir an be that, with the success of Cré na Cille, the of the self-reflexive and anti-realist strands Réalachas Sóisialta agus fantasy or non-realistic novel will continue in modern and contemporary Irish-language an Réaltacht Fhíorúil’, in ‘Trén bhFearann Breac’, to be seen for a long time as the most viable fiction.52 Their approaches are different 421–25. novel-genre for the writer of Irish in modern — Mac Giolla Léith looks to alternative Ireland’48 — seems to have proven accurate, traditions within the history of the European
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Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Photo: destabilization of literary genre associated courtesy Cló Iar-Chonnachta. with post-modernist aesthetics. The kinds of comparative studies that would place modern literature in Irish in the context of developments in other minoritized languages, www.fieldday.ieboth within the Celtic language group and elsewhere, have yet to appear. Comparisons with Irish literature in English would also further illuminate the full range of literary responses to the bilingual cultural heritage outlined by Ó Tuairisc in 1975. It is clear, however, that contemporary Irish-language criticism has certainly, whether by choice or by circumstance, moved beyond the cultural nationalist discourse of decolonization and its attendant binary oppositions. It is not that it has reached, or perhaps ever can reach, a stage where the medium of expression itself can be taken for granted. Certain revivalist concerns will always be present, especially concern about the relationships between 50 Alan Titley, ‘Mála an literature and literacy, between authorship Éithigh’, Léachtaí Cholm and readership, between publication Cille, 21 (1991), 184– 206. and reception. Just as the Irish-speaking 51 See Máirín Nic Eoin, community has had to come to terms with its An Litríocht Réigiúnach novel, while Ní Annracháin applies modern status as a minority, so does Irish-language (Baile Átha Cliath, 1982) linguistic, psychoanalytical and Marxist criticism have to accept its status as a and ‘From Lieux de Mémoire to Narratives perspectives to a study of the de-centred minority discourse, struggling to maintain a of Self-Invention: subject in contemporary Irish-language visible, palpable and audible presence in the Twentieth-Century Gaelic fiction — but both concur in exposing the face of a growing movement towards cultural Autobiography’, in Liam limitations of nineteenth-century realism homogenization. In the process of developing Harte, ed., Modern Irish Autobiography: as an appropriate critical paradigm for as a minority discourse with real explanatory Self, Nation and Society twentieth-century prose writing in Irish. power, cultural issues that tended to be (London, 2007), 132– It is clear that the focus of the critique has avoided in the past — such as the centrality 55; and Ó Doibhlin, altered dramatically and it may be the case of translation, the inevitability of hybridity ‘Smaointe ar Chúrsaí na Próslitríochta’ that from now on less attention will be and the challenges of intercultural and and ‘Glasnost nó paid to the perceived absences or gaps in interlingual communication — have now Perestroika?’. the literary record and more to the qualities become central critical issues. While the 52 Caoimhín Mac Giolla and characteristics of the literature that has creative writer may choose to reflect or to Léith, ‘“Is Cuma Faoin Scéal”: Gné emerged in the language. transcend current linguistic realities, the critic d’Úrscéalaíocht na must account for such choices and illuminate Gaeilge’, Léachtaí Cholm the field of influences in which they are made. Cille, 21 (1991), 6–26; Conclusion Máire Ní Annracháin, ‘An tSuibiacht Abú, an tSuibiacht Amú’, Many other perspectives should be brought Oghma, 6 (1994), 11–22; to bear on this discussion. The influence of ‘Litríocht na Gaeilge i other modern and contemporary literatures dTreo na Mílaoise’, in Ó Cearúil, ed., An Aimsir on Irish-language writers should be taken Óg, 14–24. into account, for example, as should the
231 www.fieldday.ie www.fieldday.ie
Reviews Field Day review www.fieldday.ie
234 ‘Mourn — and then Onward!’ www.fieldday.ieLuke Gibbons
Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation Jonathan Lear Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006 197 pages. ISBN 978-0-674-02329-1
In Vessels of Evil: American Slavery and the Holocaust (1993), the African-American Jewish scholar Laurence Mordekhai Thomas suggested that on the scales of oppression and injustice, death is not always the worst fate: ‘It is simply 1 Laurence Mordekhai false that surviving is always Thomas, Vessels of Evil: American Slavery and the rationally preferable to death.’1 Holocaust (Philadelphia, 1993), 125. Living on one’s knees, stripped of all dignity and self-respect, is a more lethal form of annihilation than the destruction of millions of members of one’s community. For this reason, the calculus often drawn up to compare the loss of life in the Holocaust with the Atlantic passage — six million or ten million? — is beside the point, for what counts Crow tipi frame, c. 1910. Photo: Richard Albert Throssel (1882–1933), courtesy of in the end is the long-term the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming. impact of catastrophe on both cultures. It is at this juncture
Field Day Review 4 2008 235 Field Day review
Plenty Coups. Photo: Richard Albert Throssel (1882–1933), courtesy of the American Heritage Center, University of www.fieldday.ieWyoming.
that Thomas’s argument takes a The same could hardly be said of African- 2 Thomas, Vessels of Evil, 153. controversial turn, for in terms of its American culture in the aftermath of slavery. 3 See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: consequences, the Shoah, he contends, did Invoking Orlando Patterson’s influential A Comparative Study not take as great a toll on Jewish culture (and equally contested) concept of ‘natal (Cambridge, 1982). as did slavery on the subsequent history of alienation’, Thomas argues that black African Americans: culture experienced the slow strangulation of ‘social death’, depriving successive Recovering the traditions of Judaism was generations of the rich array of social and not a concern that plagued Jews who cultural achievements that remained the settled in what became the nation of preserve of the dominant white class in the Israel or in the United States or anywhere United States.3 else. No one wondered what counted as Though Jonathan Lear does not use a Bar Mitzvah or Bat Mitzvah or how to the phrase ‘social death’ — or its cognate perform them. No one wondered what ‘ethnocide’ — such concepts are at the rituals to perform for Pesach, or what the heart of Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Four Questions of Pesach were. After the Cultural Devastation. His book exemplifies Holocaust, the Jewish tradition, in all its the best features of recent breakthrough richness, was left very much intact.2 works in philosophy: it is analytically
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4 Jonathan Lear, Radical rigorous, yet grounded in both history and equality, are appropriately figured in the Hope: Ethics in the Face anthropology, and open to world-views deracinated image of the Alberto Giacometti of Cultural Devastation other than those safely ensconced in the stick man who is the bearer of fundamental (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), 2; my italics. The Western academy. It deals with the cultural human rights, designated by Giorgio quotation is taken from catastrophe that befell the Crow Indians in Agamben as homo sacer. Drawing on a www.fieldday.ieFrank B. Linderman, Montana and Wyoming in the nineteenth version of Thomas’s analysis, Lear imagines, Plenty Coups: Chief century, a series of disasters that not only as against what actually happened, what a of the Crows (Lincoln, 1962), 311. destroyed the things they valued — tradition, Crow holocaust might have been like. The 5 Lear, Radical Hope, 24. territory, the buffalo and beaver, warrior vast majority of the Crows would have of 6 Lear, Radical Hope, 32, prowess and courage, a nomadic way of course have been liquidated, but if some 34; Lear’s italics. life — but also their sense of value itself. pockets of people, or even one individual, 7 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Sequestered initially by the Fort Laramie had managed to survive ‘they would still Revolutions, 3rd edn. Treaty of 1851 in an area the size of England have the conceptual resources to understand (Chicago, 1996). (33 million acres), Crow territory was what had happened’.5 In the case of cultural reduced to 2 million acres by 1882. Depleted catastrophe, this would not be possible, by disease, starvation and the pressures of as the categories for even making sense of an alien land allotment system in the 1880s, loss would have disintegrated along with the Crows were eventually moved to a physical bodies: reservation. Lear’s analysis is prompted by a cryptic remark of the great Crow chief, [T]he problem goes deeper than Plenty Coups, who lived, and led his people, competing narratives. The issue is that through the calamity: ‘When the buffalo the Crows ... lost the concepts with went away the hearts of my people fell to which they could have constructed a the ground, and they could not lift them up narrative. This is a real loss, not just one again. After this nothing happened. There that is described from a certain point was little singing anywhere.’4 What does it of view. It is the real loss of a point of mean to say that history ended and ‘nothing view ... What we have in this case is not happened’, when in fact the Crows did an unfortunate occurrence, not even a survive into the twentieth century, albeit as devastating occurrence like the holocaust; shadows of their former selves? it is a breakdown in the field in which It is tempting at the outset to suggest that occurrences occur.6 they survived as human beings — just about — but not as Crows, as a people whose The Crows underwent what might be culture was the very eco-system of their described as a fundamental paradigm shift lives. The fate of the Crows can perhaps be in consciousness but unlike its counterpart seen as a trailer for George Romero’s film in the philosophy of science,7 they did not Night of the Living Dead (1968), with the experience just a shift in consciousness reservation, and the parcelled allotment about the world. They lost the consciousness system seen as open-air precursors of the of their world. The rupture was within zombie-like shopping mall. Lear’s account of experience itself. Drawing on concepts of cultural devastation serves as an important practical reason elaborated by Candace rejoinder to those constructions of society Volger, Lear recounts how the Crow went based on the beliefs of liberal individualism, about the ordinary business of everyday according to which the suppression of life, labouring, cooking, mending, eating, actual forms of life — screening the texture drinking, and so on, but in a manner that of cultural differences behind a ‘veil of would suggest they were only partly living: ignorance’ (John Rawls) — is a precondition for taking one’s place in civil society. Such The social group may endure, and one putative forms of freedom, or abstract may identify with being a member of that
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group — thus a member of the tribe can Lear shows how the true horror of 8 Lear, Radical Hope, 44. still think of him- or herself as a Crow — cultural devastation goes ‘all the way down’, 9 Lear, Radical Hope, 36; italics in original. but the possibility of constituting oneself beyond surface manifestations of identity. 10 Joseph Roach, Cities as a certain kind of subject suddenly He contrasts ascriptions of ethnicity in much of the Dead: Circum- becomes problematic.8 of contemporary identity politics, where Atlantic Performance www.fieldday.iecultural markers are chosen like so many (New York, 1996). 11 Lear, Radical Hope, 48. It was the Crow’s distinctive social rituals designer labels, with the kind of true Crow and customs that succumbed most of all subjectivity that once went to the heart of to the onslaught, not least the practice of their existence. This subjectivity did not gaining ‘coups’ in mastering an opponent depend merely on occupying a social role; it in battle through the symbolic act of hitting required deep immersion in the ideals of a him with a ‘coup-stick’ before armed culture, precisely the kind of identification combat (the source of Plenty Coups’s that goes ‘all the way down’. When a culture prowess in the tribe). The Sun Dance, an collapses, ‘this is a problem that penetrates integral component of the culture, also fell deeply into one’s inner life’11 — such life into disuse, and one of the options facing designated at times by Lear as subjectivity in the Crow at this stage was to continue the its conventional individualist mode. Yet there performance, ‘though the point of the dance is a difficulty in depicting Native Americans has been lost. The ritual continues, though as having the kind of introspective mental no one can say what it is for.’9 life characteristic of Western modernity It is in this context that some of the — not to mention its deeply subjective, problems in Lear’s analysis begin to emerge. Protestant variants. To establish the extent It is far from clear that the power of rituals, of the existential crisis the Crows lived still less the performative impact of dance, through, Lear draws, with telling effect, on depends on an awareness of their meaning Kierkegaard’s ‘suspension of the teleological’. or ‘point’ — if indeed they can always be The soul-searching of Kierkegaard — or said to have a meaning that can be defined Hamlet — is not only for Danes, of course, or described by instrumental reason. No but one has to ask whether modes of thought doubt, rituals can outlive their usefulness with universal claims always transfer if the whole world of which they are a part unproblematically to other cultures or, disintegrates, but this does not follow as a indeed, to the universe as it actually stands. matter of course. As Joseph Roach shows Does Kierkegaardian interiority correspond in his Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic to Crow inner life at all? Performance (1996), not least of the sources The issue was a matter of life and death of revitalization in African-American culture as the Crows underwent assimilation into were the performative energies of dance and the American way of life. The systematic music, the rhythms and tonalities of the body campaign to refashion Native-American that remained when everything else had been culture along Western individualist lines destroyed.10 Many of these practices were between the 1880s and 1930s — to convert remnants of earlier African rituals that did communal land into private property not survive the brutalities of the Atlantic (or ‘allotments’), and to reconstitute passage but which nonetheless persisted communal identity in terms of self-regarding in vestigial, somatic form — and were no possessive individualism — gave effect less resonant for that. Undertows from to a slow cultural ethnocide that took up submerged pasts operated as both ‘retentions’ where extermination left off. The Carlisle and ‘surrogations’, counter-currents that Industrial School for Indians (1879–1918) unsettled the still waters of ‘social death’, in Pennsylvania became the showcase when, because of the social paralysis of the for the implantation of inner life into plantations, so much seemed lost. refractory Native Americans, leading its
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Crow prisoners confined to a reservation, January 1887. Photo: Getty Images/Hulton www.fieldday.ieArchive.
12 Cited in Joel Pfister, superintendent, Colonel Richard Henry one passage, Lear recounts how the Crow Individuality Pratt, to famously pronounce that ‘all the woman Pretty Shield expressed shame Incorporated: Indians in Indian there is in the race should be dead. at inflicting corporal punishment on her the Multicultural Modern 12 (Durham, 2004), 20. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.’ children (corporal punishment was de 13 Pfister, Individuality The regime at Carlisle took the colonel at his rigueur at Carlisle), leading her to lament: ‘I Incorporated, 44. word, as Luther Standing Bear, a survivor am trying to live life I do not understand.’14 14 Lear, Radical Hope, 61. of the first class, recollected in sorrow: There is clearly a lack of ‘fit’ here between 15 Lear, Radical Hope, 63. 16 Lear, Radical Hope, 65. ‘The change in clothing, housing, food, and the Crow’s hollowed existence on the confinement combined with lonesomeness reservation and what remained of their was too much, and in three years nearly one forms of life, but it does not follow that half of the children from the Plains were what was missing was a connection with dead and through with all earthly schools.’13 their deep subjectivity. This is the sort of cultural asphyxiation The complex interweaving of inner Lear analyses with acuity from a and outer lives is explored by Lear in his philosophical point of view. Yet, from the analysis of the roles of shame and courage perspective of cultural history, it is clear that in Crow culture. Linking conceptions of it was not the want of subjectivity but its courage with the avoidance of shame, he imposition that was killing the Indian softly notes that a tribal upbringing cultivated ‘an with its inner song. Though not addressing internalized shame-mechanism that reflects the issue directly, Lear’s ‘philosophical the Crow understanding of courage’,15 and anthropology’ (as he terms it) negotiates it is this inner recess that survives in the the complexities of Indian culture as it event of cultural collapse: ‘there are ways manifested itself in such activities as hoping in which a person brought up in a culture’s and dreaming, or moral states such as traditional understanding of courage might courage and shame, but tends to construe draw upon his own inner resources to them in mental, rather than cultural, terms broaden his understanding of what courage (if one can make such a distinction). In might be’.16 Would this formulation lack
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‘Cold Grave’. December 1890: mass burial of Sioux Indians killed at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Photo: Getty Images/ www.fieldday.ieHulton Archive.
any of its validity if it suggested that one a relationship to specific others; the 17 James C. Scott, might fall back on one’s cultural as well as alternative, associated with advanced Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden personal resources to meet the exigencies of Western individualism, cultivates a detached Transcripts (New Haven, a new order in which both self and society or generalized other, thus laying the basis for 1990). faced disintegration? Cultures have interior self-regulation abstracted from the company 18 Bernard Williams, Shame histories or ‘hidden transcripts’ (in James C. of others, real or imagined. The former is and Necessity (Berkeley, 17 1994), 82, cited in Lear, Scott’s phrase) just as much as individuals, the source of solidarity and corresponds — Radical Hope, 85. and these may be as important in providing broadly speaking — to what might be seen 19 Williams, Shame and resources of hope as inner psychological a communal moral code; the latter, to the Necessity, 84-5, cited in reserves. What is at stake here is not the type of self-interested ego institutionalized at Lear, Radical Hope, 87; my italics. existence of mental states, or subjectivity, Carlisle, and repugnant to Native-American but the relation of such private worlds to forms of life. The contrast between the ‘outer’, collective practices, the forms of life two modes is brought out by an incident in of a society. Though shame, unlike guilt, Sophocles Ajax, cited again by both Williams is an overtly social mechanism, in that and Lear, in which the hero, having prided one loses face before others, a measure of himself on his courage at killing Greek internalization may still take place since the warriors, discovers to his dismay that under actual presence of others is not required. a spell of Athena’s, he has been killing sheep As Bernard Williams notes in Shame and all along: Necessity (cited with approval by Lear): ‘Even if shame and its motivations always He could not go on living ... in virtue of involve in some way or other an idea of the the relations between what he expected gaze of another, it is important that for many of the world and what the world expects of its operations the imagined gaze of an of a man who expects that of it. ‘The imagined other will do.’18 World’ there is represented in him by an There is still, however, a difference internalized other, and it is not merely any between two kinds of internalization: one, other ... the other in him does represent compatible with Crow culture, internalizes a real world, in which he would have to the presence of others, maintaining live if he went on living.19
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20 Lear, Radical Hope, 96. Of course, Lear is correct to emphasize throughout the tribe. It is the tribe that is 21 Lear, Radical Hope, 43. that this real world was facing imminent anxious.23 22 In several extended collapse but to the extent that the Crows passages in his book, Lear acknowledges the social survived as Crows — to the extent that their In a related manner, Lear analyses with structuring of the self, ‘subjectivity’ endured the catastrophe — considerable sensitivity another dream www.fieldday.ieas in the following: ‘If traces of this culture lived on in individuals, that Plenty Coups had as a young boy one were simply to leap in however truncated or attenuated a form. following the death of his beloved older from the thick concepts of one’s culture into For survival to take place, Lear writes, brother at the hands of the Sioux. In this the ethical concepts of ‘we would have to understand the Crow vision, the young Plenty Coups was taken another culture, it would as somehow transcending their own in hand by the Dwarf-chief, the head of seem that one would subjectivity’,20 but it was perhaps more the Little People whom the Crow believed experience not only a radical discontinuity imperative to transcend subjectivity itself to lived in the hills of Montana — where stone with the past; one would retain connections with the energies of an arrowheads have been found (the Crows experience a rip in the endangered culture. As Lear writes: ‘This made their own arrowheads of bone). The fabric of one’s self. If was more than a mere psychological matter Dwarf-chief reassured the young warrior we think of the self as partially constituted by its of “identifying” oneself in a particular that if he sharpened his senses in relation to most basic commitments, way. It required a steadfast commitment his surroundings, he would prevail in the then in jettisoning those stretching over much of one’s life to organize future as a chief to lead his people. Drawing commitments one would one’s life in relation to those ideals’.21 both on D. W. Winnicott’s concept of the be disrupting one’s most basic sense of being’ Subjectivity, in this sense, is commingled ‘transitional object’, which occupies an (65). The difficulty here with, and negotiated through, profound indeterminate zone between the child’s inner lies in the sense in which social attachments, as is the case in most and outer worlds, and Sigmund Freud’s late ‘partially constituted’ non-Western (or ‘pre-modern’) cultures.22 It notion of ‘ego-ideals’, Lear comments: accounts for ‘one’s most basic sense of being’. is in this sense that the dream-vision which 23 Lear, Radical Hope, 77. lies at the heart of Crow experience — and Psychologically speaking, the Little 24 Lear, Radical Hope, 125. Lear’s analysis — also ‘transcends’ the People function as transitional figures for boundaries of the individual by virtue of its young Plenty Coups: because they are shadowy, external provenance. Recounting a taken to exist as some aspect of the spirit series of oracular dream-visions that seemed world, the question whether their voices to provide intimations of a dark future, come from inside or outside is left vague. which Chief Plenty Coups had as a young We can think of these voices as the voices boy, Lear describes in some detail how such of an emerging ego-ideal.24 dreams were not simply private experiences but intersubjective and communal. One The possibility that the dreams come from dream, presaging the disappearance of the outside the self may have to do not just with buffalo, was brought back to the elders of their otherworldly provenance but with the tribe by the nine-year-old Plenty Coups: their collective form: their giving voice to a structure of feeling ‘diffused throughout the It is not unreasonable to suppose that tribe’, as in the earlier dream of the buffalo. a sensitive nine-year-old was attuned to It is through these shards of solidarity that the anxiety in his community and that he fractured cultures often find the remnants was able to dream what he was not in a of hope, even when their world is falling to position to think. And he dreamt it on the pieces. tribe’s behalf. Plenty Coup’s dream seems Lear’s absorbing study is at its best to have been an integral part of a process when he identifies such submerged forms by which the tribe metabolized its shared — in excess of subjectivity, as it were — in anxiety. It helps, I think, to conceptualize the outlines of the ‘radical hope’ that lies the anxiety not as specifically located at the centre of his book. Because of the in this or that person but as diffused incommensurability of life-worlds — the
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November 1940: a sign at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, where US troops massacred 250 Native Americans in 1890. Photo: John Vachon/Library Of www.fieldday.ieCongress/Getty Images.
shifting tectonic plates before and after a concepts with which to understand what 25 Lear, Radical Hope, 120. calamity — hope itself ‘may outstrip the we are reaching out for.26 26 Lear, Radical Hope, 122. concepts with which we seek to understand it’.25 In marked contrast to optimism, which Hope, in this sense, does not always is driven by wishful projections of the future, require a clear — ‘conscious’ — grasp of hope is open-ended, allowing us to go on the future, but is impelled by a version of by virtue of its own striving for definition. the ‘kinaesthetic imagination’ (Roach’s To the extent that it is more expansive than term) — the will to go on, or even to shuffle wish fulfilment, it also transcends the ego, on, as in the slow motions of the Ghost emanating less from the interiority of the Dance (see below). While the future may be self than from an orientation towards the inscrutable in the midst of cultural collapse, other — if not, indeed, from the other. In it is important to emphasize that there is that line of thought stretching from Plato to no absolute discontinuity — any more Freud that claims or suggests that it is our than there is complete incommensurability sense of our imperfection as human beings in Thomas Kuhn’s notion of ‘paradigm that instills a longing for what we lack, Lear shifts’ in the philosophy of science. Cultural points to a material basis in the outward devastation that seems complete in terms of reach of desire in early childhood: ‘content’ — a substantive core of truths and values — may still meet resistance not so We instinctively reach out to parental much in subjectivity but in the recalcitrance figures for emotional and nutritional of ‘form’: the aesthetic or cultural materiality sustenance that, in the moment, we lack of practices containing, so to speak, a mind the resources to understand. This is the of their own. It is this ‘form’ or material archaic prototype of radical hope: in substratum that prevents hope from being infancy we are reaching out for a source simply blind faith, irrespective of whether of goodness, though we as yet lack the or not it has a religious basis. Participants in
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27 Roach, Cities of the patterns of culture — ‘performers’ — may ... Our decision was reached, not because Dead, 55–71. not have a conscious grasp of what these we loved the white man who was already 28 Lear, Radical Hope, 142. forms are ‘for’, and there may indeed be crowding other tribes in our country, or 29 Lear, Radical Hope, 145. 30 Lear, Radical Hope, 149. nothing conscious about them at all. As because we hated the Sioux, Cheyenne 31 Lear himself seems to Roach suggests, the inscriptions of residual and Arapahoe, but because we plainly saw www.fieldday.ieagree with this version African practices onto Christian funeral that this course was the only one which later, criticizing the ceremonies among slaves in New Orleans, might save our beautiful country for us.28 Ghost Dance for its lack of agency: ‘It is the such as a granddaughter throwing herself hallmark of the wishful into the grave at a funeral, was not a Lear glosses this as implying ‘not just that that the world will be calibrated strategy of resistance, but was it was psychologically advantageous not to magically transformed nonetheless perceived, like other wayward give into despair but also that it would have — into conformity with how would like it to be customs, as preserving havens of black been a mistake to do so. It would also have — without having to autonomy in the face of total domination. been a mistake to “go down fighting”.’29 take any realistic steps to Even when the gesture and rhythms of But is it a mistake to go down fighting? bring it about’ (150–51). the intractable body were appropriated in Lear is perhaps too harsh in his judgement For recent scholarship on the phenomenon, subsequent generations by white culture — on the millenarianism of the Ghost Dance, reiterating the such as, Roach suggests, in Elvis’s notorious representing it as little more than wish- contemporary judgement gyrations, and rock ’n’ roll generally — they projection, false optimism, on the part of by the ethnographer were still regarded as constituting an affront militant Native-American tribes in the South James Mooney that it was not a pretext for to white respectability and to puritan and the West who resisted incarceration in armed insurrection, conceptions of self (or racial) control.27 reservations in the 1890s. His account of see Jeffrey Ostler, The Though admirable throughout in its the dance is misleading, in that it appears to Plains Sioux and U.S. nuanced response to the values and life confirm the authorities’ view at the time that Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded forms of the Crow, and in particular to their it was an alibi for armed insurrection, and Knee (Cambridge, redoubtable courage, Lear’s empathy is less hence should be suppressed accordingly. 2004), chs. 11–15, apparent in the case of Plains Indians such Writing of Wovoca, the Paiute prophet and James Mooney’s as the Sioux and the Cheyenne, who chose in the South-West whose visions originally classic ethnographic account, The Ghost- heroism of a different kind — to go down inspired the Ghost Dance, Lear states that Dance Religion and fighting, even in the face of insuperable odds. he claimed to be the son of God, ‘who has the Sioux Outbreak of This is surprising at one level, for much returned to punish the whites and restore 1890, Fourteenth Annual of the book is based on the argument that the Indians to their previous life’: ‘According Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1892–93, death is not the ultimate indignity: ‘better to to this messiah, in the following spring pt. 2 (Washington, DC, die on your feet than live on your knees’, as (1891), he would wipe out all the whites 1896) La Pasionara (Dolores Ibarurri) is reported in a catastrophe ... The dance was ecstatic: 32 Lear, Radical Hope, 151. to have proclaimed during the Spanish Civil participants would dance into a frenzy ... War. Towards the end of his book, Lear and abandoned all other activities in order to contrasts the Crow mode of survival, laying bring about this cataclysm.’30 This was not, down arms and making peace with their in fact, the case: deliverance was not placed conquerors, with the tragic denouement of in the hands of the Indians themselves but the Ghost Dance among the Lakota Sioux, was to be brought about by external forces, the traditional enemies of the Crow, which whether natural or supernatural.31 To be ended on the killing fields of Wounded sure, the Sioux envisaged a world without Knee in 1890: ‘The Crow were wiser [than the white man but this need not be taken the Sioux and Cheyenne]’, Plenty Coups is literally, ‘mistaken for reality’,32 any more reported as saying: than the dream-content of Plenty Coups’s visions recounted earlier should be taken We knew the white men were strong, at face value. The Ghost Dance might be without number in their own country, viewed more productively as an attempt not and there was no good in fighting them so much (literally) to restore an irretrievable
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A poster commemorating the massacre of Wounded Knee. www.fieldday.iePhoto: MPI/Getty Images.
past but to prevent the past from being is true; they also danced to possess entirely eliminated — the fate facing the themselves again of the spirit of their Crows. As Roach argues: ancestors, to possess again their memories, to possess again their communities. They This amends somewhat the idea that danced to resist the reduction to the ... the Plains Indians danced for the status of commodities. In other words, repossession of territory, though that they danced — and they still dance — to
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33 Roach, Cities of the possess again a heritage that some people lawyer who was perhaps the first Indian Dead, 209–11. would rather see buried alive.33 activist to fully utilize the language of ‘rights’ 34 Pfister, Individuality for Native-American causes. On Yellowtail’s Incorporated, 125. 35 Frederick Hoxie, Ironically, one of the threats presented appointment as superintendent of the Crow Parading through by the Ghost Dance lay in its vernacular Agency in 1934 — the first Native American www.fieldday.ieHistory: The Making engagement with Christianity. This to assume such a position — the local of the Crow Nation in represented an appropriation of the new newspaper nervously reported that while America, 1805–1935 (Cambridge, 1995), 331. world that Indians were due to enter on their he ‘foreswore the ways of his forefathers’ The citation in the local own terms. As Joel Pfister explains, while on entering law school, he continued to newspaper is from the the individualizing regime at Carlisle sought defend the Indian’s rights to ‘dress, live Hardin Tribune, 4 May to instill ‘what it meant to be “sinful” as and worship as he chooses’, regardless of 1934. 36 Lear, Radical Hope, an effective way of structuring consciences, his (or her) degree of ‘civilization’. ‘This 64–65. guilt, and self-monitoring along Christian statement,’ writes Frederick Hoxie, ‘captured 37 As Hoxie points out, lines’, what it feared most was that Indians Yellowtail’s appeal to both Indians and Yellowtail’s support for might take Christianity — or modernity — whites: he had long been an advocate of Collier led to divisions within the Crows, and in into their own hands, giving them a specific democratic decision making, constitutional recent decades Collier’s Native-American stamp: rights and Indian enterprise, but he was advocacy of top-down also a product of the social, economic and Western-style democracy What riled Pratt most of all were religious atmosphere the Crows had created and the welfare state 35 was still a matter of ‘Indians’ who had evolved beyond being on the reservation during his lifetime’. As contention (see Vine ‘Indians’ (as he thought he understood Lear himself describes this appropriation Deloria, Jr., Custer Died them) into ‘individuals’, but who then of the new order as a means of cultural for Your Sins: An Indian continued to Indianize themselves. This survival: ‘The issue [here] would then be Manifesto [New York, 1969], 145). sort of impenitent Indianism disrupted one not simply of going over to the thick commonly held evolutionary assumptions concepts of another culture, but of drawing that being individual was more on their traditions in novel ways in the face progressive then being ‘Indian’.34 of novel challenges.’36 While not constituting the stuff of legend It may be that such resilience as the Crows like Plenty Coups, Robert Yellowtail was showed in the face of enormous adversity instrumental in a coup of his own, playing came from the tenacity with which they held a key role in the appointment of the radical on to remnants of their own past, not least activist John Collier as commissioner of their determination to hold on to communal Indian Affairs under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s land values. New Deal administration. It was under Towards the end of the book, Lear Collier’s fundamental restructuring of Indian pits younger Crow leaders such as Robert affairs that the iniquitous policy of private Yellowtail against the wisdom of Plenty allotments, coercive individualism in Indian Coups, arguing that the former, a white- lands, and the assault on Indian culture, was educated lawyer, saw allotment as a way to finally abandoned.37 Some of the wishful avoid further white encroachment. This does thinking of the Ghost Dance had come true less than justice to the remarkable young after all.
245 Field Day review www.fieldday.ie
246 Reckoning with the English www.fieldday.iePatrick Griffin
Contested Island: Ireland 1460–1630 S. J. Connolly Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007 426 pages. ISBN 978-0-198208-16-7
Map-Making, Landscapes, and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland, c. 1530–1750 Field Day Critical Conditions W. J. Smyth Cork: Cork University Press, 2006 760 pages. ISBN 978-1-859183-97-7
The history of Ireland appears more and more like the history of America. At first blush, such a statement seems absurd. Historically, and this is not news, America became more and more like Ireland. For instance, it has become a commonplace in the literature of the early modern Atlantic that Ireland and America were linked in profound ways, but Ireland almost always acted as precursor. Irishmen and women ventured to America throughout its colonial period, greening the Atlantic and presumably America in the process. Both struggled in the
An English representation of the passage of the Erne at Belleek, 1593. British Library. Field Day Review 4 2008 247 Field Day review
The Arrival of the English in Virginia, from ‘Admiranda Narratio ...’, 1585–88 (coloured engraving). Service Historique de la Marine, Vincennes, France; www.fieldday.ieBridgeman Art Library.
eighteenth century with their status settlement in a foreign land, we should first 1 This account of within the British state; but the Irish did cross the ocean to Virginia. Stimulated by Jamestown is based so first, presumably offering models of the 400th anniversary of the settlement of on two of the best studies that appeared resistance to British rule. And, of course, Jamestown, scholars have drawn on path- to commemorate the the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland served breaking work done over the last generation 400th anniversary, James as a laboratory for the first settlement of to rethink what each of these dynamics Horn, A Land as God America. So axiomatic has this last point mean. What used to be a simple story of Made It: Jamestown and Birth of America become — much more so than the other two triumph, then a simplistic one of perdition, (New York, 2005); and Atlantic bonds — that it lies beyond debate. has by now evolved into a sophisticated and Karen Kupperman, Sean Connolly’s new book, Contested ambivalent one. The Jamestown Project Island: Ireland 1460–1630, is not centrally Consider the latest take on Jamestown.1 (New York, 2007). The best older account, still concerned with America. Nor is William The focus used to be on the English who excellent, is Edmund Smyth’s Map-Making, Landscapes, and arrived in 1607, encouraging us to see the Morgan’s American Memory: A Geography of Colonial and event as a mythic moment or a fiasco. No Slavery, American Early Modern Ireland, c. 1530–1750. Yet longer. Instead of demonizing or celebrating, Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia both suggest that the tables are turning on we understand. In May of that year, less (New York, 1975). On the nature of the bonds between Ireland than four months before the Flight of the the change from old and America in the early modern period of Earls, a little over 100 men and boys from to new, see Charlotte conquest and settlement. But as these books England landed at a place which they would Hays, ‘American Originals: Descendants of demonstrate, it’s not so much that America call Jamestown but the local Indians knew Jamestown Settlers Meet took the lead in the historical relationship; as Tsenacommacah. The surrounding region, and Greet’, Wall Street rather, America’s historians did. watered by rivers emptying into Chesapeake Journal, 18 May 2007. Indeed, to evaluate the work of Connolly Bay, supported more than 15,000 people. Similarly, see Jill Lepore, ‘Our Town’, New Yorker, and Smyth in light of how we now think By all accounts, the natives possessed a 2 April 2007. of the ‘encounter’ between natives and sophisticated culture and had encountered newcomers, of the nature of English imperial Europeans before. They were led by a man ambition, and of the implications of English of considerable abilities. Powhatan, as he
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The Siege of Enniskillen, 1594, as represented by John Thomas, a soldier serving under the English commander, Captain www.fieldday.ieGeorge Bingham. British Library.
2 On Indian conceptions of was called, ruled at least thirty tribes in the by a better people, who would and could space, see April Hatfield, region through intimidation and violence. do all in their power to improve what God Atlantic Virginia: These Indians had no affinity for bonding; had put there. There was nothing new about Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century Indianness as a concept was unthinkable. this jaundiced way of seeing the ‘other’. (Philadelphia, 2004). Powhatan also relied on patronage to hold Spaniards viewed natives this way, as did the 3 Andrew Fitzmaurice, his confederation together. Subchiefs placed French. The idea that the world was divided Humanism and America: in each village under his control doled out between civility and barbarity was as old as An Intellectual History of English Colonization, the goods that Powhatan had bestowed the classical world, and was only intensified 1500–1625 (Cambridge, on them. In this ‘gifting’ culture, passing by the European encounter with indigenous 2003), 12–13, 37; out things, rather than accumulating them, peoples during the ‘Age of Discovery’. Armed Anthony Pagden, represented the surest path to securing with this enduring sensibility, the English Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire power. In this regard, Powhatan had few understood the ‘New World’ as a place to in Spain, Britain, and equals. He was master of a violent world of be ‘improved’. And so from the earliest days France, c. 1500–c. 1800 warlords and vassals. He also imposed his of settlement, Captain John Smith set off to (New Haven, 1998); J. rule over peoples and groups, less than over explore the region, to see what riches it could H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain land and territory. He did not see his world offer and to map it so as to exploit it. By and Spain in America, as if it were a map on a page.2 mapping it, he made it English. This ideology 1492–1830 (New Haven, The Englishmen had not reckoned on underwrote settlement.3 2006); and Peter Mancall, settling amid such an organized people. But Powhatan did not see things this Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession Nor could they recognize the sophistication way. In fact, he viewed these strange-looking for an English America of Powhatan’s people. We know that they interlopers not as exotic or superior but as (New Haven, 2007). regarded Indians as their inferiors, a savage useful and subservient. Powhatan planned to people — literally ‘wood’s dwellers’ — better employ the goods they brought with them, suited to an imagined state of nature than especially copper, to extend his power to to their notion of civil society. They saw other regions. He hoped to get his hands Powhatan’s people as idolatrous drudges and on their guns to overawe those who would his land as a place to be exploited and settled stand in his way. And he believed that the
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A plan of the English settlement at Lifford, County Donegal, 1600. Public Record Office, www.fieldday.ieLondon.
4 Peter Wood, Introduction, in G. A. Waselkov, ed., Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast (Omaha, 2006). On these themes, also see Karen Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing off in English were another tribe to be brought English proved almost incidental to what was Early America (Ithaca, into tributary status to him. He would really happening on the ground. Ideologies of NY, 2000). have been a fool to think otherwise. The conquest were simple and straightforward, 5 On this, see my American Leviathan: newcomers were dying at an appalling rate but complexity and ambiguity defined Empire, Nation, and from dysentery, saltwater poisoning, and the period. In other words, we’ve come a Revolutionary Frontier ‘mere famine’, as one put it. Powhatan then long way over the past generation when it (New York, 2007). played a game of ‘good cop, bad cop’ with comes to characterizing the initial encounter 6 For the best analysis of 1492 and 1992, see the them, dispatching emissaries with gifts of between natives and newcomers in America. essays by James Axtell in corn one day and raiding parties the next. Of course, we used to view the ‘discovery’ Beyond 1492: Encounters The message was clear. The English, their of what would become the United States in Colonial North silly rituals of possession as well as their in almost providential terms. The Indians America (New York, 1992). map-making to the contrary, stayed in resisted for a while, but they did so against 7 Richard White, The Tsenacommacah at Powhatan’s pleasure. inevitability. This interpretation reached its Middle Ground: Indians, Conquest, after all, did not define the early high-water mark at the end of the nineteenth Empires, and Republics years, and neither group, despite English century, with the work of George Bancroft in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 ideological pretensions, lay beyond any and especially Frederick Jackson Turner, the (Cambridge, 1991). Also 5 sort of cultural or racial pale. Both groups father of the frontier thesis. More recently, see James Merrell, The struggled to make sense of one another, we have turned this exceptionalist narrative Indians’ New World: groping for a metaphorical middle ground on its head, arguing that racism and greed Catawbas and Their Neighbors from First between cultures. And at this stage, Indians decimated Indian cultures, thereby paving Contact through the Era 4 held the upper hand. the way for conquest, formally celebrated of Removal (New York, The poisonous ideology espoused by the in 1992 with the 500th anniversary of 1991).
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8 Qualifiers include Columbus’s ‘conquest’ of America.6 Now not view American settlement as inexorable? James Merrell, Into we see things differently again. Indians did Do we have to reconsider the Irish case if the American Woods: not represent some essentialized group of the American case is not so straightforward? Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier people beyond time, the proverbial noble American scholars are no longer so sure of (New York, 2000); and savages, unable to cope with newcomers the American side of the equation. www.fieldday.ieGregory Dowd, War espousing foreign ways of understanding Neither are historians so sure of the under Heaven: Pontiac, things, people, and the land. Like all people, Irish side. Indeed, the tale of native and the Indian Nations, and the British Empire natives adapted. They learned to assimilate newcomer for the early modern period in (Baltimore, 2004). and to take advantage of the market. When Ireland is beginning to undergo a similar 9 For the sequence, see it came to European goods, Indians proved transformation. The old narrative of D. B. Quinn, The discriminating shoppers, melding new conquest dominated the whole enterprise of Elizabethans and the Irish (Ithaca, 1966), imperatives with older traditions quite easily. early modern Irish history. For generations, and Voyages and As the historian Richard White argues, Irish historians assumed that the kingdom Colonizing Enterprises natives and newcomers from the moment was, would be, or was in the process of of Sir Humphrey Gilbert of first contact through the early nineteenth being conquered. In the nineteenth century, (London, 1940); Nicholas Canny, The Elizabethan century continually created ‘middle grounds’ historians with unionist and nationalist Conquest of Ireland: between two cultures. According to our sympathies could agree upon little else but A Pattern Established, conventional wisdom these days, people the notion that early modern conquest 1565–76 (London, learned to find merit in each other’s cultures. created the salient features and fissures of 1976), as well as his path-breaking article Indians embraced white ways, dressing as the kingdom. They held radically different ‘The Ideology of English Europeans, using their goods, adopting their ideas of its meaning, but found common Colonization: From notions of land, and worshipping like them. ground in seeing its centrality to a ‘disputed Ireland to America’, Euro-Americans also ‘went native’ from national grand narrative’. The earliest William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 30 time to time, adopting Indian notions of revisionists who focused on the seventeenth (1973), 575–98. The warfare, eating Indian foods, dressing like century, such as R. Dudley Edwards and T. sequence is explained in Indians, and marrying them.7 No doubt, W. Moody, both of whom sought to bring Patrick Griffin, ‘Richard lately some have suggested that we need to archival rigour and dispassion to the study Hakluyt, Chicken Little, and the Ends of Atlantic qualify our use of ‘the middle ground’, that of the Irish past, also could not escape these History’, Reviews in it can obscure the essential features of what assumptions. Nor did they try.10 This should American History, 35 happened to native communities. But the not surprise us. As Jane Ohlmeyer and (2007), 325–34. blunt instrument of conquest can no longer Ciaran Brady argue, even revisionists have 10 Nicholas Canny, ‘The 8 Politics of History: Writing be employed. trouble moving beyond what they call ‘the Early Modern History Let’s return to Ireland. What does it paradigm of conquest and appropriation’. in Parnellian Ireland’, have to do with the story? A great deal. This motif, they argue, tends to drive the The Parnell Lecture, Ireland after all served as laboratory for study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century 2004–05: Magdalene College Occasional Paper, American settlement. And we know that the Irish history, and largely goes unquestioned 34 (Cambridge, 2005). transatlantic process resembled a sequence. because it underscores what all regard as a Some have argued that The English would conquer Ireland, and after critical truth of the Irish past.11 It represents the conquest paradigm is learning a thing or two there, would settle the great fact of early modern Irish history, at the heart of an ‘Irish exceptionalism’ and has America. The great historian D. B. Quinn did the place where debate — and Irish sense of fostered a sense of ‘Irish pioneering work in uncovering the sequence, self — begins and ends. essentialism’. On this, arguing that English adventurers who were Sean Connolly jumps into this debate see Donald Akenson, If intent on seizing opportunities anywhere on with two feet. In doing so, he plays to his the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat, 1630–1730 the globe turned their attention decisively strengths. A bit of a contrarian, Connolly (Montreal, 1997), 173–75. to America only after their experience has had some pretty pointed things to say 11 Introduction, in Ciaran conquering Ireland. And Nicholas Canny about Irish historiography. More than a Brady and Jane Ohlmeyer, demonstrated the cultural pathologies — the decade ago, he played the part of Ireland’s eds., British Interventions 9 in Early Modern Ireland ideologies — that underwrote the sequence. J. C. D. Clark, suggesting that we should (Cambridge, 2005), 10. But what happens to the sequence if we do view Ireland less as a British problem and
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more within a European ancien régime of Ireland, all hell broke loose, or better, new On problems with this framework.12 The issue for Connolly players joined an already raucous chorus. theme of conquest, see was proper context. In his estimation, a Following Steven Ellis’s and Ciaran Brady’s also the work of Steven Ellis, who concludes that European context better explained Ireland’s lead, Connolly argues that the king’s English the Tudor plantations eighteenth century than a ‘new’ British and allied Irish subjects began dismantling and takeover of Ireland’s www.fieldday.ieone, then all the rage. In Contested Island, an old system of accommodation without political apparatus and Connolly is playing the role of contrarian fully implementing a new one.13 The state Church amounted to a ‘failure’. See once more, in this instance contesting the destruction of the house of Kildare — the Tudor Ireland: Crown, conquest paradigm. In many ways the book bedrock of the idea of lordship over Ireland Community, and the amounts to an unrelenting if crafty attack — did not amount to some great watershed. Conflict of Cultures, on the old standby. The title of the book It simply initiated a heightened period 1470–1603 (London, 1985), 315–16. It proves says it all. Ireland in the fifteenth century of competition in an already competitive difficult to move beyond was a contested island of warlords and world. Endemic and complex feuding merely the conquest paradigm, competition, a world of the descendants incorporated new players from across the even if we define it as of English medieval settlers degenerating sea, ensuring that no single actor — not even ‘intervention’ or even as we acknowledge its and currying favour with the Irish in their a state — could impose effective authority. unevenness as a process midst, of Highland Scots mercenaries coming Far from dictating the course of events, the and its contingent quality, and going, and of Gaelic Irish looking for English, it seemed, had gone native. and even as we try to any ally in this jostling world of power Ambiguity is the defining characteristic resurrect the agency and cultural survivals and position. Some ‘Old English’ families of the period and of this book. Connolly of indigenous peoples. had gone native several generations earlier. believes that the earliest plantation strategy Breandán Ó Buachalla, Some of the old Gaelic families were wholly represented no strategy at all. Each was notably in Aisling Ghéar: anglicized. In fact, the old tried and true prosecuted for pragmatic and defensive Na Stíobhartaigh agus an tAos Léinn, 1603–1788 distinctions between groups do not do purposes. Each proved limited in scope, (Baile Átha Cliath, 1996), this kaleidoscopic world justice. The book scale, and intent. None of the early schemes and Éamonn Ó Ciardha, ends the same way. After what should have represented ends in and of themselves. in Ireland and the been the period of conquest, we find so- Even the plantations in Munster of the Jacobite Cause: A Fatal Attachment (Dublin, called ‘New’ English settlers intermarrying 1580s, long seen as templates for later 2003), have made these with the Irish and adopting their language. larger plans, were not ideologically driven, claims for early modern New groups of Scots only added to the justified by a racist ideology, or particularly Ireland. Eerily enough, competitive mix. Both created alliances and effective. As Connolly points out, only this tension between oppression and agency forged accommodations with the Irish. If those Irish deemed traitors lost their lands, replicates debates in anything, by 1640 Protestants were literally and loyal Irish subjects could settle on American historiography and figuratively disarmed, one group of lands surrendered. No doubt, brutality about slaves and slavery many on a complex island. defined these years. The English were, and even about Native Americans and the nature Therefore, even after the so-called — and however, doing nothing new or exceptional. of the encounter. On this term crops up quite a bit — Elizabethan Ireland, after all, was a violent place before this parallel, though one conquest and Jacobean plantation, Ireland they came; and if we compare Ireland to has to read between the was as much as it had been: a ‘contested the Continent, the level of bloodshed does lines, see Breandán Ó Buachalla, ‘James Our island’. In between beginning and end, the not seem all that pronounced. Intervention True King: The Ideology story hinges on disorder. We have been in Ireland by the English only elevated of Irish Royalism in the led to believe that the English were able to the ruthlessness of Irish warfare to policy. Seventeenth Century’, in assert their power in Ireland by the time Connolly presents us with a place where D. G Boyce, R. Eccleshall, and V. Geoghegan, eds., Elizabeth died. For Connolly, however, the English authority was ever uncertain Political Thought in state’s failure to do so — even if it wanted and intent was ambiguous, where rival Ireland in the Seventeenth to, which is another matter — ensured that shifting factions — Irish of different stripes Century (London, 1993). Ireland teetered between disorder and chaos. and English of different stripes — vied 12 Sean Connolly, Religion, Law, and Power: The Thomas Hobbes would have been at home for power. ‘Loyalties and identity were Making of Protestant here. Once Henry VIII declared himself king highly fluid,’ he argues, and ‘[i]nstincts Ireland (Oxford, 1992).
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13 Sean Connolly, Contested had not yet hardened into clearly defined Irish, but rather the results of a long-term Island: Ireland 1460– ideologies.’14 process of corrosive dillusionment’.16 In this 1630 (Oxford, 2007), 74. The act of crossing boundaries defined this context, the plans for the reform of Irish 14 Connolly, Contested Island, 90. place-in-time. Almost perversely, turning old society epitomized in surrender and regrant 15 Éamonn Duffy, The verities on their head, Connolly shows how were failing. Self-interested Gaelic warlords www.fieldday.ieStripping of the Altars: the prelate entrusted with anglicizing the Irish had all too successfully ensnared the English Traditional Religion in Church under Henry VIII married a local in their rivalries. The subsequent ‘flight’ of England, 1400–1580 (New Haven, 1992). For Catholic woman and fathered three children the earls — not really a flight at all but part the futile and pathetic with her. In an even more striking inversion to of a pattern of Irish military migration to the efforts of the Puritans, conventional understandings, the grandsons Continent — did usher in a new phase for see James Axtell, The of Edmund Spenser — the man long Ulster but not for some Spenserian reasons. Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in considered the architect of English conquest Once declared traitors, their lands were Colonial North America — became Catholic. For Connolly, Spenser’s forfeit. The flight did not represent the end (New York, 1986). views prove exceptional — going native does result or logical implications of conquest, 16 Connolly, Contested not. And why shouldn’t this be the case? but, if anything, gestured toward a new Island, 126–70. 17 Connolly, Contested According to Connolly, Protestantization beginning. The flight certainly did not signal Island, 278. under Elizabeth was never really tried. His some sort of ideological shift. Ireland appears a great deal like Éamonn Connolly concedes that the accession Duffy’s England, but one that could or would of James VI and I to the throne initiated a not be regimented. Reformers, in this regard, transition, and plantation became a state- achieved the same level of success as the sponsored enterprise. But Connolly does Puritans among the Indians in New England not see a strategy of conquest even at this — very little, in other words. Few proved juncture. Now more cognizant of threats willing or able to strip the altars.15 on the marches, James’s government sought Connolly’s characterization of the Nine to pacify and bring order to both Ireland Years War sums up his treatment of the and Scotland by cutting off the points period. Connolly concedes that by the of connection in Ulster between Gaelic end of the sixteenth century, relations had warlords and their Highland allies. The taken a turn for the worse. Fears of Spain plantation of Ulster did not bring an end did not lead to new policies; rather, new to a ‘contested island’. As Connolly puts it, Irish settlers profiteering in the vacuum ‘a whole new layer was thus added to the of power that Ireland had become did. already complex pattern of ethnic, religious, The kingdom’s problems stemmed from and political division that existed within too much private interest run amok and Irish society’.17 Change, no doubt, lay on intensified feuding. In a chapter entitled the horizon. But events, not ideology, would the ‘Wars of Ireland’, we in fact witness drive the process. Willy-nilly, Ireland would little of the expected warfare, only more become an anomalous kingdom or third of the same sorts of vendettas, alliances, appendage in the archipelago, a place of, and naked power grabs that defined Irish dare we say it, ambiguous status. society for a long period of time, in this No wonder then that the old standby instance heightened by the failure of the state of Ireland as precursor for American to assert control. Impotence not imperial settlement is stood on its head by Connolly. hubris, therefore, underscored conflict. The Since Ireland did not represent ‘a theatre war that did occur did not involve two for colonial expansion’ but a ‘problem of simply delineated sides: Irish v. English. government’, it is difficult to argue that it Its violence was not exceptional, nor was represented a precedent for the settlement of it rooted in ideology. It was not marked Virginia. Closer links — and here Connolly by ‘the development of a radically new goes back to his Eurocentric roots — existed anthropological perspective on the Gaelic between military actions in the Netherlands
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and aggression in Ireland and Virginia. Most And he knows that this is the question, even 18 Connolly, Contested Englishmen looked toward the Continent if he refuses to engage it. Make no mistake Island, 264–65. and the Mediterranean for their useful about it: this book has a powerful purpose. models. The Atlantic, for Connolly, lies on The passive voice, one imagines, could the periphery. Even the older view that ideas lead to all sorts of ideological explanations www.fieldday.ieabout the Irish informed views about Indians for what happened to Ireland in the early — as savages — should be taken with a grain modern period. But to opt to ignore or de- of salt because this interpretation assumes ‘a emphasize ideology, however justifiable, is to coherent colonizing mentality’ that did not choose another ideology, especially given the exist.18 We cannot draw parallels between centrality of the conquest narrative to Irish the Irish and Indians, he suggests, or between historical memory. events in Ireland and process in America. Ever the contrarian, he suggests no tangible • link existed between Ireland and America. Connolly’s book is sure to provoke. It William Smyth relies on an older, tried is smart and insightful. It also frustrates, and true model. And if Connolly wields though in some measure this had to be one a scalpel too craftily, Smyth uses a sledge of his aims. He raises all sorts of fascinating hammer unabashedly. In Map-Making, questions that he leaves unanswered. How Landscapes, and Memory: A Geography and when will the end come? Or will it of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland c. come at all? Do we need ideology to have 1530–1750, Smyth seeks nothing less than conquest? Does ideology shape and form to uncover the mapping of conquest and social reality or does it reflect and react to the ideologies, notions of land, and culture the sequence of events? He plans to write that underscored it. Smyth approaches the a sequel to this volume. But if we take this early modern period from the point of view book on its own merits, as a stand alone of a cultural geographer informed by post- project, it’s clear that Connolly quite skilfully modern ethnographic theory. But this is a dodges these sorts of questions. That said, work of history, and the subtitle does not they also transfix him. Throughout the book, lie. Smyth comfortably conflates the terms he plays with these ideas, teasing us at those ‘colonial’ and ‘early modern’, seeing them junctures when the old narrative seems to as analogous. In contrast to Connolly, little be rearing its head only to lop it off again ambiguity marks these pages. Ireland would and again. The effect can be as frustrating as be conquered, and ‘early modern’ scientific it is enlivening. Indeed, instead of thinking and geographic notions would underscore of Connolly as a contrarian or as an arch- colonization. In many ways, Smyth has revisionist, we do better to characterize produced a — literal — tour de force, a him as an iconoclast. Ambiguity defines powerful, unsentimental, and unapologetic all. For Connolly, nothing is inevitable study of the geography of conquest. or foreordained. He eschews any sort of Although Smyth focuses on the use of the teleology, instead sticking with contingency. map in conquering Ireland, he also renders Events, not process, he argues, drive his interesting readings of other sorts of texts, narrative. ‘It avoids the passive voice,’ he such as the 1641 depositions and the census writes, ‘that great transformer of event into of 1659. Case studies of the mapping of process.’ He adds that ‘if this book remains Dublin, Kilkenny, and Tipperary follow, an exercise in a traditional genre, the general demonstrating how a world was turned narrative survey, it is at least a self-conscious upside down in a few generations. For all one’.19 But the question remains: do we lose the complexity of its constituent parts, the clear-cut sense, the essential features of however, this is a simple story. Crossing the landscape if we are mired in ambivalence? boundaries — real or metaphorical — was
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19 Connolly, Contested a dynamic feared and condemned by all. genealogies to define shifting contours of Island, 3. The case studies and documentary evidence spatial boundaries. In early modern Ireland, 20 William Smyth, Map- he enlists support this finding. Given map confronted memory. The older Irish Making, Landscapes, and Memory: A Geography Smyth’s reliance on maps, which by their way of doing things may have looked messy of Colonial and Early nature create or codify boundaries, and to ‘civilized’ Englishmen, but it had its www.fieldday.ieModern Ireland, c. 1530– his assumption rather than dissection of own logic, purpose, and sense of order and 1750 (Cork, 2006), 55. conquest, such a conclusion is foreordained. stability. With conquest, no longer. Imposing 21 Smyth, Map-Making, Landscapes, and Maps, after all, entailed and inscribed graphic and simplistic representations of Memory, 115. power, especially in a world characterized space on a complex and sophisticated notion 22 Smyth, Map-Making, by zero-sum relationships. Maps served as of landscape allowed land to be emptied Landscapes, and tools and symbols of military conquest and and the conqueror to claim victory. Irish Memory, 123. of plantation. In this way, they mirrored, language and culture, which had been clarified, and justified intent. attuned to the woods, as Smyth suggests, Maps, then, reflected ideology as they now found itself at sea in its own land, shaped it. As maps were becoming more overwhelmed by the normatively defined exact and modern, as geography was civility of the conqueror. overtaking cosmography as a way of Military conquest prepared the way understanding space, England’s agenda for all sorts of imperialism. The English was becoming imperial. To chart was to divided the country into useful and rational dominate. Complex maps underscored administrative units. They imposed their law. the need for accurate intelligence for They planted their people. They transformed marauding armies and invasion fleets. economy. They destroyed culture. And they Empty spaces on maps revealed ignorance cleared the woods with abandon. Maps of space but also suggested the savagery made it all possible. By 1603, the ‘new of a land peopled by wood’s dwellers or conquistadores’, as Smyth calls them, were the opportunities available to the would- ‘in secure possession of Ireland’. This was be planter. As Smyth puts it, the emerging an Elizabethan conquest, which James VI science of map-making in Ireland ‘turns the and I only ‘intensified’. All that happened landscape into a permanent documentary afterwards stemmed from the twinned record to be indexed and filed away in processes of mapping and invasion. Take cards and maps for the use of future rulers 1641 as an example. Although he describes and administrators’. A map is ‘a strategic the events of 1641 as a spliced ‘rising/ instrument for administering territories and rebellion’, Smyth believes they heralded the ... a key weapon in creating and sustaining end of Irish Ireland. The conquerors enjoyed state power’. 20 the advantage of ‘state terror’ on their side, Interestingly, the very questions that and the famous depositions ensured that the Connolly dodges are the ones that Smyth rising/rebellion would be publicized around assumes as fact. Smyth, in fact, goes further, the broader Protestant world as a massacre arguing that geographic determinism of innocent Protestants at the hands of the was especially pronounced in Ireland. ‘wild Irish’. The depositions, like maps, also Here two irreconcilable cultures clashed. became ‘documents of conquest’.21 Indeed, An individualistic, expansive, scientific, the depositions represented, as Smyth argues, modern, market-oriented, and ‘graphic and ‘a major part of the war’ itself.22 As the perspective based’ world-view confronted a American historian Jill Lepore argues in her more communal, conservative, traditional, study of King Philip’s War in New England, oral, literate, and myth-making culture. One which saw massacres and the publication of needed to make maps to conceive of the narratives eerily similar to those published space, which one sought to dominate; the after 1641, ‘writing about war can be almost other relied on histories, place names, and as difficult as waging it and, often enough, is
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essential to winning it’. Recording atrocities American Revolution in one and the Patriot 23 Jill Lepore, The Name reinscribes conquest. In New England after movement and 1798 in the other. Through of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of 1675, Indians were rendered as irredeemable conquest, Ireland ‘becomes an integral part American Identity (New 23 savages, regardless of tribe. In Ireland, of the European-controlled Atlantic world, York, 1999), ix. through the act of writing, the vanquished yet — uniquely amongst western European 24 Smyth, Map-Making, www.fieldday.iewould be remembered and reinscribed as countries — becomes a colonized rather than a Landscapes, and Memory, 137. ‘Irish Papists’, whether or not they were colonizing country’.27 Ireland was more than 25 Smyth, Map-Making, 28 ‘Old English’ or ‘Gaelic Irish’. Writing about ‘this famous island set in a Virginian sea’; its Landscapes, and war canonized what had been happening past suggested a connection between Ireland Memory, 139. for generations. As one deposition, this and America in the minds of colonizers. The 26 Smyth, Map-Making, Landscapes, and one from Cavan, related, rebels were wont Irish example of a totalizing colonial plan Memory, 165. to say ‘Virginia will become Aughanure ensured that the ‘stage was set’ and ‘seeds 27 Smyth, Map-Making, again’.24 This was a world ‘with little middle were planted’ for Virginia.29 What followed Landscapes, and ground’.25 was a discernible ‘sequence’ of conquest Memory, 345. 28 Smyth, Map-Making, Oliver Cromwell only continued this and settlement. Munster fell, followed by Landscapes, and inexorable process in a more efficient Virginia and then Ulster. Colonization of Memory, 421. fashion. Smyth discusses these dynamics Newfoundland preceded plantations in 29 Smyth, Map-Making, through the census of 1659, by analysis of Wexford and Longford, culminating in Landscapes, and Memory, 425. the ways in which Ireland was mapped in Barbados, Plymouth, and Massachusetts Bay. the mid-seventeenth century, and by close The same inexorable process gripped these examinations of three regions. ‘A fully regions with the same grim results. All these colonial Ireland,’ he writes, ‘in the grips regions became frontiers to an expanding and of military occupation and dictatorship expansive England. and now to be subject to an all-embracing Smyth’s post-revisionism would seem plantation, required comprehensive island- the antidote to Connolly’s arch-revisionism. wide mapping.’26 William Petty, who would But such is not necessarily the case. If lay Ireland out on a dissecting table, region Connolly presents us with a sometimes by region, would see to the ‘cartographic frustratingly ambiguous book, Smyth’s conquest’ of the whole island on the heels unambiguous clarity and purpose prove a of the Cromwellian conquest. It would be bit too overdetermined. For the historian, he who would write the Political Anatomy one problem with Smyth’s analysis is that it of Ireland and would serve as a founding assumes what it seeks to explain. Invoking member of that arm of the modernizing Foucault quite often, Smyth argues that project, London’s Royal Society. These power is everywhere, that discourses are sections, as well as the rest of the book determinative, and that the imperially which looks ahead to the eighteenth century, normative conquers all. But if power lies read almost like epilogues to a story finished everywhere and explains everything, it soon after it has begun. If we understand the becomes axiomatic. With conquest and role of maps and ideology, we understand ideology assumed, maps can explain all the early modern Irish past. that Smyth would have us believe. If blank Almost fittingly, the book ends in America. and poorly delineated, they demonstrate Here the lesson is clear. Ireland acted as both a conqueror’s intent. If filled with place model for future colonization and safety valve names and detail, they illustrate conquest for Ireland. Hundreds of thousands would as fait accompli. This does not mean that travel to Britain’s New World possessions Smyth is wrong. Rather, he is captive to before the American Revolution in the wake teleology. The first sentence of the book of the conquest of Ireland. And forms of says it all: ‘The New English colonization rule that would govern Ireland would be of Ireland from the 1530s onwards may be imported to America, eventually leading to the seen as the equivalent of a major continental
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30 Smyth, Map-Making, invasion that transformed the island from with Ireland during the early modern period. Landscapes, and Malin Head to Rosslare and from Fair In making this point, he has illustrated how Memory, xix. Head to Cape Clear.’30 And he aims to the process of British state formation, or 31 Smyth, Map-Making, 31 Landscapes, and make ‘the documents of conquest speak’. really the story of English expansion into Memory, 19. Teleology, of course, stands as the enemy the marches, did not occur as a consensual www.fieldday.ie32 Alan Taylor, American of contingency. But in all fairness to Smyth, dynamic, as some suggest. Conflict, in fact, Colonies (New York, maps do not lead to contingent history. defined it. But conquest did not. Plans for 2001), xv. 33 Nicholas Canny, Making More to the point, a purely contingent plantation were never fully carried out. Ireland British, 1580– history of Ireland may obscure the more Ireland was never effectively ‘reformed’, 1650 (Oxford, 2003). significant processes at work. even after Spenser’s dark vision was finally In truth, we need both contingency adopted by Cromwell and his army. Making and teleology. As the American historian Ireland British failed. What he presents us Alan Taylor argues, as he struggled to see with is a story of ambiguity told against the American colonial history as more than the backdrop of an unambiguous ideology. Ideas history of ‘a proto-United States’, ‘rejecting ultimately fail to account for the complexity teleology ... to wallow in pure contingency on the ground. is an equal folly. Hindsight affords a pattern Canny complicates the story even further, to change over time that readers reasonably agreeing with Connolly that perhaps a seek from the historian.’ Only after European context offers the best solution disaggregating event from broad narrative for making sense of Ireland, but he does so can reconstruction and historicization begin; in the service of the ‘new’ British paradigm but events without framework prove equally only to undermine the broad sense of problematic.32 Both Connolly and Smyth consensus that underscores it. In many stand guilty on this score. Smyth won’t ways the ideologies that led to 1641 and entertain the possibilities of a middle ground Cromwell’s conquest did not grow from or of meaningful continuities. From the start, Irish, English, or British sources, contexts, or his story revolves around conflict. Connolly events, but from European ideas. Britishness ends his account in 1630, on the very eve represented the regional variation of a of all hell breaking loose. All we have then European humanist discourse, violent by its is middle ground and no change over time. very nature, applied in Ireland. It was not Perhaps what is needed is the clarity of modern, nor necessarily scientific. It was Smyth combined with the craft of Connolly. most certainly not a Protestant discourse. Can there be a meaningful middle ground It did not stem from the disorder of Irish between the two positions? Ireland’s answer society. Canny’s Ireland is not an exceptional to Alan Taylor may be Nicholas Canny. To outpost, but part of the fabric of Europe; be sure, like Canny’s earliest work surveying but its distinctive history will be defined by the nature of the Elizabethan ‘conquest’ of engagement with the English state, however Ireland, his major book, Making Ireland contingent the nature of that engagement British, 1580–1650 (2003), dwells a might have been. Fittingly enough, Canny’s great deal on violence and especially on work echoes that of the American historian ideology.33 That said, he has complicated James Merrell who in his classic The our understandings of conquest. Canny Indians’ New World described a process of has demonstrated how an ideology of conquest that was defined by contingency, conquest developed by fits and starts and boundary crossing, and the whir of events, did not emerge full-blown with the first and that ultimately failed. Only by framing furtive attempts at plantation; also how the question as one of conquest from the that ideology would by the mid-seventeenth beginning, both Canny and Merrell suggest, century garner support and become the can we evaluate it as process and understand defining characteristic of English engagement the meanings of contingency.
257 John Smith’s 1612 map of Virginia, with Powhatan, the Indian leader, depicted in the top right, from A Map of Virginia: With a Description of the Countrey, the Commodities, www.fieldday.iePeople, Government and Religion (Oxford, 1612).
Where does this situate Canny on the different reasons, about parallel dynamics. old colonization sequence that he and D. B. This change in sensibilities tells us a great Quinn established? Does Ireland still act as deal more about Ireland and America today precursor? Well, probably not. If conquest, than it does about what happened in the even as an ideology, had little purchase by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English the 1640s, it stands to reason that it did not Atlantic. Connolly’s arch-revisionism, animate English efforts in America. Perhaps Smyth’s strident post-revisionism, and the best we can do is to suggest that Canny Canny’s complicated story are only possible gestures towards an Ireland as parallel to in a post-modern Ireland, one divided America. Similar dynamics would grip both between those who would rather forget a societies, particularly as the state became narrative based on victimhood and conquest more involved in warfare and plantation in and those who would embrace it all the both regions. Even if ‘conquest’ was not fully more. The same holds true for America. realized, it was clear by the latter half of the Middle grounds only make sense in a post- seventeenth century — the 1660s in Ireland civil-rights United States. and 1676 for America — that Englishmen But the similarities between Ireland and ruled both the eastern littoral of North America can only take us so far. For all America and the kingdom of Ireland. of our Atlantic pretensions, Ireland is not The same, of course, holds true for the really like America. For in Ireland, as the changing ways that historians view these old saying goes, the natives did not die. parallel processes. In point of fact, American American stories of accommodation are historians did not inform or influence always told against the backdrop of the Connolly, Smyth, or even the American- reality that the Indians would lose. The trained Canny, for that matter. American Indians of the Chesapeake would not have a and Irish historians shifted in tandem, ‘hidden’ eighteenth century or a nineteenth coming to similar conclusions, albeit for century that would bring a ‘hidden’
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Tsenacommacah to a close, a subsequent contingency — determined the ability to cross history, in other words, that was refracted boundaries in both societies. Others created through the events of the sixteenth and the conditions for the erection of rigid spatial seventeenth centuries. These people would or status frontiers. Such an arrangement in not live to resist in any meaningful way America was underscored increasingly by www.fieldday.iethe mapping of their lands. The early story race, the other in Ireland by confession. But of the creation of middle grounds always the defining markers of process are beside the seems to fall apart. For the Powhatans, it all point. For the Irish in these circumstances, happened pretty quickly. Within a generation going native, while always happening, often of settlement, the Powhatans would be proved troubling, especially after traumatic overrun and massacred, the remnants of events like 1641. For America, mixing tended their people pushed beyond a line to the to end with the erection of fixed boundaries west. Most simply died of disease. Many between native and newcomer. The markers tragically became dependent on English used to explain and justify each arrangement goods. Settlers and the state, albeit an at- — one based on essential characteristics, times reluctant state, saw to the rest. By one usually based on culture and religion 1623, settlers had retaliated for the ‘Good — reflected these realities. Friday massacre’ of 1622, which saw a It is no surprise that these differing third of the settler population killed. Settlers notions of frontier/borderland also form would strike again in 1644, leading the the core of identity in each nation, as well governor to declare that Indians should not as the parameters of meaningful debate live to the east of the fall line in the colony. about each nation’s past. Both are deemed By 1676, with Bacon’s Rebellion — really to be distinctive but in different, though a complex struggle between élites, poor telling, ways. America’s distinctiveness is men on the margins, and Indians — the based on planting civility; Ireland’s on being Powhatans and all Indians in the region were a victim of it. Think only of the different effectively finished as a people. meanings associated with 1607: the ‘Flight Charting such a grim reality by exploring of the Earls’ and what is called by some the flow of events in the light of the ideology ‘America’s 400th anniversary’. No matter of race arguably offers a model for how we where we stand, we must take notice of should conceive of the pasts of Ireland and of both events. If we downplay the significance America. In America throughout the colonial of the Flight or lament it, we are trapped period, middle grounds succumbed to rigid in a debate between two sides of the same frontiers, as lines of settlers encouraged by the exceptionalist coin: whether or not, or state moved a people compromised by disease to what degree, Ireland was a colonized and dependency off the land. Such a process European country. The same applies for was replayed again and again over the course celebrating or denigrating the landing at of seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Jamestown, tied up as it is with an American Space, then, stood as the great dividing narrative of settlement. We may argue about line in society. Ireland, on the other hand, the meanings of settlement and colonization, where natives held their own, had become but we’ll always be debating within these something of a perpetual borderland between frameworks, hovering around them like and among cultures with its mix of conflict vultures. For better or worse, they define and accommodation sustained by a more who we are. And this fact ensures that, proximate state. Status, which determined the generations from now, Irishmen and women viability of middle grounds in this context, and Americans will still be arguing about played the role that space did in America the merits of conquest and middle grounds. largely because effective spatial lines could Maybe, after all, the two nations are more not be sustained. Some events — the stuff of alike than we had thought.
259 Field Day review www.fieldday.ie
260 ‘My countrymen are all mankind’ www.fieldday.ieBruce Nelson
Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery, 1612– 1865 Nini Rodgers Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007 403 pages. ISBN 978-0-333-77099-3
In the early 1840s Daniel O’Connell waged two parallel campaigns — first, to win Repeal of the Union for the Irish people, and second, to persuade Irish immigrants in the United States to join him in condemning, and working for the abolition of, chattel slavery in the American South. In addressing the second of these two grand themes, O’Connell spoke the familiar moral language of transatlantic abolitionism, but he also sought to redefine the meaning of ‘Irishness’, by claiming that his beloved country had a long and distinctive, even unique, history of opposition to slavery. It was, he maintained, ‘the first of all
Civil War ‘contrabands’, fugitive slaves who the nations of the earth that were emancipated upon reaching the North, possibly in Freedman’s Village, Arlington, abolished the dealing in slaves’. Virginia, mid-1860s. Photo: Hulton Archive/ It ‘never was stained with negro Getty Images. slave-trading,’ ‘never committed
Field Day Review 4 2008 261 Field Day review
an offence against the men of color’, ‘never part of the emigrant stream to the Americas in 1 Daniel O’Connell upon fitted out a single vessel for the traffic in the seventeenth century made it inevitable that American Slavery, with Other Irish Testimonies blood on the African coast’. O’Connell Ireland would be touched by the development (New York, 1860), 7, rejoiced that while Liverpool was crowded of chattel slavery. Rodgers asserts that ‘the 17; Daniel O’Connell, with slave ships and thus ‘tainted with Irish speaking, labouring poor of Munster’ Loyal National Repeal www.fieldday.ieslavery’, ‘not a single slaver ever sailed were among the earliest emigrants to cross Association (‘To ... [the] Executive Committee of from Dublin, or Drogheda, or Belfast, or the Atlantic; and this trend became more the Cincinnati Repeal Waterford, or Cork, or any other port in pronounced in mid-century, when Cromwell’s Association’, 11 October Ireland’. He argued that this proud history draconian military campaign in Ireland 1843) (Boston, [1843?]), had, in important respects, shaped the Irish ‘swept Irish prisoners and vagrants into 8; Liberator, 9 June 1843; Bruce Nelson, ‘“Come people and defined their national character.1 servitude.’5 The need for willing, or even Out of Such a Land, It turns out that O’Connell was wrong in unwilling, hands on tobacco and sugar You Irishmen”: Daniel making at least some of these claims. He was plantations made the Irish a desirable source O’Connell, American right in his assertion that slave ships did not of indentured labour. But relative to their Slavery, and the Making of the “Irish Race”’, Éire- sail from Irish ports during the heyday of the English, Scottish, and Welsh counterparts, Ireland, 42 (2007), 74. African slave trade, although that apparently they quickly developed a reputation as lazy 2 Nini Rodgers, Ireland, owed more to restrictions imposed by the and disobedient.6 In 1661, authorities on Slavery and Anti-Slavery, British parliament than to moral qualms the island of Barbados complained of their 1612–1865 (Basingstoke and New York, 2007), among Irish merchants. But he was wrong ‘bold extravagancy and wandering’ and, 196. in his assumption that Irish society remained even more so, of their ‘profligate tendency’ 3 Nini Rodgers, ‘Equiano untouched by slavery during the seventeenth, in ‘joining themselves to runaway slaves’. As in Belfast: A Study of eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Slavery early as 1655, there had been reports that the Anti-Slavery Ethos in a Northern Town’, was integral to the economy of the Atlantic ‘“several Irish servants and Negroes were in Slavery and Abolition, 18 World, and Ireland was an integral part rebellion”, hiding in thickets and plundering (1997), 73–89; ‘Ireland of that world. According to historian Nini estates’.7 Conflict between England and its and the Black Atlantic in Rodgers, slavery had a ‘formative influence continental, and Catholic, rivals accentuated the Eighteenth Century’, Irish Historical Studies, on Irish life’, in the eighteenth century in this tendency toward rebelliousness. When 23 (2000), 174–92; particular. Moreover, the lives and fortunes England and France went to war in 1666, and ‘Two Quakers and a of thousands of Irishwomen and men the West Indies became part of the theatre Utilitarian: The Reaction — mainly merchants, sailors, and settlers of conflict, Irish servants on St. Christopher of Three Irish Women Writers to the Problem — were directly, and intimately, linked to the and Montserrat rose up and destroyed of Slavery, 1789–1807’, 2 ‘peculiar institution’. English-owned plantations. In 1689, in the Proceedings of the All of this becomes abundantly clear in context of the geopolitical conflict that pitted Royal Irish Academy, Rodgers’s Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery, Jacobites against Williamites in Britain and 100c (2000), 137–57; ‘Richard Robert Madden: 1612–1865 (2007). Rodgers, who taught for Ireland, ‘130 armed Irishmen’ transferred An Irish Anti-Slavery many years at Queen’s University Belfast and their allegiance to the French forces on St. Activist in the Americas’, is now an honorary senior research fellow Christopher and joined them in burning and in Oonagh Walsh, ed., in history there, had previously written a sacking the English district of the island in ‘a Ireland Abroad: Politics and Professions in the number of important articles and essays true jacquerie’.8 Nineteenth Century about Ireland’s relationship to slavery and Rodgers is keenly aware of the Irish (Dublin, 2003), 119–31. anti-slavery in the late eighteenth and early reputation for turbulence and subversion in 4 Rodgers and the rapidly nineteenth centuries.3 But her book reveals a the islands of the West Indies, but she rejects growing cadre of scholars who are writing depth of learning and a level of engagement any suggestion that as an oppressed ‘race’, the on Ireland, slavery, with her subject that sets a new standard. Catholic Irish felt a special sense of affinity and abolition have a Henceforth, those who venture onto the with enslaved Africans. ‘In the last resort,’ she distinguished predecessor terrain of Ireland’s relationship to slavery maintains, ‘the Irish did not make common in Douglas C. Riach, whose unpublished PhD will, necessarily, take her arguments and cause with the slaves. Only the wildest of dissertation has been 4 conclusions as their starting point. them in their wildest moments were driven an invaluable guide to The fact that Irishmen and women became to it. They were white and wished to exercise the subject. See Douglas
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Peter, a former slave, revealing scars on his back from whippings. ‘Overseer Artayou Carrier whipped me. I was 2 months in bed sore from the whipping. My master come after www.fieldday.ieI was whipped; he discharged the overseer’; spoken by Peter as he sat for the photograph, having enlisted in the Union Army. Photo: War Department/ US National Archives/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.
Cameron Riach, ‘Ireland and the Campaign against American Slavery, 1830–1860’, University of Edinburgh, 1975, and his most important articles and essays: ‘Daniel O’Connell and American Anti-Slavery’, Irish Historical Studies, 20 (1976), 3–25; ‘O’Connell and Slavery’, in Donal McCartney, ed., The World of Daniel O’Connell (Dublin and Cork, 1980), 175–85; ‘Richard Davis Webb and Antislavery in Ireland’, in Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman, eds., Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists (Baton Rouge, 1979), 149–67. 5 Rodgers, Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery, 35, 36. 6 Hilary McD. Beckles, ‘“A Riotous and Unruly Lot”: Irish Indentured Servants and Freemen in the English West Indies, 1644–1713’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 47 (1990), 503–22, and White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados, 1627–1715 (Knoxville, 1989), 8, 38–39, 98–114. 7 Rodgers, Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery, 43. 8 Donald Harman Akenson, the advantage it conferred upon them.’9 concentration of persons of Irish ethnicity If the Irish Ran the World: Moreover, she follows Donald Harman of any colony in the history of both the first Montserrat, 1630–1730 Akenson in pointing to the Irish triumph and second English empires’. Irish settlers not (Liverpool, 1997), 134. 9 Rodgers, Ireland, Slavery — as planters — on Montserrat. According to only became the majority of the island’s sugar and Anti-Slavery, 44. Akenson, Montserrat ‘registered the highest planters; they prospered, he argues, mainly
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because ‘they well knew how to be hard and Nantes, where he was a leading member of 10 Akenson, If the Irish Ran efficient slave masters’.10 the prosperous Irish community in France. the World, 107, 119. 11 Rodgers, Ireland, Slavery At the end of the seventeenth century and The son of a Dublin-born merchant who and Anti-Slavery, 55. the beginning of the eighteenth, Montserrat emigrated to France and became involved 12 Orla Power, ‘The was subjected to a succession of penal laws in the slave trade, Antoine Walsh was an “Quadripartite www.fieldday.iethat denied its Irish Catholic residents access armateur, or outfitter of ships that sailed Concern” of St. Croix, 1751–1757: An Irish to public office but did not interfere with to Africa to buy slaves for transport to Catholic Plantation in their right to accumulate property. Ironically, the plantation societies of the Americas. the Danish West Indies’, it appears that the prohibition against Rodgers estimates that he was the ‘fifth paper presented at holding public office served to accentuate the most successful slaver in France’, and that conference on ‘The Irish in the Atlantic World’, entrepreneurial acumen of Catholic planters; during his career he ‘purchased over 12,000 College of Charleston, 13 for in Rodgers’s words, ‘the most remarkable Africans for export across the Atlantic’. Charleston, 27 February– fortunes on the island were ... made by Walsh was ennobled by the French 2 March 2007, 15. members of the Catholic community’.11 monarchy, but he also remained proudly 13 Rodgers, Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery, 106, An outstanding example is Nicholas Tuite, Irish, a patron of the Irish College in Nantes 111. the son of an Irish immigrant from County and an active Jacobite who participated 14 Rodgers, Ireland, Slavery Westmeath, who accumulated 100 acres of directly in the rebellion of 1745. and Anti-Slavery, 113, land and 41 slaves on Montserrat but found To what extent was Irish society affected 121. even greater opportunity as a merchant and by the activities of men such as Nicholas shipowner, carrying slaves and provisions Tuite, Antoine Walsh, and other Irish from island to island. Ultimately, Tuite emigrants who were directly involved in concentrated his energy and resources on plantation slavery or in the multifaceted trade the Danish island of St. Croix, where by that nourished and sustained it? Rodgers 1766 he owned or shared in the ownership readily acknowledges that ‘not much in the of fourteen plantations. So great was his way of slave trade profits trickled back to achievement that, in 1760, he journeyed to Ireland’, but she also emphasizes that the Copenhagen, where King Frederick V paid provision trade with the West Indies — the tribute to his role in the development of sale of butter, salted beef and pork, and other Denmark’s Caribbean empire. agricultural products — had ‘an enormous More typical were the hundreds, or impact on Munster and to a lesser extent on perhaps thousands, of Irishmen who Connaught’.14 As the Irish at home gradually came to the islands of the Caribbean as developed a taste first for tobacco and then indentured servants and free wage labourers for sugar, they became connected, at some and soon became plantation overseers or level, to the plantation economy and its slave- small planters. In 1760, an Irish Catholic labour system. By the middle of the eighteenth priest on St. Croix reported that ‘about one century, sugar had become Ireland’s most hundred lads of our country’ were serving valuable import, and two-thirds of its sugar as overseers on the island; surely there supply was refined in Dublin. Sugar was were many more on a larger island such as instrumental in the rise of the Catholic Jamaica.12 Nonetheless, Tuite had many middle class, Rodgers argues, and the Irish counterparts: men who became wealthy Catholic middle class became the foundation through the ownership of plantations, or stone of O’Connell’s campaign for Catholic the trade in provisions and slaves, or a Emancipation and Repeal of the Union. combination of the two. Many of these men Indirectly, then, Negro slavery impacted developed a cosmopolitan outlook that Irish society in the eighteenth century and defies easy generalizations about national became intertwined with its patterns of identity. For example, Antoine Walsh died production and consumption. But slavery on St. Domingue in 1763, but lived most also touched Ireland more directly. Historian of his life in the ports of Saint-Malo and William A. Hart estimates that there were
264 ‘My Countrymen are All Mankind’
Frederick Douglass (1817–95), c. 1879: journalist, author, former slave and abolitionist. Photo: Library of Congress/ www.fieldday.ieGetty Images.
more than 2,000 Africans and people and other port cities. A few were musicians of African descent in Ireland during the and actors; some were drummers in British second half of the century, more than in regiments; most were domestic servants, most European countries, including France. and for much of the eighteenth century at Most blacks were concentrated in Dublin least some of these servants were slaves.
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Hart argues that in retrospect ‘there is no — hence the historic legislation of 1833 15 W. A. Hart, ‘Africans disguising the existence of slavery in Ireland abolishing slavery everywhere in the British in Eighteenth-Century Ireland’, Irish Historical at this time, nor that it was restricted, in Empire. But in Ireland anti-slavery was — Studies, 33 (2002), practice, to black people from Africa and according to Rodgers — a mere ‘diversion, a 19–32 (24); personal the East Indies’. Insofar as there was slavery, foreign import for intellectuals who thrilled communication from www.fieldday.iehowever, its boundaries were porous; the to feel themselves ... part of the world’s most William A. Hart, 31 October 2006. path from slave to indentured servant to free moral cause’.18 Irish anti-slavery groups 16 Rodgers, Ireland, Slavery wage labourer was, in relative terms, easily were ‘tiny’; Irish churches, Catholic and and Anti-Slavery, 181. travelled; and there was no Irish legislation Protestant, did not really embrace the cause; Rodgers devotes her first relating to slavery. Newspaper references to even the Quakers found it divisive. She chapter (7–26) to the existence of slavery and blacks as slaves virtually disappeared in the invokes David Hempton, the pre-eminent the slave trade in early early 1770s, at about the time of Britain’s historian of Methodism in Ireland and Ireland; and there are famed Somerset case (1772), which was Britain, to support her contention that anti- numerous references to widely interpreted to mean that Negro slaves slavery in Ireland was ‘a cause for faddists slavery, and the trade in slaves, in Dáibhí Ó were entitled to freedom when they set foot and oddities along with cruelty to animals Cróinín, ed., A New 15 19 on British soil. and pacifism’. History of Ireland, vol. By the 1780s, moreover, anti-slavery Clearly, Rodgers is relentlessly 1: Prehistoric and Early had emerged as a new and powerful motif unsentimental about the character, and Ireland (Oxford, 2005). 17 Rodgers, Ireland, Slavery among Ireland’s educated classes. The Abbé fate, of anti-slavery in Ireland. A part of her and Anti-Slavery, 181, Raynal’s History of the East and West purpose seems to be to prove O’Connell, 242. Indies, which welcomed the ‘impending and Mary Birkett, and various and sundry 18 Rodgers, Ireland, Slavery storm’ of slave revolt, became one of the post-modernists and practitioners of cultural and Anti-Slavery, 275. 19 Rodgers, Ireland, Slavery bestselling books in the country. In 1788, at studies, wrong in their belief that the Irish and Anti-Slavery, 276; the behest of a group of Quaker merchants, people felt a special sense of affinity with David Hempton, Religion the Dublin Chamber of Commerce passed a victims of oppression in other parts of the and Political Culture resolution calling the slave trade ‘odious’ and world. While her treatment of Ireland and in Britain and Ireland: from the Glorious suggesting that ‘the traffic in human species slavery offers much new evidence and opens Revolution to the Decline does not appear ever to have been carried up fresh lines of inquiry, her portrayal of of Empire (Cambridge, on from this kingdom’.16 This compelling Ireland and anti-slavery seems to foreclose 1996), 96. Hempton but erroneous view was popularized further the possibility of contingency and to treat does not use the words ‘faddists and oddities’. by Mary Birkett, a Quaker whose family questions that require further analysis merely Rather, in describing a had moved from England to Ireland in as foregone conclusions. It is important, I strand of Presbyterian 1784, when she was nine years old. At age believe, to examine anti-slavery in Ireland radicalism in the late seventeen, Birkett published a long poem, from a perspective that challenges Rodgers’ eighteenth century, he refers to ‘a kind of The African Slave Trade Addressed to Her bleak portrait, while also exploring the high-minded Dissenting Own Sex, in which she claimed that, in convergence of historical circumstances and cantankerousness in its sharp contrast to her native England, Ireland forces that contributed to its decline and hostility to war, slavery had always remained free of the trade in marginalization. and blood sports’. slaves. It was through Birkett, Rodgers Anti-slavery had three main pillars in claims, that ‘the idea of Ireland as a lover Ireland. It developed first among members of the oppressed everywhere ... permanently of the Religious Society of Friends (the entered the nationalist psyche’.17 Quakers) in the 1780s. The Quakers Although Rodgers believes that slavery were a small sect. In the early nineteenth had a ‘formative influence on Irish life’, she century, they had about 4,500 adherents in argues that anti-slavery was a minor force Ireland, with perhaps 650 of them living in Irish society. In England the abolitionist in Dublin. Many Quakers were descended movement helped to generate the widespread from veterans of Cromwell’s army, who, in conviction that slavery was an evil institution the aftermath of their ruthless suppression that must be eradicated immediately of the Irish Catholic uprising of the 1640s,
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E. W. Clay, O’Connell’s Call and Pat’s Reply, 1843, lithograph on wove paper; 31.1 x 46.5 cm. www.fieldday.ieLibrary of Congress.
20 David Brion Davis, ‘The settled on confiscated lands, renounced war, unprecedented commitment to immediate Quaker Ethic and the and built a religious community that was set abolition. Many of the society’s mass Antislavery International’, apart from the world and yet deeply engaged meetings were held in Protestant churches in The Problem of Slavery in the Age of with it. Over time they became legendary — most often, in Methodist meeting houses. Revolution, 1770–1823 for their economic success; and their In fact, the leadership and membership of (Ithaca, 1975), 213–54; commitment to philanthropic endeavour the Dublin (soon to be Hibernian) Negro’s Christopher Leslie earned them widespread respect. They were Friend Society overlapped to a significant Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British also part of an international network that degree with that of the Hibernian Bible Abolitionism (Chapel linked them closely to their co-religionists Society, which was notoriously anti-Catholic Hill, 2006). On Ireland, in England and North America. Through in ethos and intent.21 in particular, see Richard these affiliations they emerged as leaders The third major pillar of the evolving S. Harrison, ‘Irish Quaker Perspectives on the Anti- of the transatlantic anti-slavery movement, anti-slavery movement in Ireland was Daniel Slavery Movement’, especially in its early stages.20 O’Connell himself. O’Connell had become Journal of the Friends’ By the late 1820s zealous evangelicals committed to the cause of abolition by the Historical Society, 56 from a number of Protestant denominations mid-1820s, and he played a leading role (1993), 106–25. 21 Anthony J. Barker, were turning their attention to slavery in the parliamentary campaign to outlaw Captain Charles Stuart: and beginning to address it in their own slavery in the British Empire. Without asking Anglo-American distinctive way. In 1829, evangelical permission of anyone in the hierarchy of the Abolitionist (Baton Protestants took the lead in founding the Catholic Church, he identified Catholicism Rouge, 1986), 46–48; Harrison, ‘Irish Quaker Dublin Negro’s Friend Society, and several with abolition and adopted the evangelical Perspectives’, 112. of the society’s organizers began a tour of trait of ‘looking at Slavery as a Sin, wherever Irish cities and towns that engendered an it exists, and ... declaring war against it,
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over the whole globe’.22 It is a testimony as more important than Luther’s; his wife 22 Barker, Captain Charles to the depth of O’Connell’s commitment Hannah believed that the Boston prophet Stuart, 46. 23 Daniel O’Connell, that he increased his own involvement in was seeking ‘a world in which there would ‘To the Ministers and the movement at the very moment when be no slavery, no king, no beggars, no Office-Bearers of the evangelical anti-slavery was taking off, lawyers, no doctors, no soldiers, no palaces, Wesleyan Methodist www.fieldday.ieeven though he was keenly aware of the no prisons, no creeds, no sects, no weary or Societies in Manchester’, London, 6 July 1839, ‘Orange’ coloration of Irish Protestantism’s grinding labor, no luxurious idleness ... no in Daniel O’Connell, ‘Second Reformation’ and he believed that restraint but moral restraint, no constraining ed., A Full Report of the the Wesleyan Methodists, in particular, were power but love’.25 Ultimately, Webb became Proceedings of the Great the determined enemies of Catholicism and deeply frustrated with the quietism and Meeting of the Catholics of London, Held at of the religious liberty he cherished. ‘In the timidity that increasingly characterized the Freemason’s Hall, on the long struggle the Catholics of Ireland made Irish Quaker community, and in 1851 he left Fifteenth Day of July, for the abolition of the laws that infringed the enveloping warmth of the sect into which 1839, with an Address freedom of conscience’, he reminded them, he had been born forty-six years earlier. to the English People, and the Letters to the ‘you never gave us any assistance. On the To dismiss the Webbs and their associates Wesleyan Methodists by contrary, you were found in the adverse as mere oddities obscures the extent to Mr. O’Connell (London, ranks, active, persevering, virulent!’23 which they were able to make Ireland a 1839), 40. According It is undeniable that, apart from hospitable place for visiting representatives to David Hempton, ‘the true significance of Irish O’Connell and a few other Catholics such of the transatlantic abolitionist movement. Methodism in the first as the civil servant, widely travelled author, One of the most notable visitors was Charles half of the nineteenth and historian Richard Robert Madden, Lenox Remond, a free black and faithful century lay ... in its anti-slavery in Ireland was overwhelmingly Garrisonian from Salem, Massachusetts, front line position in the great evangelical Protestant in character. In a country that who arrived in Ireland in May 1841 and crusade against was 80 per cent Catholic, and divided by stayed for nearly six months. Far more than Roman Catholicism’. sectarian antagonisms, this was a major in England and Scotland, he encountered D. N. Hempton, ‘The problem for the movement. It may even be ‘receptive and overflowing crowds’, not Methodist Crusade in Ireland, 1795–1845’, true that at least some of Ireland’s leading only in Dublin, but in Wexford, Waterford, Irish Historical Studies, abolitionists were ‘oddities’, as Rodgers Limerick, Belfast, and other cities and towns. 22 (1980), 33–48 (35). charges. Along with a few close relatives Webb reported that Remond addressed six 24 Hannah Maria and friends, the Dublin Quaker Richard meetings in Dublin; all of them were well Wigham, A Christian Philanthropist of Dublin: Davis Webb was at the centre of a reform attended. At one, in particular, ‘the room A Memoir of Richard circle that took up causes such as ‘slavery, was crowded almost to suffocation, but the Allen (London, 1886), temperance, British India, anti-opium, attention and zeal of the audience could 14. For an evocative anti-capital punishment, anti-corn law, not be surpassed’. From Dublin, Remond recollection of the world of the Dublin mesmerism, cold-water cure’; indeed, so journeyed south to Wexford, where he Quaker reformers, many causes that its members became spoke to three crowded meetings. He then see Alfred Webb, The known as ‘Anti-Everythingarians’.24 delivered five lectures in Waterford, where Autobiography of a But if they were oddities, they clearly the number of people clamouring to hear Quaker Nationalist, ed. Marie-Louise Legg (Cork, were not faddists. On the contrary, what him was so large that his hosts finally had to 1999), 17–32, and Riach, characterized the Dublin trio of Webb, begin charging admission, in order to keep ‘Richard Davis Webb and Richard Allen, and James Haughton was the attendance manageable. Then it was on Antislavery in Ireland’. their long-standing devotion to anti-slavery. to Limerick, where he gave three lectures, to 25 Clare Taylor, ed., British and American It became the cause that defined their lives. a bigger audience each time. Webb, a veteran Abolitionists: An In 1840, after attending the World’s Anti- of many such events, reported that the last of Episode in Transatlantic Slavery Convention in London, they became these gatherings was the ‘most crowded and Understanding disciples of the radical abolitionist William the most attentive meeting I ever attended’.26 (Edinburgh, 1974), 120; Riach, ‘Richard Davis Lloyd Garrison, who was reviled by a wide Four years later, Frederick Douglass Webb and Antislavery in swathe of public opinion in the United made an even greater impression. A fugitive Ireland’, 156. States. Webb hailed ‘Garrison’s reformation’ slave who was well on his way to becoming
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26 C. Peter Ripley, et one of the great orators of the nineteenth his reception in Ireland (and in Scotland and al., eds., The Black century, Douglass delivered more than fifty England) made an indelible impression. For Abolitionist Papers, lectures in most of Ireland’s largest cities the rest of his life, he continued to believe vol. 1: The British Isles, 1830–1865 (Chapel Hill, and towns to audiences that responded that his sojourn abroad had been a major 1985), 97; Liberator, 24 with ‘Great sensation’, ‘Great applause’, turning point in his personal and intellectual www.fieldday.ieSeptember 1841. and ‘tremendous cheers’.27 For someone development. Here he had first ‘breathed 27 John W. Blassingame, ed., who only recently had been a slave himself, an atmosphere congenial to the longings The Frederick Douglass Papers, series one: this reception was overwhelming. ‘Seven of his spirit, and felt his manhood free and Speeches, Debates, and years ago I was ranked among the beasts unrestricted’. Here he recalled being received Interviews, vol. 1 (New and creeping things’, he told an audience in ‘not only as an equal, but as a recognized Haven, 1979), 42, 44. Cork; ‘to-night I am ... here as a man and a man of genius’.30 28 Blassingame, ed., The 28 Frederick Douglass brother’. In his correspondence, he went The other larger than life figure in the Papers, series one, vol. 1, much further, contrasting the omnipresence narrative of anti-slavery in Ireland is, of 56. of racism in the United States with the ‘total course, O’Connell. As a Catholic, what was 29 ‘Letters to Antislavery absence of all manifestations of prejudice his role in a predominantly Protestant social Workers and Agencies [Part 1]: Frederick against me, on account of my color’, movement? Surely his reputation as Ireland’s Douglass’, Journal in Ireland. ‘I can truly say, I have spent Liberator, his strategic position as the leader of Negro History, 10 some of the happiest moments of my life of a genuine mass mobilization for Repeal (1925), 656–57. since landing in this country’, he wrote to of the Union, and his status as Ireland’s 30 Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Garrison on 1 January 1846: — indeed, Europe’s — leading Catholic Freedom (New York, layman gave abolition a platform that went 2003), 15. In the Southern part of the United States, far beyond anything the Webbs’ Hibernian 31 Rodgers, Ireland, Slavery I was a slave, thought of and spoken of Anti-Slavery Society could provide. Rodgers and Anti-Slavery, 272. 32 O’Connell, Loyal as property ... In the Northern States, a acknowledges that O’Connell was Ireland’s National Repeal fugitive slave, liable to be hunted at any greatest contribution to the abolitionist Association, 7. moment like a felon ... doomed by an movement. But she makes a sharp distinction inveterate prejudice of color to insult and between the 1830s, when he was among the outrage on every hand ... But now behold leaders of a triumphant campaign to abolish the change! ... Instead of a democratic slavery in the British Empire, and the 1840s, government, I am under a monarchical when, she writes, ‘anti-slavery gave him government. Instead of the bright blue endless trouble’.31 She is referring in part to sky of America, I am covered with the the ideological and strategic questions that soft grey fog of the Emerald Isle. I breathe divided the movement in the United States, and lo! the chattel becomes a man. I gaze Britain, and, to a lesser extent, Ireland; around in vain for one who will question and to the quarrel between O’Connell and my equal humanity, claim me as his slave, supporters of Repeal in the United States over or offer me an insult ... I find no difficulty his accusation that Irish immigrants who here in obtaining admission into any place compromised in any way with slavery could of worship, instruction or amusement, on not have the ‘genuine feelings of Irishmen’.32 equal terms with people as white as any I O’Connell’s Loyal National Repeal ever saw in the United States. 29 Association desperately needed the financial support that Irish Americans were eager In fact, Douglass encountered a far more to provide. But as his denunciations of the complex and fractured society in Ireland crimes of the White Republic became louder than this euphoric portrait suggests. But as and ever more extreme, the entire Repeal someone who had crossed the Atlantic in apparatus in the United States fell apart. part to avoid the long arm of the American And as it fell apart, famine ravaged Ireland. ‘slave catchers’ who were eager to return It not only caused unprecedented deprivation escaped chattel to their masters in the South, among the Irish people; it helped to generate
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a new discourse of human suffering that Douglass to a Repeal meeting in Dublin 33 Gustave de Beaumont, highlighted the misery of the ‘white slaves’ of in September 1845 and introduced him to Ireland: Social, Political, and Religious, with an Ireland and alleged that, in comparison, the the audience as the ‘black O’Connell of the Introduction by Tom Negro slave’s lot was one of safety, security, United States’. It was here that the Liberator Garvin and Andreas and relative ease and comfort. Even before issued one of his most famous perorations; it Hess (Cambridge, Mass., www.fieldday.iethe Great Famine, having seen ‘the Indian in was here that he declared, ‘wherever tyranny 2006), 130. 34 ‘Letters to Antislavery his forests, and the negro in his chains’, the exists, I am the foe of the tyrant; wherever Workers and Agencies French aristocrat Gustave de Beaumont had oppression shows itself, I am the foe of the [Part 1]: Frederick been shocked to encounter ‘the very extreme oppressor; wherever slavery rears its head, I Douglass’, 672. of human wretchedness’ in ‘unfortunate am the enemy of the system ... My sympathy 35 James E. Guilfoyle, ‘The Religious Development of Ireland’.33 But de Beaumont had not sought with distress ... extends itself to every corner Daniel O’Connell, II: The to play one suffering and victimized people of the earth.’ Douglass marvelled at these Making of a Devotional against another. His sympathy extended words, of course, but what stands out in Catholic’, New Hibernia equally to the Indian, the Negro, and the Irish retrospect is his sense of O’Connell’s strength Review, 2 (1998), 114– 32; Denis Gwynn, Daniel peasant. Now a new generation of polemicists and radiance. He spoke for more than an O’Connell, rev. centenary sought to build a wall between black bondage hour, with no hint of weakness, anxiety, edn. (Cork, 1947), 241. and Irish ‘slavery’. Douglass was dismayed by or distraction. On the contrary, ‘the fire of 36 ‘Letters to Antislavery this development. But even he was compelled freedom was burning in his mighty heart’, Workers and Agencies [Part 1]: Frederick to ask himself whose cause he should espouse, Douglass told Garrison. ‘I have heard many Douglass’, 662. when Ireland’s poor were more wretched speakers within the last four years — speakers than he had been as the chattel property of of the first order; but I confess, I have never his master in Maryland. ‘I see much here to heard one by whom I was more completely remind me of my former condition,’ he told captivated than by Mr. O’Connell’.36 Garrison, ‘and I confess I should be ashamed But could O’Connell have won Catholic to lift up my voice against American slavery, Ireland to the cause of anti-slavery? In the but that I know the cause of humanity is one countryside, the cottiers and labourers who Benjamin Robert Haydon, The the world over.’34 made up the bulk of the rural population Anti-Slavery Society Convention, O’Connell barely survived the winter were, of necessity, preoccupied with questions 1840, oil on canvas, 1841, 297 of ‘Black ’47’, and he died in May during of day-to-day survival in an increasingly x 384 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London. Philanthropist an aborted pilgrimage to Rome. Historians precarious environment. But in the cities and Thomas Clarkson (1760–1846) tell us that for the last several years of his towns where the Repeal campaign was taking is speaking; Daniel O’Connell is life, his physical condition had left him root, O’Connell had some success in building visible in the top left. more and more incapacitated, and that a a bridge between internal and external deepening spiritual anxiety had become a concerns. At Repeal meetings in Dublin, he major deterrent to any effective engagement made questions of slavery and abolition a with his ongoing political agenda. As early frequent subject of discussion and debate. As as October 1843, his acquiescence in the he denounced chattel slavery as ‘the greatest government’s prohibition of the massive crime that can be committed by humanity Repeal meeting scheduled for Clontarf against humanity’ and described himself as had left him bruised and rudderless. His ‘the friend of liberty in every clime, class, imprisonment for three months in 1844 only and colour’, his overwhelmingly Catholic added to his physical travail. His biographer audiences burst into applause and cheered Denis Gwynn tells us that by the end of that aloud. Moved by his eloquence, Irishmen year, ‘he was already a broken man’.35 and women wrote to friends and family in It is all the more remarkable, then, that America asking how it was that they could O’Connell continued to address the issue of oppose O’Connell’s criticism of the ‘enemies slavery with extraordinary clarity and vigour of liberty’, how it was that they had ceased to during much of this period. This was nowhere be Irish.37 more apparent than when he welcomed In 1841, when Dublin Quakers drafted a
270 ‘My Countrymen are All Mankind’ www.fieldday.ie
37 Liberator, 2 May 1845; letter calling on Irish emigrants in the United to abolish slavery,’ he wrote, except for ‘the David T. Gleeson, The States to join with the abolitionists in seeking vile faction that always kept this country ... Irish in the South, 1815– the overthrow of slavery, the Liberator quickly in bondage. For instance, I called [on] two I 1877 (Chapel Hill, 2001), 125–26, 129. added his signature, as did R. R. Madden and believe [to be] Orangemen’ and when they 38 Riach, ‘Richard Davis Ireland’s Apostle of Temperance, the Capuchin saw that O’Connell’s name was first on the Webb and Antislavery Father Theobald Mathew. O’Connell’s petition ‘they walked away and would not in Ireland’, 162; John F. Repeal wardens played the leading role sign’. Overall, the many Catholic signatories Quinn, ‘“Three Cheers for the Abolitionist in circulating the ‘Irish Address’, which may have included large numbers of Catholic Pope!”: American suggests that although the infrastructure of clergymen. Allen reported from Dublin that Reaction to Gregory abolitionism in Ireland was overwhelmingly a single individual had secured the signatures XVI’s Condemnation Protestant in membership and ethos, many of a Catholic bishop and seventy-two priests. of the Slave Trade, 1840–1860’, Catholic — perhaps most — signers of the letter were ‘How many, then’, Garrison’s Liberator asked Historical Review, 90 Catholic. This becomes vividly clear from the triumphantly, ‘are [included] among the sixty (2004), 81; Liberator, 18 report of a Repeal warden in Kells, County thousand names that are appended to the March 1842. Meath, who claimed that he had obtained Address?’38 500 signatures. ‘Everybody here is willing But the institutional Church in Ireland
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remained resolutely silent as the controversy has acknowledged, ‘Only after the cultures 39 Letters of the Late Bishop over slavery swirled around it. The Irish of Europe and America changed through England to the Hon. John Forsyth on the Subject of bishops were, in important respects, caught the abolitionists’ agency and only after Domestic Slavery (New in a pincer between the Vatican and the the laws of every civilized land eliminated York, 1969), xi, iv, v; rapidly expanding presence and power of the the practice, did Catholic moral doctrine Quinn, ‘“Three Cheers www.fieldday.ieCatholic Church in the United States. The decisively repudiate slavery as immoral. for the Abolitionist Pope!”’; Robert Emmett overwhelming concern of the members of the Only in 1890 did Pope Leo XIII attack the Curran, ‘Rome, the 40 Irish hierarchy was to build up the personnel institution itself.’ American Church, and and infrastructure of devotional Catholicism We can conclude, then, that while anti- Slavery’, in Joseph C. in their own country, and to fend off the slavery in Ireland had some triumphant Linck and Raymond J. Kupke, eds., Building challenge represented by the aggressive, moments, it was undone by a complex array the Church in America proselytizing thrust of Irish Protestantism’s of forces and circumstances, including the (Washington, DC, 1999), Second Reformation. Insofar as they paused coming of the Great Famine, the death of 30–49. to consider the question of slavery and anti- O’Connell, the rise of a competing narrative 40 John T. Noonan, Jr., ‘Development in Moral slavery, they could hardly ignore the fact of white slavery and suffering, the persistent Doctrine’, Theological that their friends and compatriots in the silence of the Irish Catholic Church, and, Studies, 54 (December American hierarchy — Irish-born men such lest we forget, the emergence of powerful 1993), 664–67, 673–75 as John England in South Carolina and John pro-slavery voices in Irish America. All of (675). 41 Wigham, A Christian Hughes in New York — were denouncing this may appear to have been foreordained, Philanthropist of Dublin, abolitionism not only as a danger to social but if so, we must also acknowledge that 219. order but as quintessentially Protestant. O’Connell and Douglass were like comets In Rome, meanwhile, the Church in the night sky, but comets that kept on retreated from a stance that had, for a brief burning. The Dublin Quaker reformers could moment, given great encouragement to not match their extraordinary charisma and opponents of slavery. In 1839 Pope Gregory would not have aspired to. But the ‘inner XVI issued In Supremo, an Apostolic Letter light’ burned within them for a lifetime. that unequivocally condemned the slave Remarkably, as late as 1883, when he was in trade and appeared — to many readers his eighty-first year, Richard Allen visited the — to identify the institution of slavery as United States and spoke to students at Fisk equally ‘unworthy of the Christian name’. University, in Nashville, Tennessee, a school Abolitionists seized on the letter’s vehement that was steeped in the ethos of abolitionism admonition ‘that none henceforth dare and whose students were likely to be the to subject to slavery ... Indians, negroes, children of slaves (in some cases, former or other classes of men’ as decisive proof slaves themselves). ‘For more than fifty years that the Pope had sided with them. In fact, I was engaged in the anti-slavery cause’, he In Supremo issued no injunction to free told the assembled student body, ‘first for the any of the millions of men, women, and emancipation of [British] slaves in the West children who were already enslaved, and Indies, and then for those in America. … I the American Catholic hierarchy quickly am thankful that in the good providence of mounted a counteroffensive aimed at God I am here; [and] that I see what I do’.41 demonstrating that the Apostolic Letter had In an era of increasingly intense and no bearing upon ‘domestic slavery as it exists narrowly focused nationalism, these men in the southern states and in other parts of helped lay the foundations of a different the Christian world’.39 Thereafter, Rome kind of national sensibility, one that sought remained more or less silent on the question to transcend nationalism’s exclusions and of slavery until the passage of the last to create instead an Irishness that was secular abolition legislation of the nineteenth generous, inclusive, rooted in their native century, Brazil’s ‘Golden Law’ of 1888. As soil but global in its reach. Later in the the Catholic theologian John T. Noonan nineteenth century, the politics and vision of
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42 James P. Rodechko, Patrick Ford and Michael Davitt were rooted role as nationalist and internationalist, Patrick Ford and His in this sensibility. Fittingly enough, Ford, an Alfred Webb was elected honorary president Search for America Irish Catholic emigrant from Galway, settled of the Indian National Congress in 1894. In (New York, 1976), 28-32; Bruce Nelson, in Boston and worked as a printer’s assistant his presidential address, he defined himself ‘Irish Nationalism, for Garrison and the Liberator before for his audience by pointing to the example www.fieldday.ieIrish Americans, and starting his own abolitionist newspaper and and legacy of O’Connell and Garrison. the “Social” Question, then enlisting in the Union Army during ‘I was nurtured in the conflict against 1916–1923’, boundary 2, 31 (2004), 153–56 (155). the American Civil War. In the late 1870s American slavery’, he told the assembled 43 Alfred Webb, and 1880s, Ford and Davitt would dedicate delegates in Bombay: ‘Presidential Address at themselves to the struggle for land reform the Tenth Indian National in Ireland while repeatedly reaffirming their In the words of William Lloyd Garrison, Congress, Madras’, in his Indian Affairs: Speeches commitment to ‘Universal Justice and the the founder of that movement, ‘My of Alfred Webb, Esq, Rights of Humanity’.42 country is the world; my countrymen are M.P., President, Tenth But perhaps the last word should belong all mankind.’ To aid in the elevation of Indian National Congress to Alfred Webb, the oldest son of Richard my native land has been the endeavour (Bombay, 1895), 10–11. and Hannah Webb, who became a distinctive of my riper years. [But] in the words of and important figure in the ranks of Irish Daniel O’Connell, ‘My sympathies are nationalism, one who could share a platform not confined to my own green island. I with Parnell while also sharing his parents’ am a friend to civil and religious liberty concern with alleviating suffering far beyond all over the world.’43 Ireland’s shores. In recognition of his dual
273 Field Day review www.fieldday.ie
274 Plato’s Cave? www.fieldday.ieDeirdre McMahon A Game with Sharpened Knives Neil Belton London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005 320 pages. ISBN 0-297643-59-2
Propaganda, Censorship and Irish Neutrality in the Second World War Robert Cole Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006 196 pages. ISBN 0-748-62277-2
The Emergency: Neutral Ireland 1939–45 Brian Girvin Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2006 385 pages. ISBN 978-1-405000-10-9
‘Mise an Fear Cheoil’: Séamus Ennis — Dialann Taistil 1942–46 Séamus Mac Aonghusa Edited by Ríonach Uí Ógáin Indreabhán: Cló Iar-Chonnachta, 2007 490 pages. ISBN 978-1-905560-07-3
Dublin Nazi No. 1: The Life of Adolf Mahr Gerry Mullins With a Foreword by Cathal O’Shannon Dublin: Liberties Press, 2007 253 pages. ISBN 978-1-905483-19-8
That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland during the Second World War Clair Wills London: Faber and Faber, 2007 502 pages. ISBN 978-0-571221-05-9
A guard looking through his telescope at the look-out post at Brandon Point. Photo: Keystone Features/Getty Images.
Field Day Review 4 2008 275 Field Day review
Clair Wills’s compelling new study, That sessions in neighbours’ homes, card-playing, 1 F. S. L. Lyons, Ireland Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland Sunday night patterns, turkey-drives, fair since the Famine (London, 1971), 557–58. during the Second World War, includes days, dances in the town hall and the round 2 Clair Wills, That Neutral political and social as well as cultural of social activities centred on the local Island: A Cultural history. She has researched an impressive church. Frugality was the order of the day. History of Ireland during www.fieldday.iearray of source material — official and Transport difficulties made delivery of the the Second World War (London, 2007), 1. private records, the national and provincial Cork Examiner sporadic, while listening to 3 Ibid. press, literature, memoirs and biographies, the radio became impossible because of the 4 Monsarrat quoted in high and popular culture, and ephemera such difficulty of obtaining batteries. Wills, That Neutral as advertisements and posters. Her study Wills’s father was evacuated to Wales early Island, 118. challenges one of the iconic images of Irish in the war but returned to London, spending neutrality, that of F. S. L. Lyons in Ireland nights in the Anderson shelter during air since the Famine in 1971, when he wrote: raids. His life was more disrupted than her mother’s but also more varied. He made It was as if an entire people had been frequent visits to the local British Restaurant condemned to live in Plato’s cave, with for dried egg and chips, made models of the their backs to the fire of life and deriving British and German planes battling overhead, their only knowledge of what went on listened daily to music, comedy and drama on outside from the flickering shadows the BBC, and watched films and newsreels of thrown on the wall ... When after six the war at the local cinema. years they emerged, dazzled, from the If the contrast seems emblematic of the cave into the light of day, it was to a new distinction between living inside and outside and vastly different world.1 the war, it is one of the major themes of Wills’s book that Irish neutrality was not Wills presents the conflicting perceptions of synonymous with peace. The war was neutrality in her evocative opening pages, distant from the concerns of most Irish where she compares and contrasts the people but their daily lives were shaped by wartime experiences of her Irish mother, the political, social, economic and cultural in West Cork, and her English father, on pressures of trying to survive in the midst of the outskirts of London. The farm, which a world war. her Cork grandfather had bought from To the British, and later the Americans, the Land Commission, ‘was the model on neutrality was seen as an extreme expression which Fianna Fáil hoped to build a new, of isolationism and Irish perverseness. It was fair, if frugal, agrarian society’.2 The family also seen as a betrayal and Wills perceptively subsisted on their own crops and the small remarks how often the rhetoric of adultery income from the sale of milk, eggs and pigs, was used in this context. In his 1951 novel, boosted by the older children’s earnings. The Cruel Sea, Nicholas Monsarrat, in a For the boys there was rabbit-snaring and contemptuous reference to Ireland, wrote seasonal agricultural work for the county that ‘there are degrees of neutrality, just as council; for the girls, domestic service in the there are degrees of unfaithfulness: one may home of the local minister. ‘Except for the forgive a woman an occasional cold spell, unaccountable fact that my grandfather had but not her continued and smiling repose in been born a Protestant (though he had long another man’s arms’.4 British and American since converted), the family came close to visitors to Dublin during the war recalled embodying the ideal of a self-sufficient, rural, a city of light, luxury and plenty, with the devout and independent Ireland’, writes strong implication that beneath all this lay a Wills.3 Her mother’s principal memories moral darkness, Dublin fiddling while Europe of entertainment during the Emergency burned. Dubliners knew this was a partial were occasional visits to the cinema, music picture at best and that within a few yards
276 A collection of posters outside the newspaper shop, Dublin 1940. Photo: William Vandivert/ www.fieldday.ieTime Life Pictures/Getty Images.
of the Gresham, the Shelbourne and other Not surprisingly, one of the most striking fashionable watering holes, there existed dire aspects of Irish writing in the period was the poverty, which worsened during the war. preference for documentary work, polemic, A more profound sense of ambivalence commentary, reportage and propaganda in permeated cultural and artistic opinion, both print and broadcasting. The war cut about which Wills writes incisively. The off Irish writers from British publishing generation of writers born in and around outlets but this stimulated a wartime literary the first decade of the twentieth century renaissance, which, for all the anxieties — Patrick Kavanagh, Flann O’Brien, Seán about intellectual torpor, was evidence of O’Faoláin, Frank O’Connor, Máirtín Ó an energy and dynamism that was resisting Cadhain, Séamus Ó Néill — educated at stagnation. This was particularly evident in the colleges of the National University Irish-language writing. and the teacher-training colleges, reached In the early years of the war, as Wills artistic maturity during the war. They makes clear, neutrality caused few problems were more confident but also more cynical for writers like Hubert Butler, Kate O’Brien, about the new state. Wills observes that Louis MacNeice, Elizabeth Bowen and Denis the social role of literature developed very Johnston. But as the war intensified and differently in 1930s Ireland than in Britain criticism of Ireland and the Irish became ever and America. Because political theory and more shrill, the conflict of loyalties became sociology were underdeveloped disciplines acute. Kate O’Brien’s novel, The Last of the in Ireland, literature was recording Irish life. Summer, set in the summer of 1939, refracts
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A survivor from the Athenia, which had been torpedoed by a German submarine, comes ashore at Galway, 6 September 1939. Photo: Central Press/ www.fieldday.ieGetty Images.
Irish neutrality through the more hardened the censor’s blue pencil was less in evidence prism of 1943, when it was published, in their columns than in the national papers thus distorting how Irish neutrality was like the Irish Times. actually perceived immediately after the The grind of daily life — the lack of tea outbreak of war. Wills devotes considerable and petrol, the inedible black bread, the attention to MacNeice and his ‘convoluted damp turf, the exhausting train journeys, self-justification’ about the war in 1939–40. compulsory tillage, smuggling and the By 1943, however, like Kate O’Brien he black market, the ubiquitous ‘glimmer saw Irish neutrality as an evasion and a man’ — affected every class. But there were shirking of responsibility. Wills writes about other changes in Irish society which Wills popular culture with equal insight: from the considers. There was the growth of women’s recruiting pageants of ‘Step Together’ and organizations like the Irish Countrywomen’s ‘Roll of the Drum’ to Ireland’s Own (full Association and the Irish Housewives’ of make-do-and-mend tips) and the huge Association. The need for better cookery popularity of amateur drama throughout and nutrition promoted the career of Maura the country (especially with women). Laverty, whose Home Economy (1941) and She analyses wartime plays like Robert Never No More (1942) were bestsellers. Collis’s Marrowbone Lane (1939), George Although the number of people who had Shiels’s The Rugged Path (1940), and Paul radios was particularly small along the Vincent Carroll’s The Strings, My Lord, western seaboard (one in thirty for Donegal, are False (1941), which enjoyed enormous Galway and Kerry), the high emigration to success. Wills’s study of the regional press Britain from the west of Ireland during the is particularly productive as she shows that war ensured that some of the most isolated
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5 Wills, That Neutral and remote areas of Ireland were now in when, in 1942, he was invited to work Island, 10–11. closer contact with Britain than ever before. for the Folklore Commission, collecting 6 Wills, That Neutral But the western seaboard was also traditional music and songs in Galway, Island, 11. 7 Séamus Mac Aonghusa, experiencing a grimmer contact with the war. Mayo and Donegal. As Ríonach uí Ógáin ‘Mise an Fear Cheoil’: In the most moving and haunting chapter observes in her Introduction, Ennis made www.fieldday.ieSéamus Ennis — Dialann of the book, Wills recounts what happened frequent references to the daily problems of Taistil 1942–46, ed. when the victims of the Battle of the Atlantic rationing, endless train journeys, the lack Ríonach Uí Ógáin (Indreabhán, 2007), began to wash ashore. In October 1940 the of tea, fuel and petrol, but there was little passim. sheer number of corpses overwhelmed the about the war itself and what it meant to 8 Mac Aonghusa, ‘Mise an authorities in Donegal. Many bodies were him and the people he met on his travels. Fear Cheoil’, 145. spotted far out to sea by distressed observers On the surface it often reads like an idyllic on the land but could not be recovered; existence: ‘airneáil agus seanchas cois tine’, others had to be hauled from inaccessible cutting turf and cycling through some of the rocks and coves and even then identification most beautiful landscapes in Ireland despite was often impossible because of advanced the frequent references to ‘drochlá báistí decomposition. Gardaí up and down the agus stoirme chruaidh’, punctures, leaking west coast received heart-rending requests shoes and lodgings.7 Nevertheless, there are from relatives overseas for information some intriguing glimpses of the war and the about sons or husbands whose bodies might wider world: on Tory Island, Ennis noticed have been washed ashore. that the song ‘Óró na Buachaillí’ now had an By 1943 for most people their Emergency extra verse about the boys who had gone to existence was circumscribed by restrictive Scotland; in Derry in January 1944 ‘chonaic legislation, censorship, shortages, and me pictiúr, Hitler’s Children, ab fhiú a rationing. For the worst-hit, it meant fheiceáil. Pictiúir de phropaganda a bhí ann, poverty, illness, unemployment, and ach léirigh sé an Reich sa nGearmáin ó thús’ emigration. Wills concludes that ‘one version [I saw a film, Hitler’s Children, worth seeing. of Ireland’s wartime story is that it is all It was a propaganda film, but it explained about absence — the absence of conflict, the Reich in Germany from the beginning.]; of supplies, of social dynamism, of contact near Falcarragh he was shown the mountain with “the outside world” ’.5 But she believes where a plane crashed earlier in the war, that this perspective has masked the material killing everyone on board; in Gaoth Dobhair and psychic impoverishment that the war in March 1944 he met 82-year-old Síle wrought in Ireland, and which continued Gallagher, who, with her husband and long after it ended. The effects of poverty, family, had spent many years in Scotland. massive emigration, the decline of rural Her children were now in the United States areas, the suppression of debate through and Scotland: ‘Chaith Síle cuid mhó dá saol censorship, and of political dissent through in Albain ... Shiúil sí cuid mhór de na bailte a series of repressive measures including móra agus tá tuiscint mhaith aici ar an saol internment, ‘persisted like a silent damage amuigh.’8 She gave him some precious tea to the culture throughout the 1950s’.6 Her before he left, tea from one of her children in book sets the benchmark for future studies America, which Ennis drank with relish. of Emergency Ireland. The war figures more frequently in The wartime diaries of Seamus Ennis Ennis’s diaries as it nears the end; he have resonances of many of the experiences mentions the death of Hitler and the capture described by Clair Wills. At the outbreak of Berlin and Hamburg. While staying in of war Ennis was working at the Three Carna, he wrote on 8 May, ‘scéal ar an Candles printing firm in Dublin but lost bpáipéar inniu go bhfuil an cogadh thart. Níl his job because of the paper shortage. He de shuim ag seandaoine ann ach “Caidé go was contemplating joining the British army bhfairsingí an tae?!!”’. [Report in the paper
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that the war was over. The old people were Dublin, its ‘watchfulness and foreboding’, 9 Mac Aonghusa, ‘Mise an only interested in when tea supplies would ‘sadness’, ‘leaden air’, ‘grey skies’, the Fear Cheoil’, 233. 10 Mac Aonghusa, ‘Mise an be restored.]9 On 16 May he described ‘forsaken air’ of Clontarf, ‘the village of Fear Cheoil’, 236. one of the memorable codas of the war, de lost causes’. De Valera and his government 11 Neil Belton, A Game Valera’s reply to Churchill: appear like a sinister chorus: with Sharpened Knives www.fieldday.ie(London, 2005), 192. 12 Belton, A Game with Chuas siar tigh na gClochartach i gCarna As he thought about his last conversation Sharpened Knives, 275. san oíche ag éisteacht le hóráid an with [de Valera], his oracular turns, Taoisigh — ní go róthirim a tháinig mé his careful admissions of weakness, abhaile, ach ó ba chearr siar é níorbh fhiú Schrödinger had a clear image, as in an liom an óráid a ligean tharam gan é a enlarged photograph, of men behind the chloisteáil. Ní ina aiféala a bhí mé mar ba leader deep in shadows, vague shapes in bhreá liom a óráid.10 the apparently empty air of a darkened room. Their indistinct pressure disturbed [In the evening I went to the Cloherty Schrödinger’s image of the man. If the house in Carna to listen to the Taoiseach’s picture were developed differently these speech — I was none to dry when I got ghostly figures behind him might come home; although it was a good way away, into the foreground, changing the picture it wasn’t worth missing the speech. I in an instant ...11 didn’t regret it as I enjoyed the speech.] Later in the novel Belton attempts to Reading the diaries, there is something link quantum theory with the ‘endless immensely ironic, and sad, about Ennis despairing quibble’ of wartime Dublin when collecting the remnants of one dying Schrödinger explains the difficulty of living culture while another was blowing itself to in Ireland: smithereens. There is one area of wartime culture (in Reality seems to flicker. Reality cannot the widest sense of the word) that Wills flicker, but here it does. If the quantum does not discuss in any detail: the Dublin of energy were much larger than it is Institute of Advanced Studies, widely derided we’d see the world for what it is: a as de Valera’s folly in 1939–40. It drew superimposed shimmer of wave paths, all to Dublin a polyglot, cosmopolitan group there simultaneously, all the paths of light of scientists, most notably the physicist visible at once ... Of course we don’t see Erwin Schrödinger, winner of the Nobel any of that, because in our gross world Prize in 1933, who became director of the quantum effects are so small. Not here, School of Theoretical Physics. The wartime though, not in your country. We see the colloquia organized by Schrödinger and his interference of waves about to break, a colleague Walter Heitler attracted the most slow motion in which the possibilities prestigious names in physics, including Paul are open and undecided. It’s like being Dirac, Max Born and Kathleen Lonsdale. suspended in a fluid, sensitive to every In 1943, Schrödinger delivered his seminal flux. We know that there is a direction, lecture series, What is Life?, on quantum that time will produce a clear answer theory and its implications for genetics. as to where we were and what we were The lectures at Trinity were attended by so doing, but it never seems to happen. I many people (including de Valera) that they cannot stand it any more, it is driving me had to be repeated. His first years in Dublin out of my mind.12 are the subject of Neil Belton’s 2005 novel, A Game with Sharpened Knives. It paints The novel is infused with Lyons’s ‘Plato’s a monotonously monochrome picture of cave’ view of wartime Ireland and it stops
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13 Robert Cole, before the excitement of What is Life? the BBC and other stations but did not. Propaganda, Censorship which challenged Lyons’s picture of wartime There were plans to expand broadcasting and Irish Neutrality in stagnation. Schrödinger spent sixteen happy co-operation between BBC London, BBC the Second World War (Edinburgh, 2006), ix–x. and productive years at the DIAS before Northern Ireland and Radio Éireann but 14 Balfour, quoted in Cole, returning to Austria. these foundered on the opposition of BBC www.fieldday.iePropaganda, Censorship In the battle for the hearts and minds Northern Ireland. Frank O’Connor was also and Irish Neutrality, 1. of Irish opinion on neutrality, propaganda refused a permit to go to London to make 15 Cole, Propaganda, Censorship and Irish and censorship were vital weapons. In a BBC broadcast — perhaps because of his Neutrality, 2. 1996 censorship was analysed by Dónal left-wing past. 16 Bernstein, quoted in Cole, Ó Drisceoil in his Censorship in Ireland, Cole shows that before Pearl Harbor there Propaganda, Censorship 1939–45: Neutrality, Politics and Society. was considerable anti-British propaganda and Irish Neutrality, 115. Robert Cole’s rationale for his new study, in the Irish-American press, although one Propaganda, Censorship and Irish Neutrality opinion poll in January 1941 showed that in the Second World War, is that it fills 40 per cent of Irish Americans opposed Irish the gap ‘where the vital propaganda- neutrality. Even after Pearl Harbor, there censorship aspect of relations between remained a strong core of anti-British feeling neutral Eire and belligerent nations in war- in the US, fuelled by the reverses in the Far time is concerned’.13 He quotes Michael East in early 1942, which were blamed on Balfour’s definition of propaganda, ‘the art British weakness. However, a Gallup poll of inducing people to leap to conclusions on 22 February 1942 showed that 70 per without examining the evidence’,14 and cent of Irish Americans wanted the Irish to thinks it an apt one for the war of words agree to the use of their ports by the Allies. over Irish neutrality. The Gaelic American dismissed anyone who Allied official propaganda took some accepted the poll as a ‘Gallup stoodge’. There time to get started but the British press was was a delay in distributing US Office of War ‘trained on Eire virtually from day one’.15 Information material in Dublin. The official Indeed so virulent was the press comment news bulletin, Letter from America, was that by mid-September 1939 the British circulated to clergy, teachers, government government was issuing D-Notices banning officials, lawyers and anyone else who asked certain articles and cartoons. The British for it. Hollywood films were being pushed press posed a serious problem for the Irish by the OWI but Sidney Bernstein, the British censors because of its dominant presence in Ministry of Information Films liaison with the Irish market. Despite this, Cole thinks Hollywood, complained that many of these the Irish censors had considerable success films did not provide a realistic view of in suppressing what they considered to be America: ‘Phony war romances and dramas the most objectionable comments in British haven’t their place in this war, for it is not newspapers. They also watched the post, a phony war.’16 Bernstein wanted more theatre, films, posters and advertising. films likeMrs Miniver, which was hardly a The job of the postal censor (who worked contender in the realism stakes. closely with the British security authorities) Cole clearly enjoys discussing John was especially onerous: in July 1942, for Betjeman (or Sean O’Betjeman as he example, the cross-border (between the occasionally signed his name) who entered North and the South) post alone consisted the scene in June 1940 when the Empire of 32,000 letters and postcards, 576 parcels Division of the Ministry of Information and 690 newspapers. dispatched him to Dublin to report on Irish There was less censorship in opinion and how British propaganda might broadcasting. The Irish newspapers gave be improved. His suggestions included a BBC listings right throughout the war Catholic Truth Society pamphlet on the and the government could have jammed persecution of Polish Catholics and getting
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the racing fraternity on Britain’s side, neither Irish opinion of the errors of neutrality but 17 Cole, Propaganda, of which saw the light of day. Betjeman this was clearly a dead duck by 1943. It Censorship and Irish Neutrality, 111. was to return as press attaché in early 1941 was rather more successful in persuading 18 Cole, Propaganda, when he established good connections British and American opinion that Irish Censorship and Irish with the Irish Independent and provided neutrality favoured the Germans rather than Neutrality, 173. www.fieldday.iestories about concentration camps, prisons, the Allies. There was little for Betjeman spies, torture, informers and conscripted to do and he left in Dublin in October labour. Betjeman realized that the Irish were 1943; the Irish government gave him a suspicious of direct British propaganda, farewell dinner. He was succeeded by the and that it was better to work for improved dyspeptic Ross Williamson, who moaned Anglo-Irish relations, treat Irish nationalism about ‘this horrible little country’ and the with respect, ease the Irish sense of being cut ‘absolute second-ratedness of everybody’, off from the world, circulate informational but concluded in 1944 that most Irish people rather than promotional materials, visit Irish still supported neutrality, were glad not to be officials, stop anti-Irish cartoons, and work in the war and held de Valera in high regard. closely with the Americans. He hated Gray and hoped that he ‘will be However, one wonders how reliable shot before long’.18 Alas for Williamson, Betjeman’s judgement was. Here Cole’s Gray stayed in Ireland until 1947, returning unfamiliarity with the dramatis personae, to the US where he lived until his death in especially on the Irish side, leads him to cite 1968 at the ripe old age of ninety-eight, Betjeman rather too uncritically. There are producing a voluminous but unpublishable several references by Betjeman to the alleged memoir, ‘Behind the Emerald Curtain’, still pro-German sympathies of the diplomat fulminating about de Valera. T. J. Kiernan and his wife, the singer Delia Irish-German wartime and post-war Murphy. Yet near the end of the book Cole relations have received scholarly attention refers to Delia Murphy’s decoration for over the last decade in David O’Donoghue’s helping escaping British POWs when her Hitler’s Irish Voices (1998); Cathy Molohan’s husband was Irish minister to the Vatican. Germany and Ireland 1945–55 (1999); Cole also needs to be more discriminating Andreas Roth’s Mr Bewley in Berlin (2000); about the views of the American minister J. P. Duggan’s Herr Hempel at the German in Dublin, David Gray, who thought that Legation, 1937–45 (2003) and Mervyn Frederick Boland, the assistant secretary O’Driscoll’s Ireland, Germany and the Nazis, of the Department of External Affairs, was 1919–39 (2004). Gerry Mullins’s Dublin Nazi ‘pro-Axis and turned over to the German No. 1: The Life of Adolf Mahr looks at the and Italian legations anything that might man who became director of the National interest them’.17 The charges were baseless Museum in 1934, the same year that he and nothing in Boland’s career, then or later, founded the Irish branch of the Nazi party, indicated the slightest sympathy with the which he had joined the previous year. Mahr’s Axis. Gray, a man of considerable charm story and that of his family is a fascinating one. and ebullience (as his papers testify), became He was born in Trent, then under increasingly deranged about neutrality in Austrian rule, now in northern Italy (Trento), general and de Valera in particular. to Sudeten German parents. He was a Cole’s chapters are arranged distinguished archaeologist and was president chronologically and by 1942 the themes of the British Prehistory Society in the late become repetitive. There was revived British 1930s. In the summer of 1939 he and his optimism after Pearl Harbor that Irish family returned to Austria for a holiday neutrality could not survive US entry into and were stranded there when war broke the war, but that soon subsided. The object out. Although he tried to return to Ireland, of Allied propaganda was to persuade his Nazi activities had already attracted the
282 Swastika Laundry, Ballsbridge, www.fieldday.ieDublin. Photo: Getty Images.
19 Cathal O’Shannon, attention of the Irish security authorities writes that he ‘lived in an Ireland that was Foreword, in Gerry and his return was vetoed. The latter part of not just anti-British and anti-Allied but Mullins, Dublin Nazi Mullins’s book describes what happened to also significantly sympathetic to Germany. No. 1: The Life of Adolf Mahr (Dublin, 2007), 11. Mahr’s remarkable children during and after Irish governments, pre- and post-de Valera, 20 O’Shannon, Foreword, 11. the war, an altogether more inspiring story sought out Germans to come to Ireland and than that of their sour and embittered father. the new Free State, rather than the former If Mullins had confined himself to this colonial ruling classes’.20 These are rather story, it would have been a better book. sweeping generalizations for which no Unfortunately, his lack of experience as a evidence is adduced; unfortunately this is a historian is compounded by his sketchy failing that pervades the rest of the book. knowledge of both the Irish and German There are maddening omissions. When contexts. The same can be said for Cathal was Mahr born? What did he study at O’Shannon’s Foreword. ‘This is a book I university, surely an important fact in have been waiting half my lifetime for,’ he any consideration of his career as an announces dramatically. Why? Well, he archaeologist? Where does he fit in the wanted to read more about Nazis in Ireland wider context of Austro-German-Irish like Mahr and Fritz Brase (first director of cultural relations going back to the closing the Army School of Music) ‘and the rag decades of the previous century? Annoying tag and bobtail of some of those who were as these omissions are, they are dwarfed brought here by the Irish government to by a rather more disturbing agenda that build the mighty Shannon Scheme’.19 Surely gradually unfolds in the book: the highly the latter were brought by Siemens and not tendentious attempt to link Mahr and de by the Irish government? As for being ‘rag Valera as fellow Nazi sympathizers. In tag and bobtail’, most were skilled engineers 1935, according to Mullins, the Irish Nazis and technicians who returned home when seceded from the British body ‘so as not to the Scheme was completed. O’Shannon offend the new de Valera government, which
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was unhappy about any Irish organisation in even more fantastical conspiracy theories 21 Mullins, Dublin Nazi No. being subservient to a British one’. The only and wonders if the arrest was ‘a favour, 1, 66–67. 22 Mullins, Dublin Nazi No. evidence cited for this claim is a lecture given to prevent any further embarrassment to 1, 66–67. 25 by Rudolf Muhs in London in 2005. Later, [de Valera’s] administration’. Mullins 23 Mullins, Dublin Nazi No. Mullins writes that expresses particular animus against Colonel 1, 74. www.fieldday.ieDan Bryan, the canny and efficient head 24 Mullins, Dublin Nazi No. 1, 114–15. Mahr and de Valera could be forgiven of G2 (Irish Military Intelligence), who 25 Mullins, Dublin Nazi No. for not seeing the grave dangers posed consistently advised de Valera not to let 1, 176. by Hitler’s rise to power ... Of course the Mahr back to Ireland. Mullins argues that Machiavellian de Valera, who lived the Bryan was pursuing a vendetta against Mahr maxim ‘keep one’s friends close, and one’s and had no real evidence against him. But enemies closer’, may have felt it prudent Mahr’s wartime career as head of the Irland- to maintain good relations with Hitler’s Redaktion radio station was well known top man in Ireland ... Dev and Mahr after the war and constituted damning worked in adjacent buildings, attended evidence of his work for the Nazi regime. some of the same functions, and shared In November 1947 he sent a letter to his an interest in politics and archaeology.21 ‘personal friend’ de Valera defending himself against these charges. There was no reply. De Valera also kept a good working There is a prevalence of speculative terms relationship with the German minister, in all of these accounts — could be, may Hempel, and ‘probably adopted that other have, probably, possible, might. They reveal maxim “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”. the paucity of Mullins’s research. He does De Valera may have reasoned that a not cite O’Driscoll’s key work on the period. showdown between Britain and Germany If he had bothered to consult the de Valera might help to bring about a united Ireland Papers or the Dan Bryan Papers in University — as long as Germany won’.22 College Dublin Archives or the records of On the Austrian Anschluss in 1938, the Department of External Affairs in the Mullins suggests that ‘the annexation of National Archives, he might have found a small nation by a larger, more powerful answers to some of these speculations and one should have sounded alarm bells discovered just what, if any, was the extent for de Valera and his government ... It is of the friendship between Mahr and de possible that Dev felt political sympathy Valera that he seems so anxious to establish, with Mahr’.23 Later Mullins writes of a but unable to prove beyond the geographical wartime report on Ireland compiled by Mahr propinquity of their offices in Merrion Street. that it had ‘a heavy republican tone ... his Brian Girvin is the author of Between Two plans for Ireland read like a de Valera or Worlds: Politics and Economy in Independent an IRA manifesto ... Conspiracy theorists Ireland (1989) and he is editor (with Geoffrey might wonder whether Dev was his co- Roberts) of Ireland and the Second World scriptwriter’.24 Since de Valera was in distant War: Politics. Society and Remembrance Dublin in 1941, there are certain logistical (2000). He and Roberts were involved in problems, conspiracy theories apart, about the ground-breaking Volunteers Project, set him being Mahr’s co-scriptwriter (the co- up in University College Cork in 1995 with scriptwriters were actually Francis Stuart and the aim of examining the experience of Irish Frank Ryan). But Mullins’s glib linking of de citizens who contributed to the Allied war Valera to the IRA shows a basic ignorance of effort, either by military service or war work the political and ideological differences that in Britain. Most of the essays in Ireland had developed between the two by 1941. and the Second World War came out of the When Mahr was finally arrested by the Volunteers Project. The title of his new book, British in January 1946, Mullins indulges The Emergency: Neutral Ireland 1939–45,
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26 Brian Girvin, The promises a more comprehensive study than is Girvin notes, but when crises did occur Emergency: Neutral actually delivered; what we get is a rather arid ‘he had established his position as the key Ireland 1939–45 diplomatic history, which goes over a lot of interlocutor between Ireland and Britain and (Basingstoke, 2006), 31 30–31. ground covered by other historians in recent was largely trusted by both sides’. 27 Girvin, The Emergency, years. The same could not be said for his www.fieldday.ie30–31. One of the most problematical aspects American counterpart. Like Cole, Girvin 28 Girvin, The Emergency, of the book is Girvin’s treatment of de tends to take Gray at face value and to 335. 29 Girvin, The Emergency, Valera, of whom he writes that ‘the passions ignore the increasing signs of unreliability, 49. he aroused seem strange at this historical paranoia and obsession in his reports from 30 In 1927, several members distance, yet they were a key feature of Dublin; he does not mention, for example, of O’Sullivan family of Irish politics for most of the twentieth the séances Gray held at his residence in the Adrigole, west Cork, died from starvation, century ... His strength was his fortitude in Phoenix Park, at one of which Roosevelt’s allegedly neglected by the face of adversity’.26 Girvin also notes dead mother put in an appearance. Girvin officials on account of that where admirers saw de Valera’s steely also makes use of the reports (which their republican politics. determination and leadership qualities, were read by Irish Intelligence) of the The incident became the subject of a novel others saw ‘a narrow and dogmatic mind Czechoslovak consul in Dublin, D. K. by Peadar O’Donnell, framed by the most insular aspects of Irish Kostal, who reported in May 1940 that Adrigoole (1929). nationalism’.27 Girvin is critical of the support for Hitler was evident in the 31 Girvin, The Emergency, recent tendency to debunk de Valera and general Irish population and that there was 73. 32 Memoirs of Admiral appreciates that ‘there are now signs of a widespread approval of Lord Haw Haw’s John Godfrey, Churchill more sensitive reappraisal of the man and his broadcasts. Interestingly, Cole states that College Archives Centre, era’.28 He comments rightly on the danger when Betjeman arrived the following month Cambridge. of seeing de Valera as a ‘unique dictator’ he found that Irish people thought Haw and attributing to him everything that went Haw a wonderful joke and listened to him right or wrong between 1916 and 1959. because the BBC was so dull. However, this is largely the image conveyed The big question hovering over British in the book, not helped by the fact that two and American policy was whether the ports of Girvin’s chapter titles refer to that hoary were really so vital. Girvin never addresses old cliché, ‘De Valera’s Ireland’. In large this fundamental point although he writes and small ways, Girvin writes, ‘the Ireland that Maffey had doubts in July 1940. that Fianna Fáil created in the course of the Admiral John Godfrey, director of British 1930s was less liberal, less tolerant and less Naval Intelligence, wrote in his memoirs that secular than that inherited from Cumann na ‘by the end of 1941 the matter was dead nGaedheal, though it was politically more as far as we were concerned, somewhat to democratic and inclusive’.29 He does not the disappointment of the Irish, who talked explain how the 1930s were supposedly about their ports incessantly, and disliked less liberal and tolerant than the 1920s the idea that their acquisition did not any (the decade of film and book censorship, longer seem to be a matter of importance the abolition of divorce, the cut in old age to us’.32 This opinion was shared by the pensions, Adrigole,30 etc. etc.). American chiefs of staff when they made a Like Cole, Girvin underlines the strategic assessment of the ports in August importance of the Dublin-based diplomats, 1943. They concluded that bases in southern especially the British Representative, Sir John Ireland were of little use as long as the French Maffey and the American Minister David Atlantic coast was in German hands, as ships Gray. Maffey, an old India and Sudan hand, travelling by the south of Ireland would was an invaluable source of sane advice be an easy target for German submarines and information, which often helped to based in the Bay of Biscay. If de Valera did take the wind out of Churchill’s belligerent agree to give access to the ports, then Allied sails. He could be critical of de Valera, as forces would have to be diverted to protect
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the defenceless Irish hinterland. Instead of neutrality. They dispute the threat of internal 33 Quoted in T. Ryle Dwyer, requesting the use of the ports, the chiefs of conflict that might have ensued if Ireland Irish Neutrality and the USA (Dublin, 1977), 174. staff recommended that they should be made had entered the war. But as Eunan O’Halpin 34 Girvin, The Emergency, 33 available only if the US ever needed them. has argued, to a large section of Irish public 135. Concerning the offer of unity in June 1940 opinion in 1939 Britain was not a bastion 35 John Barnes and David www.fieldday.iein return for ending neutrality, Girvin observes of democracy in need of reinforcement Nicholson, eds., The Empire at Bay: The Leo somewhat mystifyingly that ‘it may not have against tyranny but the country that had Amery Diaries 1929–45 been a feasible solution but it did represent unleashed the Black and Tans against them (London, 1988), 1040. an opportunity for substantial change’.34 It is and continued to aid and abet the repression 36 Girvin, The Emergency, worth noting that a similar offer was made to of nationalists in Northern Ireland. The Irish 324. 37 Eunan O’Halpin, the Indian Congress Party in 1942, a promise élite’s experience of repression was at British Defending Ireland: 37 of independence in exchange for co-operation hands, not German or Italian. The War The Irish State and Its in the war effort. One of de Valera’s reasons for of Independence was succeeded by the Civil Enemies (Oxford, 1999), refusing the offer of unity was his conviction War, a war of great cruelty and bitterness, 151; Judging Dev, RTÉ Radio 1, 18 November that once the wartime emergency was over the which had ended only sixteen years before in 2007. offer would be reneged upon. It was a view 1923. That war had led to a further decade shared by Gandhi, who famously described of political unrest which only subsided in the offer to congress as a post-dated cheque the mid-1930s. For the vast majority of the on a failing bank. Their scepticism about Irish people, any prospect of a return to those Churchill’s sincerity was borne out by his later horrors was unthinkable. contemptuous comment on the 1942 offer that Girvin also tends to see the debate in ‘we made it when in a hole and can disavow it almost exclusively Anglo-American-Irish because it was not accepted at the time’.35 terms. At the beginning of the war every But would Irish public opinion have small European state wanted to stay neutral, agreed to exchange neutrality for unity? especially the small, newly independent Girvin claims that the de Valera government states that had emerged after the First World manipulated public opinion for its own War. This was equally true of states in Asia ends. Well of course it did, so did every and Latin America. One might also point government. What Girvin particularly to the way Ireland was treated as compared deprecates — ‘an extraordinary aspect of de to neutral Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey Valera and Fianna Fáil’s behaviour’ — was and the Iberian dictatorships, towards the ‘sense of insecurity which they promoted which Churchill was considerably more ... anxiety was a permanent feature of circumspect. But then Ireland was the only Irish public life from May 1940 to August European neutral that he did not have to be 1945’. Girvin sees this as an attempt both to nice to; attacking the Irish now and then was orchestrate support for government and to probably therapeutic. Girvin argues that the undermine challenges from opposing groups. Irish could have done a lot more to support He also strongly disputes the argument the Allies short of going to war, but given the that Irish neutrality was in the national extensive material that has been released in interest, as this could not equate to party Irish, British and American archives over the or government interests. Irish neutrality, he last decade and more, this argument cannot claims, ‘had little to do with national interest be sustained. De Valera was determined that and everything to do with ideology’.36 though the country was neutral, he would The argument as to whether Ireland never allow it to be used as a base of attack should have abandoned neutrality and against Britain, a policy he had enunciated supported the Allies surfaces from time as far back as 1920, and he kept to that. to time in the correspondence columns of The Irish government put no restriction the Irish Times. Girvin and Roberts firmly on its nationals joining the Allied forces or believe that de Valera should have abandoned working in British war industries and it gave
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38 Girvin, The Emergency, unstinting co-operation in areas like postal the Germans and later with the Japanese 329. censorship, coast-watching, subversion and representatives to their heart’s content.’39 39 Irish Times, 14 May espionage. A majority of the British Cabinet However, although Churchill continued 1945. 40 Martin Gilbert, Winston in 1939 and thereafter, despite Churchill’s to criticize neutrality in his war memoirs, S. Churchill 1945–1965: jeremiads, considered it preferable to have privately his views do not seem to have been www.fieldday.ie‘Never Despair’ (London, the Irish as a co-operative neutral rather than as hostile. In the final volume of his official 1988), 364–72. Churchill run the risk of another wartime insurgency. biography published in 1988, Martin Gilbert included these comments about Ireland in a 1952 In a rather apocalyptic conclusion, printed the remarkable but rather bizarre edition of his biography ‘The End of de Valera’s Ireland’, Girvin document that Churchill wrote, and which of his father, Lord portrays neutrality as the fount of all the was known within the Churchill family as Randolph Churchill. country’s post-war ills. He argues that ‘The Dream’. One evening at Chartwell the main legacies of the Emergency were in November 1947, when Churchill was isolationism and lost opportunity which attempting to copy a painting of Lord almost led to the destruction of Irish Randolph Churchill, the ghost of his society, which, paradoxically, he also father suddenly appeared and they had a sees as ‘safe, stable and conservative’. conversation about events since his death in Somewhat puzzlingly, he locates the roots 1895. What happened to Ireland, asked Lord of isolationism in the 1930s, a decade Randolph, the player of the Orange card in when Ireland played a leading role at the 1886, did they get Home Rule? League of Nations. In consequence of this isolationism, ‘policymakers in Ireland could ‘The South got it, but Ulster stayed with us’. not or would not see the challenge the new ‘Are the South a republic?’ Europe provided or the opportunities which ‘No one knows what they are. They it offered’.38 This statement ignores how are neither in nor out of the Empire. But hamstrung Irish policymakers were in any they are much more friendly to us than consideration of the Common Market by they used to be. They have built up a their almost complete dependence on British cultured Roman Catholic system in the markets and sterling. South. There has been no anarchy or In the history of neutrality, de Valera is confusion. They are getting more happy of course the dominant personality on the and prosperous. The bitter past is fading.’ Irish side, but in the books under review ‘Ah’, he said, ‘how vexed the Tories one wishes that Churchill received rather were with me when I observed that there more attention. In certain respects he and de was no English statesman who had not Valera were mirror images of one another: had his hour of Home Rule’. Then after they came to symbolize their countries at a a pause, ‘What about the Home Rule critical time; they were aware of their place meaning “Rome Rule”?’ in history; they each came to Anglo-Irish ‘It certainly does, but they like it. And relations burdened with a weight of historical the Catholic Church has now become a baggage. Churchill had a pernicious great champion of individual liberty.’ influence on Irish policy in 1940-41 (as he ‘You must be living in a very happy did on India throughout the war) and his age. A Golden Age, it seems’.40 hectoring only reinforced Irish suspicions of British aims. These were confirmed in Nearly all of these books have benefited his famous broadcast at the end of the war from the opening of Irish official and private when he praised British self-restraint: ‘His archives since the 1980s and they reveal how Majesty’s Government never laid a violent much we still have to understand about a hand on them, though at times it would period which shaped every sphere of modern have been quite easy and natural, and we Irish society. left the de Valera Government to frolic with
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288 Ireland’s Difficulty, the Novelist’s www.fieldday.ieOpportunity? Sean Ryder
Catholic Emancipations: Irish Fiction from Thomas Moore to James Joyce Emer Nolan Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007 xxiv + 240 pages. ISBN 0-815-63175-8
Thomas Moore saw bright prospects for the Irish novel in the nineteenth century: ‘Ireland bids fair to be the great mart of fiction,’ he wrote in the Edinburgh Review in 1826. Unfortunately for Moore, what was good for novelists was not necessarily good for poets; as he saw it, the growth of fiction was accompanied by the desertion of ‘the fair springs of Poesy’ across Europe, and the impossibility of creating poetry at all in Ireland in its present condition. ‘The same causes,’ he complains, ‘that have embittered and degraded the history of Ireland, so as to render it incapable of furnishing any safe Charles Henry Cook (c. 1830–1906), St. Patrick’s Day, oil on canvas, 1867, 86.4 x 111.7 or worthy theme for the poet, cm, National Library of Ireland. have brought the character of its
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Thomas Moore, artist unknown, sometimes attributed to Martin Archer Shee, oil on canvas, c. 1800–05, 73.7 x 62.2 cm, National Portrait Gallery, www.fieldday.ieLondon.
people, both moral and social, to a state by Maria Edgeworth, who complained 1 Thomas Moore, ‘Irish which is eminently favourable to the more that party and sectarian division made it Novels’, Edinburgh Review, 43 (1826), 356– humble aspirations of the novelist.’1 impossible to produce fiction in Ireland 72. This formulation of Ireland’s difficulty as in the 1820s. Moore too acknowledged the novelist’s opportunity is an interesting the ‘great concert of discord’ produced by reversal of the famous renunciation of fiction Ireland’s colonial condition, but, unlike
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2 Moore, ‘Irish Novels’, Edgeworth, believed that the results — the interrupted by digression or prolixity. The 358–59. ‘inverted and unnatural’ institutions, the characterizations are shallow and typological 3 Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff gentry’s ‘vulgar arrogance’, the people’s rather than individualized and organic. The and the Great Hunger (London, 1995), 203. historically induced ‘low, circumventing writing is uneven in register and voice, the cunning’ — were all valuable grist to the moral structure marred by political concerns. www.fieldday.iemill of fiction (as opposed to poetry), The writing may even be ‘duplicitous’, in the and that in combination with the ‘lively sense of calling for the rejection of native temperament of the whole nation’ there is barbaric violence and superstition while in ‘plenty of small game for the satirist and fact generating reader sympathy for those observer of character’. If the novelist’s role very energies of the unreformed past — like is to be a ‘sketcher of human nature’, then Milton, being of the devil’s party without no country could provide ‘more original knowing it. subjects for his pencil, more mixtures of Interestingly, Moore’s own benchmark for lights and shadows, or more of that sort of fiction did not correspond to that of the realist picturesqueness, towards which (in morals novel. Instead of the features of bourgeois as well as painting), utility and order are realism — for instance, the narrative of the last ingredients requisite’. And politics, individual progress, social improvability, far from being a distraction to a fictional harmony between the individual and society, narrative, Moore assumes to be essential reader identification with character, and a to the understanding of those manners reduction of politics to a career option or and morals. For him, the recent fiction of plot device — Moore imagines the novel John and Michael Banim and other Irish to be a mixture of social satire, incidental authors did not transcend politics but made variety, character ‘observation’ (rather than a necessary vehicle for them: ‘It is pleasant identification), all crafted into a form that after ages of bad romance in politics, to find has a utilitarian dimension. He assumes that thus, at last, good politics in romance.’2 political conflict and historical intrusion Set alongside the mostly negative are part of the very fabric of the life to be assessments of the early nineteenth-century represented, and therefore inescapably part Irish novel by previous generations of critics, of the fiction. In such writing there may one might think Moore’s comments to be be little distinction between foreground strangely utopian, misguided, or facile. At and background, characters may take on worst, the usual story goes, the nineteenth- allegorical meaning, and human behaviour century Irish novel is just a clumsy and may be deeply shaped by collective activity practically unreadable attempt to imitate the and communal structures. great realist novel that flourished in England Moore’s comments point to the fact that and continental Europe. At best, it is a the realist novel was not the only model heroic failure that simply found it impossible available to or valued by Irish novelists in to represent the turbulent and recalcitrant the nineteenth century, and that using it as conditions produced by a colonial history a benchmark may be severely to distort the within the formal conventions of the classic purpose and achievement of much nineteenth- realist text, what Terry Eagleton calls the century fiction. Recent critical commentary ‘contention ... between English convention has reflected similar thinking by paying much and Irish experience’.3 This ‘failure’ may more attention to the extensive presence of even have its own virtue — in so far as it non-realist genres of sensation fiction, gothic, confirms the value of an insurgency that melodrama, historical romance, didactic disrupts English literary forms as well as ‘improvement’ fiction and the picaresque colonial political and economic structures. It in Irish writing — seeing in these forms is commonplace to argue that these novels’ alternative Irish traditions that may in fact plots are incoherent or circular, constantly have been more successful and robust, even
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Outward Bound (Dublin), Erskine Nicol (1824–1904), lithograph, 34.2 x 27.6 cm, National Library of Ireland. This popular image can be seen above the piper in www.fieldday.ieCook’s St. Patrick’s Day.
if they cannot be assimilated to a Leavisite Instead, Nolan performs the more difficult 4 See Jacqueline Belanger, canon based on classic realist principles.4 task of finding ways in which the attempts ed., The Irish Novel in the Nineteenth Century Emer Nolan’s stimulating new book at realism by certain Irish Catholic authors (Dublin, 2005) for a good returns us to the issue of Irish realism — but may in fact have had some emancipatory sample of recent trends; not to simply rehearse the existing arguments aspects. She pays due respect to the fact that see also J. H. Murphy, about its limitations in an Irish context. these authors themselves took the realist Catholic Fiction and Social Reality in Ireland, 1873–1922 (London, 1997). 292 Ireland’s Difficulty, the Novelist’s Opportunity?
5 Nolan, Catholic novel as a benchmark, and were conscious the historical record of Anglo-Irish relations. Emancipations, 176. of the problems and difficulties they faced. But in the framing devices Moore uses to She reads her selected authors — especially chronicle this historiography, Nolan detects Moore, Gerald Griffin, the Banim brothers, certain representational strategies that bear Charles Kickham, Canon Sheehan and strongly on the development of Irish fiction www.fieldday.ieGerald O’Donovan — as engaged in more right through the century. By ‘narrating a or less deliberate attempts to develop a prose history of collective consciousness’,5 Moore form with a dual purpose; on the one hand, gives voice and agency to the rural, Catholic, capable of imagining a modernizing Irish communal, ‘Whiteboy’ identity without society in the process of political, religious demonizing, sentimentalizing, individualizing and economic ‘emancipation’, while on the or pathologizing it. The result is more dialogic other hand, retaining sight of the valuable than is usual in nineteenth-century Irish elements of pre-modern social and cultural fiction, since Rock’s Irish voice addresses his formations that persist in Irish rural culture. English interlocutor unapologetically, with Their project is a kind of literary equivalent confidence, and with an entirely coherent of O’Connellism, in which the native ‘subaltern’ narrative of Irish history. bourgeoisie seek to establish modern forms One effect of this technique, and one of civil society (and thus be emancipated where Nolan sees particular originality in from the past), yet paradoxically remain Moore, is to validate the communal, the culturally distinct from a ‘modern’ imperial carnivalesque, the customary, and even culture (in order to be emancipated from the rebellious without relegating them to political and cultural oppression). Thus modernity’s category of the primitive, as is the very cultural phenomena (the rituals, common in other nineteenth-century writers, traditions, social structures, religion) that even those sympathetic to the national must be valorized as signs of post-colonial or Catholic cause. Each of the authors national distinction are also those that Nolan surveys, however, are shown to have potentially undermine the building of a difficulty achieving this — each novel is a modern nation. struggle to negotiate between the desire for There is obviously a powerful tension emancipatory modernization and the anxiety between these demands, with consequences about its consequences for Irish culture. for literary form that are normally read as The Banim brothers and Griffin aesthetic failure by critics. But by adopting are caught in a bind whereby their a wider frame as Nolan does, the picture determination to assert the essential civility becomes a much more interesting reflection of the Irish (in order that they might be on the intersections of representational seen to qualify for the responsibilities of form, political strategy, nation-building and modernity) is disturbed by the vitality and modernization. attraction of the less civil, even criminal Thomas Moore is Nolan’s starting point. characters that populate the Ireland they But she is less interested in Moore’s theories represent. Griffin’s exemplary modern of fiction, or indeed his one real novel (a Catholic hero in The Collegians is so strange philosophical-theological-antiquarian- shallow when set beside the more vital if Orientalist romance set in early Christian chaotic and dark ‘villain’ of the novel that Egypt, entitled The Epicurean), than she is in he seems to be merely ‘lip-synching the his hybrid work Memoirs of Captain Rock music of modernity’,6 as if Griffin himself (1824). Much of Captain Rock was certainly cannot write a script for him to believe in. not intended to be understood as ‘fiction’. The Like Kickham (whom, Nolan reminds us, bulk of the text is the Captain’s account of was probably the bestselling Irish author several hundred years of Irish history — less until the 1950s at least), they cannot bring a novel than an urgent attempt to set straight themselves to abandon the energy of the
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the Church’s participation in a crude 6 Nolan, Catholic modernization that had no respect for Emancipations, 177. 7 Nolan, Catholic collectivity and tradition. Emily Lawless in Emancipations, 177. Grania is shown to have adopted elements 8 Nolan, Catholic of the heroic individual of classic realism Emancipations, 179. www.fieldday.iein order to represent a woman’s story with 9 Nolan, Catholic Emancipations, xx. something like the power of a Jane Eyre, but is brought up short by the genre’s inability to fully represent the context of rural Irish life, including the Irish language. At the same time, George Moore and the early Joyce (like many after them) finally abandon realism for a naturalist style that bleakly subverts realism’s optimistic assumptions, casting doubt over any emancipatory possibilities at all in Ireland. Yet, for Nolan, it is eventually Joyce who has real success in bringing into harmony both modernity and pre- or non- modern forms of Irish cultural practice — by opting for the much riskier and ambitious formal experimentation that earlier writers would not or could not perform. In the creative flux of Finnegans Wake especially, the artificial but powerful distinction unassimilated folk, while simultaneously between what the nineteenth century believing that modernization in the form sometimes defined as Protestant culture and of discipline and progress held the key Catholic anarchy is finally dissolved: ‘the to national development. The dilemma is masses achieve consciousness’.8 captured by Nolan’s quip that ‘Kickham Partly Nolan’s book is an attempt hoped that Irish peasants could be hard- to counter old assumptions about the working and provident, and still dance at nineteenth-century Irish novel’s ‘failure’; the crossroads’.7 This situation, however, partly it is an attempt to model a new is not simply a paralysing contradiction. way of evaluating the purpose and effect Kickham’s Knocknagow provided a of such fiction; and partly its aim is ‘to powerful vision of modern pastoral for supply a missing chapter in the prehistory a post-Famine survivor class of aspirants of Joyce’s distinctive modernism’.9 Its to Irish nationhood and proprietorship, multiple ambitions are its strength but also in terms that supported a usable, if an occasional source of frustration: while problematic, Irish version of modernity. the close readings of the individual texts The Catholic novelists of the later part are remarkably clear-sighted and fresh, the of the century had somewhat different larger implications of the analysis of this conditions to deal with, following very diverse but highly select range of texts Catholicism’s resurgence and assertion of sometimes beg for further development. institutional power, and the emergence of The theoretical arguments that knit together peasant proprietorship. Some, like Sheehan the disparate writers and historical periods and O’Donovan, created their own versions (from the Act of Union to the Celtic Tiger) of the tension between modernization and have sometimes to be left as indicative older cultural forms, expressing through statements rather than fully demonstrated realistic modes their anxieties about theses. For example, Nolan notes pithily
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10 Nolan, Catholic that the perception of the Catholic Irish as Epicurean is far more of a ‘Catholic’ novel Emancipations, 178. a violent and indisciplined race before the than his Memoirs of Captain Rock, and 11 There are some Famine quickly transmuted into its opposite Joyce’s Portrait (rather than Ulysses or interesting preliminary comments on literary — a perception that they were the most Finnegans Wake) is the Irish novel that Catholicism in Joe Cleary, repressed and sexless people in Western makes it on to international lists of ‘Catholic www.fieldday.ie‘The Nineteenth-Century Europe in the wake of Catholic consolidation fiction’ in the company of Graham Greene, Irish Novel: Notes and in the late nineteenth-century. And now, François Mauriac and Evelyn Waugh. Why Speculations on Literary History’, in Belanger, having been for a while the avatars of de did Ireland’s Catholic authors not only ed., Irish Novel in the Valera’s anti-materialist vision, the Irish are produce something quite different to the Nineteenth Century, perceived to be model consumers, ‘taking classic realist novel, but also something 213–19. with gusto to the accelerated consumption of quite different to the European Catholic 12 David Lloyd, ‘Afterword: Hardress Cregan’s Dream the post-boom economy’. ‘These,’ she notes, novel? And what effect, if any, did the — For Another History ‘are recognizable stages of the process of widely circulated pietistic literature that kept of the Irish Novel’, becoming fully incorporated into the system nineteenth-century nationalist publishers like in Belanger, ed., Irish of global capitalism.’10 This argument about James Duffy in business have on Catholic Novel in the Nineteenth 11 Century, 229–37 (236– the longer trajectory of modernity in Ireland culture, writing and politics? 37). flashes through the book, but is not always The reason for dwelling on this particular firmly attached to the literary historical detail issue is not so much to signal the limits of being discussed — it does, however, give the Nolan’s approach as it is to show how her book a rich suggestiveness that should make study opens up and provides occasion for it valuable even to those working outside the further questions. In a recent essay describing field of the nineteenth century. the possibilities for a productive critique of In a similar way, the term ‘Irish Catholic the nineteenth-century novel, David Lloyd fiction’ itself raises significant issues that suggests that ‘both the Irish novel of the Nolan does not have space to explore in period and the criticism of it seem constantly full. While she admits to using the term haunted by the acknowledgement of failure ‘Catholic’ in primarily a sociological and or of inadequacy to models it seeks to political sense rather than a denominational emulate’ — this despite the recent critical one, it is difficult not to wonder whether reorientations that take a more positive view there are circumstances when ‘Catholic’ of the Irish novel’s fragmented, disrupted in ‘Catholic fiction’ might signify more forms. He argues that there is little point in than nationalist political sympathies and trying to redeem these works aesthetically; family background. What happens if we instead, our reading of them should helpfully apply the term as a doctrinal or theological propel us towards a critical antagonism perceptive, or as a name for the intended with the dominant literary forms that these or actual audience? Were there multiple novels ‘fail to live up to’ or partly reject, ways of being Catholic in terms of class and and that continue to legitimate forms of gender that might have a bearing on the domination even now.12 Nolan’s insightful production and reception of fiction? The work makes a unique engagement with scene is complicated: William Carleton grew the Irish realist novel that illuminates the up within a Catholic sensibility and culture, strategic possibilities as well as limitations and made Irish Catholicism a theme of his of that literary form, and helps us see the fiction, but for a Protestant audience and ways in which struggles with representation an anti-Catholic purpose. Catholic authors have ramifications in the wider cultural and like James Clarence Mangan published political spheres. In all these respects, this is a prose in Protestant journals like the Dublin highly important book. University Magazine and sometimes registered the influence of continental Catholic writing. In some ways, Moore’s
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296 Bardic Realities www.fieldday.iePeter McQuillan Irish Bardic Poetry and Rhetorical Reality Michelle O’Riordan Cork: Cork University Press, 2007 xxvi + 458 pages. ISBN 978-1-85918-414-7
1 Mícheál Mac Craith, Lorg na hIasachta ar na Dánta Grá (Baile Átha Cliath, It has long been axiomatic that 1989); Tadhg Ó Dúshláine, An Eoraip Irish poetry of the High Middle agus Litríocht na Gaeilge 1600–50 (Baile Átha Cliath, 1987). Ages, in particular official court or ‘bardic’ poetry, was less susceptible to foreign influences than either the prose of the period or other types of poetry practised during the so-called ‘classical’ period (thirteenth to seventeenth centuries). This book goes some way towards an overhaul of this accepted wisdom and reinforces the conclusions of various scholars over the past number of years that literature in Irish was very much a part of the European mainstream — see, for example, Mícheál Mac Craith, Lorg na hIasachta ar na Dánta Grá, on the poetry of courtly love, and Tadhg Ó Dúshláine, An Eoraip agus Litríocht na Gaeilge 1600–50, on the influence of the baroque aesthetic on devotional and political literature.1 Like Royal Irish Academy, 23F16/99. Image courtesy of Irish Script on Screen, Dublin Institute for Mac Craith’s study, this book Advanced Studies.
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is concerned with a literary manifestation of situated within the context of the European 2 Pádraig A. Breatnach, a particular aristocratic courtly ethos, while ‘preceptive’ movement, where specific advice ‘The Aesthetics of Irish Bardic Composition: it is similar to aspects of Ó Dúshláine’s in its is given to prospective authors regarding An Analysis of Fuaras concern with the manipulation of a common the style and subject matter appropriate to iongnadh, a fhir store of rhetorical figures and tropes for composition through the formal analysis of chumainn by Fearghal www.fieldday.ietextual effect. literary style. Fundamental to Matthew’s Óg Mac an Bhaird’, Cambrian Medieval Essentially, O’Riordan is engaged in the tract, for example, is the process of inventio, Celtic Studies, 42 (2001), exploration of a shared European aesthetic, the finding of an appropriate subject from 51–72. which, she argues, informs the praise among the storehouse of traditional themes 3 Erich Poppe and Patrick poetry of the medieval and early modern of composition. In general, the emphasis Sims-Williams, ‘Medieval Irish Literary Theory and periods in Ireland. To this end, she posits is on finding the appropriate treatment Criticism’, in A. Minnis what has been in effect a ‘missing link’ and description of a subject within the set and I. Johnson, eds., in our understanding of what constituted confines of a genre: ‘originality’ is not the The Cambridge History the training of Irish poets. Chapter 1 sets aim. Once the ‘conception’ of a composition of Literary Criticism (Cambridge, 2005), ii, the scene historically with the recognition has been addressed, the discussion moves 291–309. that Irish as a vernacular had long been on to consider grammatical (‘the invention 4 Damien McManus, ‘Latinized’; O’Riordan goes on to argue of words’) and rhetorical aspects of ‘The Bardic Poet as for a basic ‘continuity of contact’ between composition. The latter are divided in Teacher, Student and Critic: A Context for the Ireland, Britain and Europe during the familiar fashion into figures (dealing mostly Grammatical Tracts’, entire medieval period. In that context, the with manipulation of morphology and in C. G. Ó hÁinle and Anglo-Norman invasion, far from being syntax) and tropes (metaphor, metonymy, D.E. Meeks eds., Unity disruptive, actually intensifies existing synecdoche, allegory, and so on). There in Diversity: Studies in Irish and Scottish Gaelic trends. In fact, in the explosion of European is also a section on metrics, including a Language, Literature and literary vernaculars in the High Middle Ages, discussion of metrical faults (something History (Dublin, 1997), Ireland had already a head start — the Old entirely familiar from Irish tradition). Despite 97–123. Irish grammatical tract Auraicept na nÉces some differences, the other two treatises 5 For a summary and discussion see, for is presented as a case study of this process. cover much the same type of material. example, various articles O’Riordan here builds on previous work The remainder of the book presents a by Brian Ó Cuív such as: on the aesthetics of bardic composition (P. series of case studies, which are designed to ‘Linguistic Terminology A. Breatnach);2 on medieval Irish literary contextualize Irish bardic practice within this in the Irish Bardic Tracts’, Transactions of the theory (Poppe and Sims-Williams),3 as well high medieval literary synthesis. Chapter 3 Philological Society, 64 4 as teaching practice (McManus). takes a poem by the well-known fourteenth- (1965), 141-64, and ‘The Irish grammarians and versifiers left century poet Gofraidh Fionn Ó Dálaigh, Linguistic Training of behind a series of linguistic and grammatical Beir eólas dúinn a Dhomhnaill, composed the Medieval Irish Poet’, Celtica, 10 (1973), 114- tracts.5 They were, however, largely silent on for Domhnall Mac Carrthaigh, rígdamna 40. other aspects of the poets’ creative process, of Desmond. The inventio of the poem is in particular the rhetorical structuring of an exhortation to the dedicatee to lead his composition. In chapter 2 O’Riordan traces people out of their West Munster ‘home’ this missing link to the European mainland of to Cashel, historic centre of the Munster the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, high-kingship, in the east of the province. to the treatises of Matthew of Vendôme (Ars Here we see that the poet draws on the Versificatoria, c. 1175), Geoffrey of Vinsauf ‘topical reserve’ of his culture to find an (Poetria Nova, c. 1208) and John of Garland entirely appropriate inventio: this is what, (Parisiana Poetria, c. 1234), all of which according to Geoffrey of Vinsauf, should be are largely concerned with the intersection circumscribed by the ‘mind’s inner compass’ between grammar and rhetoric. Coinciding before the poet attempts to compose. While with the transition of rhetoric from a public/ it may bear little relation to fourteenth- civic to an academic discipline and the rise century political reality, its literary (and of a scholastic curriculum, these treatises are cultural) reality is established by the history,
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6 Edited by Lambert or senchas, of the McCarthys and their multitude of rhetorical figures and tropes: McKenna in The Book erstwhile association with and possession of from the use of maxim and aphorism of Magauran (Dublin, the high-kingship of Munster. This literary (sententia) at the opening of the poem, as the 1947), 152-67. 7 See P. A. Breatnach, ‘The appropriateness is augmented by the poet’s poet instructs his lord in the teagasg flatha Chief’s Poet’, Proceedings use of a suitable apologue or uirscéal, that tradition of advice to a prince, to the poet’s www.fieldday.ieof the Royal Irish of Moses leading the Israelites out of their use of the technique of licentia, a ‘frankness Academy, 83C, 3 (1983), Egyptian captivity, as well as his evocation of speech’ that is tempered by, for example, 37–79, for a discussion of Irish terms relating to of a mytho-historical Eóganacht itinerary understatement (litotes) and self-denying this. — the journey that is delineated resonates ordinances (occultatio/paralipsis), whereby with the topography of an imagined, largely the poet pretends not to praise his patron pseudo-historical past that therefore bears while actually doing so), as well as other types a certain timeless quality. Once the poem of ambiguity, irony, innuendo and flattery. is under way, we see evidence of the poet’s Thus, in O’Riordan’s formulation, complaint characteristic delight in the exploitation functions less as the obverse of praise than of linguistic forms: the first few stanzas as a foil for it, a means of deliberating upon, are informed by the device of metaplasm reassessing and renewing the poet–patron (juxtaposition of words that look similar and nexus. Later in the poem, Ó Fialán shows may be conceptually similar but are formally his virtuosity by embarking on a litany of his different), in this case eol/eolas ‘knowledge/ patron’s triumphs in war (caithréim), which direction’, and seol ‘send’, ‘embark’. This gives him ample scope to deploy various device enhances the representation of rhetorical techniques based on repetition the sense of anticipation that attends an (repetitio): straight repetition of a word imminent journey or expedition, further (conduplicatio); repeating the final word of a intensified by the use of various types of phrase at the beginning of the next (gradatio) repetition or ‘dwelling’ on the topic that and other metaplasmic variations in form. attend it (commoratio). Chapter 5 returns us to the European The discussion in chapter 4 further mainland and engages in a comparison, on augments this sense of the literariness of a number of levels, between Irish bardic bardic composition. It is a close reading poets and the medieval troubadours. Various of ‘a poem of complaint’ composed parallels are drawn: the preoccupation by one Ádhamh Ó Fialán for an early of both groups with rank and status, the fourteenth-century Ulster lord, Tomás contractual nature of the relationship Mac Shamhradháin.6 The poem represents between artist and patron, the ‘indulgence’ a characteristic instance of bardic and special favour expected by the poet from dissatisfaction — the poet’s patron has his lord,7 as well as the conventional literary failed to fulfil, through the appropriate conceit of the poet as the patron’s lover or remuneration, his side of the reciprocal spouse. This last aspect is developed in an contract that exists between him and the poet. Irish context in chapter 6, entitled ‘Lovers’ In this case, the poet seeks restitution of cattle Quarrels’. Here three poems are discussed, that he had originally received in exchange all by Ó hUiginn poets. The inventio of each for a poem. O’Riordan’s approach is that in of these poems is that the poet feels slighted the absence of any evidence apart from the or undermined by his lord and O’Riordan poem itself, the theft of the cattle remains analyses them as good illustrations of licentia ‘notional’, more of a literary pretext for the or permissio — the art of addressing a topic exposition of the poet–patron relationship: candidly but by modulating the tone through it is the poem’s inventio, in other words. ambiguity, innuendo and flattery. The first The author’s analysis of the text emphasizes is by the early fifteenth-century Tadhg Óg Ó at every turn the felicitousness of the poet’s hUiginn addressed to Uilleog Búrc. Central invention and his adroitness at exploiting a here is the attribution of blame to others, to
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those who surround the patron rather than which, she maintains, functions as a kind 8 Edited by Lambert to the lord himself. This enables the poet to of deep background against which the later McKenna in Studies, 40 (1951), 93–96; 217–22; speak frankly to his own concerns without three compositions can be assessed. She 352–63 implicating Búrc too far. In the course of points again to a multitude of rhetorical the poem, the tone shifts from complaint, devices employed by the poet in opening www.fieldday.iethrough blandishment, accusation and the poem, from the initial proverbial-type threat to a plea for reconciliation by means opening (sententia) to the use of various of the poet’s own art. Again, O’Riordan types of repetition essential to the question- emphasizes the literariness of this endeavour and-answer format of the composition: — we have no independent way of knowing epanaphora (essentially anaphora, repetition if any such falling-out over a drunken of a word or phrase at the beginning of a word resulting in the poet’s imprisonment line), conduplicatio (simple repetition of by Búrc ever took place, but the poem words), gradatio (the incremental building nonetheless makes perfect sense on its own of climax, here through repeated questions rhetorical terms. The two poems discussed introduced by Cá mhéad? ‘How many?’), for Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn (c. 1545–91) are and divisio (answering the basic question ‘A theachtaire théid ar sliabh’ and ‘Cóir by positing a series of ancillary questions). Dé eadram is Uilliam’ which their original The questions referred to concern, initially, editor, Eleanor Knott (1922), has suggested the proper inflection of Irish nouns and the were both dedicated to an ‘unidentifiable’ first nine stanzas establish the basic inventio William Burke (possibly son of Seán, to of the poem: the teacher asks the questions, whom Tadhg Dall addressed his famous the pupil cannot answer, and therefore he poem ‘Fearann cloidhimh críoch Bhanbha’ must proceed to the serious business of in the 1570s). In any event, O’Riordan instruction. O’Riordan notes that in so argues that the very vagueness of these doing, the poet Ó Dálaigh places himself compositions in referential terms enhances within the medieval rhetorical tradition the poet’s exploitation of the classic features in that the material of the poem itself is of the complaint ‘genre’ — abandonment, designed to illustrate the grammatical points puzzlement and a desire for reconciliation. being taught (a practice found in the three In the latter poem, O’Riordan highlights medieval treatises alluded to above). Ó hUiginn’s effective use of the device of Of course it might be argued that this paralipsis or occultatio, disavowing in order approach to texts in terms of literariness to emphasize: essentially the poet here damns suits some poems better than others and his lord with faint praise. here we could take Tadhg Dall as a case in Chapter 7 takes us in a somewhat point. In the poem discussed by O’Riordan, different direction: ‘Poems about Poetry’. mentioned above, ‘A theachtaire théid ar Here we find the poets at their most self- sliabh’, it seems to me that a literary as aware and, indeed, self-aggrandizing. opposed to a literal reading enhances our Four poems are discussed in this chapter, appreciation and understanding of the poet’s three of them from the late sixteenth or intentions. As had been already pointed out early seventeenth centuries.8 These poems, by Knott, the meaning of the piece hinges according to O’Riordan, read like didactic around the interplay of the terms fíach ‘due, exercises cast in the form of a dialogue debt’ and geall ‘pledge, surety, mortgage’. In between either master and pupil or between brief summary: the poet sends his messenger argumentative peers, on the technical and in secret to his patron, Uilliam Búrc, to ask linguistic rights and wrongs of bardic him to assist him in his helplessness: for composition. She first discusses a fourteenth- the past two or three years, in his patron’s century poem by Gofraidh Fionn Ó Dálaigh absence, he has been paying everyone’s debts (‘Madh fiafraidheach budh feasach’), (fiacha), as well as his own. For this he has
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9 O’Riordan, Irish Bardic gone to the courthouse to seek redress (even now a ‘debtor’ for the poet’s sake. Just how Poetry and Rhetorial that process costs him further). He returns common, I would like to know, is the use Reality, xvii. from the court with a good warrant and of metaphors of financial indebtedness for 10 See my Native and Natural: Aspects of the shows his patent to some ‘servants’ (lucht unrequited love in Renaissance Europe? In Concepts of Right and seirbhísi, their precise remit or allegiance is any event, O’Riordan’s approach encourages www.fieldday.ieFreedom in Irish, Field perhaps deliberately vague here). With their a reading that, I feel, potentially enriches our Day Critical Conditions reaction, however, he loses hope; moreover understanding of sixteenth-century literature (Cork, 2004). ‘his captain’ and the sheriff can do nothing and enables us to ask further questions for him; he is advised to face up to his about that literature. creditors (or to entrust himself to them, That this would be the case for other in the Irish: bísi i leith lucht na bhfiach). specimens of sixteenth-century and early The poet then laments that, not only can seventeenth-century poetry in Irish will he not clear his debts, but that one pledge be more hotly contested. In fairness to or mortgage (éngheall) does not buy him O’Riordan, she does not set out to discuss credit and he is subjected to various usurious ‘political’ poems as such, and there is no need practices: it is as if he is being charged twice to rehearse here the views of, for example, and three times on everyone’s debt; even Marc Caball and Breandán Ó Buachalla, when he redeems his pledge it is passed on to which were occasioned by the appearance of another creditor; finally the president of the O’Riordan’s first book in 1990. However, it court laments that it is beyond his power to does seem at times in the current book that help the poet who has to keep paying. But the shadow of depoliticized reading still lurks for the poet it is not primarily the money in the background. The title of the book is in that concerns him, it is the indignity he is this respect perhaps somewhat provocative, made to suffer: his herdsmen, horse boys and Irish Bardic Poetry and Rhetorical Reality. servants all abandon him and the poet closes ‘Reality’ here translates as a literary his argument by returning to the lament of plausibility based on culture-specific factors, Búrc’s (his compánach) absence. He finishes choosing a theme or topic that is ‘realistic’ with a rather conventional stanza of eulogy, although it might never have happened (but epithets such as ‘the lion cub of Loch Con’ could have). The question then arises of how being used to describe the absent patron. to interpret this literary ‘reality’ in the light This poem is discussed by O’Riordan of alleged contiguous ‘facts’ of the outside within the general context of what she world (in O’Riordan’s view ‘political context’ calls ‘bardic love’ — in particular, the re- is a ‘fact-oriented’ mode of interpretation: establishment of the terms of personal ‘the poem then represents “facts”’9). I would intimacy between poet and patron when argue, however, that political context is not the poet feels that that intimacy has been reducible to ‘facts’ and that consideration of slighted. Of primary interest here are such contexts typically demands a reading these ‘terms’: Ó hUiginn is employing that is sensitive to the symbolic content of the the language of financial indebtedness poetry, a reading which, in other words, takes and legal obligation in order to make his a more ‘anthropological’ view of a more point metaphorically and we need not be long-term cultural meaning that transcends concerned about the existence or otherwise immediate political ‘realities’.10 Staying of an actual material debt in ‘real-life’ with the poetry of Tadhg Dall, what is the terms. An interesting comparison here rhetorical reality of his poem of exhortation might be Sonnet 134 by Shakespeare, Ó (‘D’fhior cogaidh comhailtear síothchán’, hUiginn’s contemporary, where the poet ‘To a man of war is peace observed’) to declares himself ‘mortgaged’ to his lover’s Brian na Múrtha Ó Ruairc, lord of Bréifne, will — he addresses her as ‘thou usurer’, composed in the late 1580s when Ó Ruairc while the poet’s friend who also loves her is had fallen foul of the president of Connacht,
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Royal Irish Academy, 23F16/129. Image courtesy of Irish Script on Screen, Dublin www.fieldday.ieInstitute for Advanced Studies.
Sir Richard Bingham, for assistance rendered the rhetoricians, especially in respect of 11 O’Riordan, Bardic Poetry to survivors of the shipwrecked Armada ‘plausibility’ — while the McCarthy claim to and Rhetorical Reality, off the north-west coast of Ireland? (One Cashel in the fourteenth century is hardly in 94–95. 12 Cathal Ó Háinle, survivor, Francisco de Cuellar, refers to ‘el the realm of political realism, it is nonetheless Promhadh Pinn (Má gran señor Ruerge’.) Here again, the poem plausible in a historical and literary sense Nuad, 1978), 46–48. shows a number of rhetorical features such as and it also resonates with contemporary those discussed above: the opening sententia, Gael–Gall antagonisms (Cashel being in the use of paradox, irony and anaphora Butler territory at this point). She therefore (the poet typically launches each incitement draws the conclusion that the apologue ‘does with an imperative form of some kind) as not ... encourage the notion that the poet well as a lengthy apologue, derived from had a function of political exhortation’.11 Aesop, on the treachery of the lion who Possibly so in this particular instance, having invited all the animals to his cave on although I am not certain how much we can the pretext of a feast, proceeds to kill them, ever recover the cognitive and affective terms all the save the fox who has the cunning of the reception of such poetry. However, to escape with his life (he sees footprints could O’Riordan ‘plausibly’ have analysed going into the cave but none coming out). Tadhg Dall’s sixteenth-century apologue in In other words, the bellicosity of Ó Ruairc this same light given its immediate political will force the English to sue for peace, but context and bearing in mind, as Cathal Ó this will be merely a prelude to such an act hÁinle has pointed out in relation to this of treachery on their part, so forewarned is very poem,12 that the 1570s had witnessed forearmed. In her discussion in chapter 3 of incidents of precisely the kind that the poet the apologue used by Gofraidh Fionn in his is warning Ó Ruairc against, the massacre of poem to Mac Carrthaigh (Moses leading his the followers of Brian Ua Néill at the hands people out of Egypt, just as the dedicatee of the earl of Essex in 1574 and the summary will lead the McCarthys back to Cashel), mass execution at Mullaghmast (Mullach O’Riordan emphasizes the literariness of Maistean) in 1577 (both recorded by the its use in accordance with the precepts of Four Masters)? In addition, I have argued
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13 McQuillan, Native and elsewhere13 that the rhetorical fulcrum of this emphasizing an aesthetic shift among poets Natural. poem is provided by the poet’s invocation of themselves rather than a wholesale collapse 14 See Patricia Palmer’s the symbolic ideological centre of the Gaelic of their cultural world. I have no quibbles evocative account, incorporating both polity’s sense of unity: Tara, Midhe, Uisneach with this interpretation: there is no denying poem and execution, in and other sites associated with the high- the pervasively whimsical tone of the poem. www.fieldday.ieLanguage and Conquest kingship. That this ‘high-kingship’ was never However, as Caball has pointed out,15 by in Early Modern Ireland realized in the historical record does not the time of the Ulster Plantation the tone of (Cambridge, 2004), 212–16. diminish its ideological cogency, especially such poems has changed radically as a result 15 Marc Caball, Poets in the Ireland of the 1570s and 1580s. How of plantation, dislocation of the nobility and Politics: Reaction then did the ‘rhetorical reality’ of Ó hUiginn’s and the spread of English common law. and Continuity in Irish gríosughudh ... chum cogaidh a n-aghaidh We should also note that, conversant as Ó Poetry, 1558–1625, Field Day Critical Conditions na banriaghna Eisiobel (‘incitement to hEodhasa was with the preceptive rhetorical (Cork, 1998). war against the queen Elizabeth’, as one tradition, he had also, as Clare Carroll has 16 Clare Carroll, Circe’s manuscript prefaces the poem) reverberate argued, read his Machiavelli.16 Cup: Cultural in Ó Ruairc’s head as he stood in the dock However, I do not wish to finish on a Transformations in Early Modern Ireland, Field in London awaiting his execution for high negative note because this is an important Day Critical Conditions treason, an event whose depiction by John book which deserves a warm welcome on (Cork, 2001). Stow presents it as a ghoulish and gruesome its own terms. I had a sense of revitalized 17 Quoted by O’Riordan, reverse mirror image of the apocalyptic engagement and enjoyment in reading Irish Bardic Poetry and Rhetorical Realities, 72, diction of Tadhg Dall’s exhortation (‘his O’Riordan’s analysis of the various poems from Jane Baltzell Kopp’s members and bowels burned in the fire, his presented here. And certainly, it puts to translation. heart taken out and holden up by the hang- rest the curious notion (I cannot remember man, naming it to be the Arch-traytor’s the original source but one sees it recycled heart’14)? from time to time) that Irish poets of the Somewhat in the same vein, the book bardic period were but little concerned with concludes with a fine discussion of two the compositions as integrated or cohesive poems written in the last throes of the wholes or units, the individual verse as a bardic era, when, as O Riordan puts it, rhetorical unit, so to speak, standing in the medieval prescriptive arts were being more or less random juxtaposition with abandoned and literary tastes were changing, its companions. To give the final word to in Ireland as in Europe. One of these poems Geoffrey of Vinsauf: ‘Let the mind’s inner is by Eochaidh Ó hEodhasa (d. 1616), compass circumscribe the whole area of the ‘Ionmholta malairt bhisigh’ and O’Riordan subject matter in advance’.17 In the poems gives an excellent analysis of the poem’s presented in this book, O’Riordan has most structure, highlighting not least its moments elegantly shown how Irish poets could of irony. She again accords this poem a more triumphantly realize the precepts of medieval literary than literal reading, in other words scholastic teaching.
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304 The Lack of the Liberal www.fieldday.ieTerry Eagleton
Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change, 1970–2000 R. F. Foster Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 2007 240 pages. ISBN 978-0-713997-83-5
In the culture wars between nationalists and revisionists (or ‘revisionists’, as Roy Foster scare- quotedly has it), a spot of vulgar Marxism can concentrate the mind wonderfully. Anti-colonial revolutions in the twentieth century have been largely the work of the petty bourgeoisie, allied with forces to the left of them which, as is the way with bourgeois revolutions, usually end up being sold down the political river. Marxism was the first mass political movement to champion such anti-colonial aspirations, just as it was the first mass political movement to wave the flag for women’s emancipation. But in doing so, it sought to furnish the forces of national independence with Dony McManus’s Linesman Pulling Rope (1999), a rather less parochial, more City Quay, Dublin. Photo: Axiom Photographic Agency/Getty Images. inclusive and internationalist
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world-view than the nationalism to which is rather less apparent. It is certainly not they were typically in thrall. In this, it was to unambiguously the case when it comes to prove singularly unsuccessful. Ireland. And there are, of course, those Even so, the political Left challenged cross-grained creatures who are anti-colonial the limits of nationalist ideology while in every instance but their own, just as there www.fieldday.iecontinuing to support the right of peoples are those who wish to see tower blocks to govern themselves — a right which sprout in everyone else’s back garden. it regarded like liberalism, feminism, Few thinkers have waxed more democracy and republicanism as part enthusiastic about the bourgeoisie than of the precious heritage of bourgeois Marx. You can tell a Marxist by his or Enlightenment. You can support a political her admiration for the middle class. Marx project while criticizing some of its regarded them as the most revolutionary ideological expressions. Liberals like Roy force in human history, and never ceased Foster support feminism, while no doubt to lavish praise on their magnificent rejecting what they would see as its more achievements in the cause of human ‘extreme’ ideological manifestations. One emancipation. But the middle classes takes it that he is no more a fan of bra- have particular reason to be embarrassed burning than he is of Brendan Bradshaw. by such commendation. As they grow But in the liberal camp, what goes for older, they wax somewhat coy about their feminism does not necessarily go for national own insurrectionary heritage, rather like liberation. We hear an enormous amount respectable young trainee accountants who from liberal revisionists about the crimes squirm when their parents fondly recall and follies of nationalism, but scarcely a the brutish antics of their childhood. If the word about the virtues of anti-colonial middle classes wreak political havoc from rebellion from India to Angola. True to time to time, it is ironically in the name of our post-modern times, the political and order and stability. If they tear the political economic find themselves displaced by the world to pieces, it is to create the kind of cultural and ideological — as they are, too, peaceable, well-disciplined, conservative by emollient revisionist accounts of Anglo- regimes within which their consuming Irish landlordism or Northern unionism passion — the accumulation of profit — can which see them as cultural and ethnic groups be most vigorously pursued. Revolutionary somewhat akin to the disabled or immigrant origins are bad for business. The values that Poles, rather than as dominant social and founded the state now prove an obstacle economic classes. to its flourishing, as former sans-culottes By contrast with the political Left, get their feet under ministerial desks and liberals have been more equivocal about talk of collective liberation gives way to whether, say, their proper aversion to Islamic the language of individual liberty. Neither nationalism is coupled with a desire to rid violence nor heroism is any longer tolerable. Iraq of an illegal imperial invader. They thus In the transition from bandits to bankers, tend to be more selective than the political militants to managers, Shelley to Trollope, Left about the middle-class Enlightenment the bourgeoisie, like children in the grip of of which they are, even more obviously than Freud’s so-called family romance syndrome, the Left, the contemporary heirs. For the are constrained to draw a veil over their Left, it is simply inconsistent to be a good own tainted origins, thrusting this squalid Enlightenment liberal yet to oppose the narrative of aggression and illegality into emancipation of colonized nations. Anti- the political unconscious. Only in the colonialism is simply a form of democracy. occasional liberal society — the United Whether this is the case with Roy Foster, States springs to mind — can this running Tom Dunne, or Joep Leerssen, however, battle between poetry and prose, the epic
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and the pragmatic, be successfully resolved, are equally critical of inflexible absolutes. as entrepreneurialism in Texas or Arizona In fact, the founding principles of liberalism becomes a new form of heroism. Appealing are just as absolute and inflexible as those of to the founding fathers in the States is as Seventh-Day Adventism, a point which by no much a conservative gesture as a radical one. means automatically constitutes a criticism www.fieldday.ieIn most of the middle-class world, however, of the creed. It is good that most liberals the more amnesiac you grow about the believe torture to be absolutely wrong. real sources of your own power (invasion, In other respects, however, liberals do usurpation, insurrection, extermination, indeed elevate to absolute status values that and so on), the more your sovereignty is are clearly relative. Foster himself seems perfected. It is a doctrine promulgated to take it for granted in post-modern style all the way from Pascal and David Hume that diversity and plurality are always to Kant and Burke. For this theory, all unequivocal goods, whereas there are political authority thrives on a certain willed those rather less generously open-ended oblivion or merciful forgetfulness, rather souls among us who hold that five fascist as for Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Freud parties or a rash of aristocracies are a good all constructive action depends on a certain deal worse than one. If diversity, plurality, salutary repression. flexibility and inclusiveness can indeed be Or, if not outright oblivion, then at least precious values, they are also the mantras on what Freud called ‘secondary revision’. of a late capitalism which needs for its own Discreditable political pedigrees may be purposes to break down barriers and loosen too recent to be easily erasable, as Burke up old allegiances; and the true pluralists recognized of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy are those who feel the need to say both in contrast to his adopted England. But as things together, rather than remain blind one phase of middle-class society yields to to the material basis of their own beliefs. another, and the insurance brokers gradually The doctrine that honest doubt is preferable take over from the insurrectionists, that to firm conviction; that firm conviction earlier history can at least be mocked, is always only a heartbeat away from massaged, downplayed and discredited authoritarianism; that the truth generally lies by a post-revolutionary generation of in the middle; that there are no important middle-class ideologues in full-blooded conflicts in which one side must absolutely Oedipal revolt against the founding fathers. win and the other absolutely lose; that a Revisionism is not, to be sure, simply a readiness to compromise in the spirit of reflex of historical conditions, which is realism is always to be commended, and that why this particular Marxist narrative has a resistance to this counsel is inherently a vice smack of vulgarity about it. Only paid-up — all of these abstract, inflexible, one-sided, Foucaultians hold that the truth is simply grossly generalizing liberal dogmas must a function of interests. But historians have surely be thrown open to a genuinely free generally found it as hard to historicize play of the mind. themselves as physicians have proved inept It is, to be sure, important to deflate at self-healing, which is why this story is one grandiose nationalist claims, just as it is they might do worse than bend an ear to. important to refute cynical revisionist If it is unlikely that they will, it is because debunking. In one sense, however, nothing liberal pragmatists like Foster are averse to more dramatic has happened in these large theoretical abstractions, except when disputes than the replacement of middle- it comes to such notions as ‘the uniqueness class nationalists with middle-class liberals. of the individual’, ‘the rights of property’, Fundamental power-relations remain largely ‘the rich diversity of humankind’, ‘the values unaltered. The task of the political Left is of Western civilisation’, and so forth. They not so much to take sides in this somewhat
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parochial squabble as to comment on its own partisanship. For one thing, liberalism historical foundation. There are many is supposed to be defined by its anti- affinities between these two warring camps. partisanship or disinterestedness. A liberal Roy Foster is quite as hostile to the Left as like Edna Longley might serve to exemplify arch-nationalist D. P. Moran. Revealingly, such an admirable lack of sectarian www.fieldday.iehe refers in this book to the former Irish animus. For another thing, liberal thought Communist Party apparatchik Mick is supposed to be about living, breathing, O’Riordan, leader of a notably toothless, unique, flesh-and-blood individuals, not arthritic, tamely reformist bunch of leftists, rebarbative dogmas or coercive collectivities. as belonging to ‘the wilder shores of In fact, of course, it constitutes a belief radicalism’, which is rather like mistaking system every bit as abstract as nuclear Sean Connolly for James Connolly. (It physics, if not quite so difficult to grasp. As should be added, however, that O’Riordan for collectivities, Foster writes here sniffily of fought with great courage against Franco. Irish republicans who ‘identify with nation, Foster, however, does not like heroes, which tribe, church or party’, heedless of the fact presumably means that he is as averse to that free liberal spirits like himself are every Oliver Tambo as he is to Patrick Pearse.) bit as tribal on their protected reservations There is also a well-bred sneer at leftist in Oxbridge and Camden Town as anything political demonstrations, which played to be found in the interior of Borneo. To an a key role in ending the Vietnam War, as outsider, the shared mindset of most middle- ‘quintessential act(s) of 1960s agitprop class liberals is every bit as striking as the theatre’. Both parties to this contention tend cloned opinions of the Church of Latter-Day to be doughty supporters of capitalism; Saints. both are sceptical of older mythologies, At one point in his argument, Foster whether colonialist or nationalist; both notes rather plaintively that some people use view the kind of history that preceded them the word ‘liberal’ as a term of abuse. As far as ideologically distorting; both regard as Marxists go, it would be more accurate themselves as in the van of modernity; both to describe it as at once a term of abuse tend to be believers in historical progress. In and admiration. Classical liberalism is a fact, Foster is not entirely without a certain tale of exhilarating emancipation from the Irish chauvinism himself, having regularly prelates, autocrats and patriarchs, insisting labelled as ‘bandwaggoners’ those non-Irish as it did on the scandalous revolutionary commentators on Irish affairs with whose truth that men and women were free, equal, views he disagrees. We, poor Sassenach autonomous and endowed with inalienable souls, are bogus Irish, rather than full- rights simply by virtue of belonging to the blooded, authentic specimens of the race. human species. Which is to say, simply by One vital difference between the two virtue of the kind of bodies they had. This camps is that nationalists are upfront about is one of the most astonishingly radical their ideology, sometimes stridently so, insights ever to see the light of day, though whereas liberals on the whole are not. In it had a precedent in Judaeo-Christianity. fact, in their hearts liberals do not regard In its heyday, liberalism was far more of their beliefs as ideological at all, which a revolutionary movement than socialism is one reason why it is so exasperatingly has ever managed to be. It also fostered an difficult to argue with them. Ideology, like atomistic notion of the self, an extrinsicist, halitosis, is what other people have. Foster austerely contractual view of human speaks in this book of an Irish Labour Party relations, an anaemically utilitarian ethics, ‘uninfected’ by ideology, as though socialism a self-satisfied faith in progress and civility, is on a level with typhoid. It is not hard to a Panglossian purblindness to the more see why liberals tend to be blind to their malign, recalcitrant aspects of human
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Oisín Kelly’s Jim Larkin (1977), O’Connell Street, Dublin. Photo: www.fieldday.ieStockbyte/Getty Images.
nature, a doctrinal suspicion of doctrine, an of humanity’ serves to illustrate this point, alienated view of the extra-individual sphere, whereas, as Perry Anderson has pointed out and a witheringly negative view of power, in the case of Isaiah Berlin, this constitutes a the state, society, freedom, tradition and misreading of the passage in question.) communality. (As far as the liberal suspicion Liberal belief has been largely blind to of doctrine goes, Foster thinks that Kant’s the ways in which freedom for some has celebrated comment on the ‘crooked timber involved oppression or exploitation for
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Éamonn O’Doherty’s James Connolly, Beresford Place, www.fieldday.ieDublin.
many others, and has perversely championed historical basis, along with their virtues and a form of social and economic life that rides defects, and asks how these two things may roughshod over some of the very values it be interrelated. The traditional term for this holds most dear. So it is that Foster is an approach is ‘dialectical’, a word that one ardent supporter of both individual liberty can imagine Foster using about as easily and business schools. It is the economic as one can imagine him singing ‘Danny and political doctrines of liberalism that Boy’. It means, among other things, paying have sent Western tanks into Baghdad, just homage to one’s opponent, which marks as it is the ethical and cultural doctrines of the difference between the Left’s attitude to liberalism that have been summoned in some liberalism and liberalism’s attitude to the quarters to protest against that undertaking. Left. Socialists want to build on the great This view of middle-class liberalism, one liberal heritage in order eventually to reach might venture, is rather more subtle, beyond it. They are as committed to its complex and nuanced than the black-and- values as any Mill, Arnold or Russell; it is white polarities of Foster, Longley, Leerssen just that they see the need for radical change and Colm Tóibín when it comes to their own if those values are ever to have a hope of political adversaries, despite their ceaseless being universalized. reminders to others to be subtle, complex, For their part, liberals are supposed to nuanced and even-handed. see all sides of the story; but it is remarkable The Left does not regard liberal values how quickly those who protest against as timeless absolutes insulated from critical fixed oppositions resort to just this habit of scrutiny. Instead, it inquires into their mind when confronted with an ideological
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opponent. Irish liberal revisionists are not distaste for grand narratives might be a little celebrated for bringing to bear on their own less grandly generalizing. Not long ago, in principles the kind of sceptical, flexible, the darkest days of apartheid, one might open-minded investigation to which they plausibly have accused members of the South subject the beliefs of others. Yet this is African National Congress of clinging to www.fieldday.ieprecisely what their liberalism requires their absurdly abstract ideals and failing of them, which is where the creed starts to reconcile themselves to political reality. to hurt. A good liberal must be so liberal There were times when Martin Luther King as to have real trouble in being a liberal. looked like the most flaky sort of utopianist. They don’t like labels, for one thing. Foster, If the US occupation of Iraq is still in place unlike his great liberal near-namesake E. in fifty years’ time, would it be gritty realism M. Forster, reveals scarcely a scrap of such to embrace it and fanatical purism to object self-awareness, thus demonstrating that even to it? Foster is amusingly sardonic in this the finest of intelligences can be occasionally book about the reinvention of a befuddled rendered obtuse by ideology. Instead, he Celticism; it is a pity that all he has to pit appears to believe that his views are simple, against it is a Blairite pragmatism. hard-headed common sense, and sets up an Liberal revisionists are above all card- eminently self-serving opposition between carrying modernizers. The distinction fair-minded liberals and bigoted nationalists, between moderates and fanatics can be easily as though Ruth Dudley Edwards was less mapped on to one between the up-to-date prejudiced than Frederick Ryan. The truth and the archaic. As a historian, Foster trades is that, like most liberals, Foster is nervous in the past; as an ideologue, he greets much of political conviction as such, not just of of it with contempt. (There is a distinction its nationalist varieties. Like most liberals, here between R. F. Foster and Roy Foster, too, he does not seem to recognize just what the former representing the dispassionate a privileged position this is. There are those historian, the latter signalling the who have no need for political conviction, opinionated commentator.) ‘Modernization’, and those who cannot survive without it. probably the most vacuous, all-purpose One might expect a pluralist and pragmatist term in the sociological lexicon, is for liberal to be more sensitive to such distinctions. revisionists generally benign, as opposed One might also expect a pragmatist like to those who have noticed that it is usually Foster to be more contextual about what a euphemism for capitalism and its latest counts as political realism and idealism. autocratic requirements. In any case, that He is naturally allergic to the idealist system, with its urge to illimitable growth, rhetoric of Irish nationalism; but he does is now beginning to look distinctly archaic not seem to notice that the United States, in the light of ecological findings. And a a nation of which one imagines he is for mode of production that time after time the most part a political ally, is rife with has so plainly demonstrated its inability to enough earnest, high-minded, portentous feed the world is surely ripe for surpassing. ideological wind-baggery to make even Traditional Ireland for the more vulgar sort the most devoted Platonist flinch. It is a of revisionist is largely a place of myths, discourse that has wreaked rather more priests and stubbornly unmodernizable damage around the globe than Jim Larkin Micks, all of them distressingly remote from ever did. Those who refuse to adapt their middle-class Dublin. Yet modernization political ideals to contemporary reality are is itself among other things a form of almost always in Foster’s eyes ‘diehards’, mythology, as Horkheimer and Adorno ‘irredentists’ and ‘irreconciliables’. So indeed point out, and there are secularized priests they sometimes are; but one would expect, galore, some of them even more sinister than once again, that a liberal pluralist with a the clerical variety.
311 Field Day review
itself. Even demythologizing history-writing Bernadette McAliskey, several has its origin in fifth-century Athens, in the months after an attempt on her life in January 1981. steely realism of Thucydides. Republicanism is among the most ancient forms of politics. Liberalism is a discourse much older than www.fieldday.ienationalism, which sees itself as nothing if not modern and is in some respects quite right to do so. Liberalism is also of course a good deal longer in the tooth than Marxism. Slavery was bang up-to-date in its own day, and the fascists were programmatic modernizers. Many of the artistic avant garde were political reactionaries. Foster speaks in Luck and the Irish of ‘antediluvian’ labour practices, like any purple-jowled Daily Telegraph editorialist; but there is a distinctly modern quality about seeking to defend oneself against speed-up, neglect of safety measures and intensified exploitation. Modern multicultural identities can be every bit as coercive and constraining as some pre-modern concepts of selfhood. A chapter in this book on the loosening grip of religion in Ireland fails properly to balance the precious gains of this secularization with the loss of a certain spirituality, as the country shifts from comely maidens to hard-faced executives. For some observers, though not for Foster, true modernization in Ireland would involve completing the process of decolonization. Not all nostalgia is self-indulgent. In some respects, the past was indeed superior to the present, just as in other respects the opposite is the case. Atavists and progressivists are alike tunnel- Any lecturer rash enough to declare, say, visioned. Walter Benjamin even managed that the paper clip was invented in 1908 to forge nostalgia into a revolutionary will most certainly be greeted by a riposte concept, aware that what stirs men and from the back of the hall that a fossilized women to revolt is not dreams of liberated version of one has just been unearthed from grandchildren but memories of oppressed an Etruscan tomb. Historians are mostly ancestors. The Angel of History is driven aware that there is not all that much new backwards into the future with its horror- under the sun; that the very word ‘modern’ struck gaze fastened on the catastrophe of descends to us from classical antiquity; the past. Foster quotes Charles Haughey on and that the brave avant-gardist notion not being a prisoner of one’s past; but there of breaking with past history has a very are also ways of using the past to interrogate long history indeed. No epoch other than the present, and in doing so, make for a finer modernity characterizes itself, bizarrely, future. Those callow triumphalists who can simply by its temporal coincidence with discern little catastrophe in the past — who
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cannot see the force of Schopenhauer’s gleefully into an assault on Bernadette brutally just observation that most men McAliskey, Desmond Greaves and a motley and women in history would probably have collection of other political enemies. There been better off never having been born is an enjoyable satirical polemic against the — are likely to embrace a future that is no Provos, but very little on loyalist violence. www.fieldday.iemore than a mildly improved version of the The redneck views of the later Conor Cruise present. ‘The present with more options’, O’Brien are passed over in discreet silence. A as one post-modernist excitedly declared. ‘Platonically pure’ Irish nationalism is sternly The real political divisions of our time are upbraided, but as with ‘virulent bubonic between end-of-ideology idealists like Foster, plague’, it is hard to know quite what other who seem to believe that no world-shaking strain is supposed to exist. Easter 1916 is changes are now required of history, and accused of putting paid ‘to any possibility of those political realists who recognize that an autonomous Ireland that might include our condition is so dire that only such a the North’, as though the Northern unionists deep-seated transformation could feasibly would have selflessly transcended their own repair it. Progressives tend to believe that material interests and cheerfully rallied under the truth is not as bad as it has been painted; the banner of independence if only there had radicals believe that the truth is almost been less talk in Dublin of blood sacrifice always worse than one had imagined. and rosary beads. Erudite and absorbing Luck and the Irish begins with a lively though it is, the survey suffers from the summary of the Great Irish Leap Forward, kind of problem one would confront in, say, which concludes that this has been largely reading Roger Scruton on comprehensive beneficial but which by no means overlooks education: one knows more or less what is the case against such a sanguine estimate. going to be said. ‘Moderniser was apparently On the one hand, the country can boast a calling to moderniser across the petrified growth rate outperforming that of other forest of cross-border politics’, Foster writes EU nations; on the other hand, it has the rather absurdly of Terence O’Neill and Seán highest proportion of relative poverty among Lemass, as though they were pigeons rather EU nations, and tops the league table of than politicians. inequality. There is a typically perceptive The book ends with a scintillating survey account of the current state of religion in the of contemporary Irish culture, complete country, which ignores the fact that since with some wonderful cameos and lightning nobody in their right mind would swallow thumbnail sketches (Van Morrison as ‘an the superstitious nonsense that mostly passes edgy Belfast fusion of blues music and for Christianity in the country, the Irish tend baroque Dylanism’). Foster is surely right to to buy their atheism or agnosticism on the claim that Irish drama today has equalled cheap. The Catholic Church has oppressed its revivalist forebears (some might say them not only in ways too wearily familiar considerably surpassed it), and sees how the to recount, but also, rather more subtly, by novel, once thought to play second fiddle in depriving them in its theological illiteracy Irish culture to the short story, has evolved of any version of the Christian gospel that into a major cultural phenomenon. There might remotely challenge them. is some overhyping of Bob Geldof, a man A chapter on the fortunes of Fianna Fáil thoroughly detested by most Green activists, devotes rather too much attention to the rise along with a hilarious account of the Irish and fall of Charles Haughey. There follows Pub (though that is part of modernization an account of the Troubles, which devotes a as well). Luck and the Irish is stylish, couple of cursory sentences to the injustices funny, witty, compulsively readable and against which the Catholics saw themselves marvellously well-informed. Pity about the as battling, before launching rather more ideological blinkers.
313 Field Day review www.fieldday.ie
314 Once Upon a Time in the West www.fieldday.ieGearóid Ó Tuathaigh
Irish Folk History and Social Memory Guy Beiner Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007 xix + 466 pages. ISBN 978-0-299-21820-1
The moment of conception of this work was, as the author tells us, dramatic:
One dreary day, in the autumn of 1997, I stepped out of the Modern Irish History Department at University College Dublin, to which I had recently arrived, walked down the corridors of the Arts Faculty and opened a door into Aladdin’s cave. Inside I found not only a thousand and one tales, but also many more — each waiting to take me on a magic carpet ride and show me wonders beyond belief. I had discovered the archive of the Department of Irish Folklore.1
Almost a decade after this first enchantment, the fruits of Guy Beiner’s excavations have now appeared in a book of impressive
Jack B. Yeats, unpublished illustration of the 1798 centennial celebration, Colooney, County Sligo. Field Day Review 4 2008 315 Private collection. Field Day review
scholarship and striking originality: his The concept of ‘social memory’ is the 1 Guy Beiner, Remembering own claim, that the work ‘audaciously presiding idea of Beiner’s examination of the the Year of the French: Irish Folk History proposes to turn modern Irish history (and construction and transmission of the story of and Social Memory 2 by extension, history at large) on its head’, the Year of the French/Bliain na bhFrancach (Madison, 2007), xi. scarcely seems exaggerated. by the communities directly affected by the The Department of Irish www.fieldday.ieThe image of moving from the darkness events of the French expedition to the West Folklore incorporates the archive of the Irish of an academic history department to the of Ireland in support of the United Irish Folklore Commission light of folklore archives is echoed at other rising of 1798. The particular novelty of his (IFC), by which its points in the book, as Beiner chastises Irish approach lies in his use of an ‘archaeology records are identified. historians for their reluctance — indeed of social memory’, which entails ‘setting An important study, published since Beiner failure — to engage this rich resource for out to retrace the origins of traditions went to press, is Mícheál Irish historical studies, specifically for the ... [starting] with the period in which Briody, The Irish Folklore study of popular historical traditions (a the sources were collected and [moving] Commission 1935–1970: historiography of oral or folk history, as backwards towards the original events’.5 History, Ideology and Methodology (Helsinki. Beiner calls it). These strictures, with a few Resisting any clear-cut distinction between 2007). notable exceptions, are in large measure ‘positivist and interpretative investigation 2 Beiner, Remembering the justified. Certainly, while scholars of various of oral history’, Beiner’s study ‘deliberately Year of the French, xii. disciplines, including historians, have been integrates both approaches in its analysis of 3 The first use of the IFC material on the Famine more willing in recent years to engage oral traditions, which are considered both was by the literary critic, literary material in both vernaculars bearing as recollections of events in the past [in this Roger McHugh, ‘The on the culture-conflict of the early modern case, 1798] and as representations of the Famine in Folklore’, in period in Ireland, and on the world-view of ways these recollections were subsequently R. D. Edwards and T. D. Williams, eds., The Great the dispossessed as it is found in eighteenth- narrated in local communities’.6 His purpose Famine (Dublin, 1956), century verse, for example, the use of the is to explain ‘how provincial communities 391–406. For more archives of the Irish Folklore Commission directly affected by the French invasion recent use, see Cormac Ó (IFC) as a source for the exploration of remembered historical events’, and the Gráda, An Drochshaol: Béaloideas agus Amhráin ‘history from below’ in nineteenth-century discussion ‘oscillates between the study of an (Baile Átha Cliath. Ireland has been disappointingly limited. actual past and interpretative representations 1994), and Black ’47 The folklore of the Famine provides a lonely of the past in the changing context of an and Beyond: The Great exception to this general neglect.3 ethnographic present’.7 The challenge is Irish Famine in History, Economy and Memory In considering the reluctance of Irish to ‘transcend present-minded discourses, (Princeton, 1999), esp. historians to make use of the folklore “excavate” recollections of the past, and 194–225. Also selections archive in their researches, Beiner quotes recontextualize them’.8 of folklore by Cathal Cathal Póirtéir’s comment that there was This excavation required the examination Póirtéir, ed., Famine Echoes (Dublin, 1995) lacking an ‘acceptable methodology’.4 Beiner of a very wide range of utterances on the and Glórtha ón nGorta does not seem altogether convinced of this Year of the French recorded among the (Baile Átha Cliath, 1995). explanation. Nor should he be. The main provincial communities that lived (at the 4 Cathal Póirtéir, ‘Folk elements of his own methodology — the time and since) in the counties in Connacht Memory and the Famine’, in Cathal Póirtéir, ed., intellectual procedures through which he and the north midlands along or adjacent to The Great Irish Famine examines and interprets the source material the route taken by the French military force (Cork and Dublin, 1995), — are not impossibly arcane or inaccessible. (and the Irish rebels who joined them) as it 231. He has familiarized himself with key domains moved from its landing point near Killala 5 Beiner, Remembering the Year of the French, 317. of critical theory, on memory, tradition, in County Mayo on 22 August 1798, south 6 Beiner, Remembering the cultural transmission and history (its truth through Castlebar, north again through Sligo Year of the French, 23. claims, its procedures and practices, its and Leitrim and east to the final defeat and 7 Beiner, Remembering the forms), drawn from a range of different surrender of the Franco-Irish rebel army Year of the French, 8. 8 Beiner, Remembering the academic disciplines — anthropology, by crown forces at Ballinamuck, County Year of the French, 316. sociology, cultural geography, psychology, Longford on 8 September 1798. The grim literary and cultural theory, and history itself. reckoning on 23 September for the rebel
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Sesquicentennial of the Battle of Ballinamuck, 19 September 1948. Photo: National Photographic Archive, National www.fieldday.ieLibrary of Ireland.
9 Tom Dunne, ed., The forces who remained at Killala constitutes transmission down to our own time. It is an Writer as Witness (Cork, the final chapter of the remarkable story impressive achievement. 1987), 1. of Bliain na bhFrancach (in fact, scarcely a Is it the case, then, that this methodology month) for the people of the West and the of excavation and recontextualization, north midlands. and the source material indicated, were The point of departure for this excavation until now entirely beyond the analytical is the 1930s. That is to say, the bulk of the command of most Irish historians? It is true sources for the folk history of the Year of the that, in contrast to their acknowledgement French are, firstly, the collections of folklore of the need for familiarity with economic made by Dr. Richard Hayes in the mid-1930s theory and skills of quantification in dealing for his path-breaking book The Last Invasion with certain topics in economic and social of Ireland: When Connacht Rose (published change, Irish historians were generally slow in 1937, with a revised new edition in 1939); to engage literary and cultural theory and secondly, the material in the Main Collection its implications for the writing of history. of the IFC collected in the field by its own The positivist approach, ‘practical history’ collectors, mainly from the 1930s to 1950; based on close, context-sensitive reading of and thirdly, the material collected in 1937–38 written sources, held sway in Irish historical in a special initiative in which the IFC scholarship from the 1930s. As late as 1987, succeeded in getting the co-operation of the Tom Dunne could complain that historians teachers and the participation of the senior had ‘made surprisingly little contribution children in some 5,000 primary schools to the extensive modern theoretical debate in the state in generating a rich body of about the nature of historical understanding’, folklore, known as the Schools’ Manuscript and that a ‘general lack of theoretical Collection. In addition to this core material, appraisal has been a damaging feature of Beiner has examined an exceptionally wide Irish, as of British historical writing ... ’9 range of ancillary material pertaining to The intellectual climate was already all aspects of the folk traditions of 1798 changing when this was written, and in Connacht–north Leinster and their the situation has altered significantly in
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Paddy Óg Liath Ó Súilleabháin being recorded by Tadhg Ó Murchú of Coimisiún Bhéaloideas Éireann/Irish Folkore Commission, County Kerry, 1948. Photo: Kevin www.fieldday.ieDanaher, Department of Irish Folklore, University College Dublin.
recent decades. The Field Day project and in Irish history was conducted from the 10 cf. Ciarán Brady, ed., publications (the pamphlets, Anthology and 1970s to the 1990s).10 Key texts, by cultural Interpreting Irish History: monographs) were a catalyst and a challenge critics, demanded response across academic The Debate on Historical 11 Revisionism (Dublin, for new interdisciplinary approaches. The disciplines. Defensive postures were still 1994). growth of interdisciplinary sites of debate struck, but a growing number of academic 11 Examples would include and inquiry, such as Irish Studies and Post- historians eventually began to show a more J. Th. Leerssen, Mere colonial Studies programmes, facilitated, bracing reflexivity on the claims of their Irish and Fíor-Ghael: Studies in the Idea through conferences, curriculum design and discipline and on their own practices. of Irish Nationality, team-teaching, a more regular intercourse The Famine sesquicentenary in the Its Development and between historians and scholars of other mid-1990s inspired reflection and debate Literary Expression disciplines. Dedicated societies (with on historical consciousness and memory, prior to the Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam, publications) were established for the study commemoration and representation, while 1986; Cork, 1996), of both eighteenth- and nineteenth-century addressing epistemological, conceptual and and W. J. McCormack, Ireland, each constituting an interdisciplinary methodological aspects of the ‘historical Ascendancy and forum. The urgent and abrasive debates on turn’ in cultural studies.12 It was, as Niall Ó Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History from historical consciousness, memory, and the Ciosáin remarks, a case of ‘history writing 1789 to 1939 (Oxford, ‘uses of the past’ in the context of identity ... becoming more “cultural”, [while] other 1985). politics and violent conflict in Northern disciplines concerned with culture were 12 The most useful Ireland, drew in scholars from different becoming more historical’ — a development bibliography is in Ó Gráda, Black ’47 and disciplines. Historians were drawn into that saw ‘a growing interdisciplinarity Beyond. their own, largely ‘domestic’ dispute on in historical writings about culture, with 13 Editor’s Introduction ‘revisionism’ in Irish history (though the increased citations of anthropologists and in Niall Ó Ciosáin, ed., range of issues — conceptual, methodological literary and social theorists by historians Explaining Change in Cultural History (Dublin, and expository — raised by Beiner draws on the one hand, and a major turn to 2005), 4–5. attention to the relatively narrow terms in historical topics by those non-historians which much of the debate on revisionism on the other’.13 Joep Leerssen was again
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14 Joep Leerssen, prominent in addressing a grand sweep of linguistically disabled condition of many Remembrance and nineteenth-century remembrance practices,14 professional historians in investigating many Imagination: Patterns while a more recent surge in studies of ‘sites’ aspects of Irish history — in particular, in the Historical and Literary Representation of memory, commemorations, collective the history of mentalités and subaltern of Ireland in the memory and remembrance has been history — during the long period of decisive www.fieldday.ieNineteenth Century prompted by the seminal texts by Pierre language-shift between the seventeenth and (Cork, 1996). Nora and Jay Winter, as well as by the nineteenth centuries. Specifically in relation 15 Ian McBride, ed., History and Memory in Modern burgeoning debate on memory and history- to the archive of the IFC, as late as 1970, as Ireland (Cambridge, writing in the particular context of Irish Beiner reminds us, some 80 per cent of the 2001) supplies a Studies.15 Irish historians have interrogated Main Collection comprised items in the Irish representative sample. the narrative structure of ‘the story of language. And while the Schools’ Collection 16 In, respectively, R. F. Foster, The Irish Story Ireland’ and ‘the politics of memory’, of 1937–38, including its material on Bliain (London, 2001); Kevin while source-criticism, remembrance and na bhFrancach, was overwhelmingly in Whelan, The Tree of subjectivity have been deployed together in English, any scholar seeking to use the full Liberty (Cork, 1996), and historiographical reflections on 1798.16 The resource of the IFC (and of certain ancillary Tom Dunne, Rebellions: Memoir, Memory and number of recalcitrant minutemen patrolling folklore material) on the French episode of 1798 (Dublin, 2004). We the discipline boundaries has continued to 1798 would have needed competence in both may note in passing the decline. Differences remain, of course, in Irish and English. This requirement limited prominence of ‘outsiders’ discipline perspectives and in the ‘working the number of Irish historians of the modern to the Irish academy at key moments of languages’ of various discourses; but there period likely to undertake serious research in originality and challenge is nowadays more attentive reading and the folklore archive. in source-criticism and listening across disciplines than was the case There is, perhaps, a further anxiety, with interpretative direction a generation ago. ethical and intellectual moorings, greatly in historical–cultural studies of modern If the lack of an ‘acceptable methodology’ exacerbated during the decades of violent Ireland — George-Denis does not provide an entirely satisfactory conflict in Northern Ireland, which rendered Zimmermann, J. Th. answer, then perhaps we ought to consider folk history suspect to Irish professional Leerssen, and now Guy other factors that might explain why Beiner historians. Most Irish historians were Beiner. 17 This is not to say, of was virtually undisturbed by historians distressed by the justification, by various course, that historical during his researches in the IFC archive, and parties to the Northern conflict, of their consciousness was in any why the source material from which he has recourse to armed struggle through reference simple way the ‘cause’ mined such a rich analysis of the complexity to their own reading or version of Irish of violent conflict in 17 Northern Ireland. of social memory of a dramatic episode history. Revulsion, on ethical grounds, in Irish history lay virtually undisturbed, at the use of violence, was accompanied at least by historians, for decades. An by outrage on intellectual grounds that element of plain snobbery, social no less the version of history being invoked was than intellectual, cannot be discounted. mistaken, unsound, distorted, false: in Historians of the Irish academy were trained, short, that it was an abuse of ‘history’, as dispassionate, strongly imbued (at least practised by professionals, an abuse that, in from the 1930s) with a reverence for the certain important respects, originated in the Rankean valuation of the written record. shortcomings and unreliability of ‘popular’ They recoiled from the unstable evidence history. Prominent among these failings was gathered by amateur enthusiasts, generated popular history’s defective understanding of in oral performance and as part of social ‘time’ in historical understanding. ritual, from witnesses whose subjectivity In 1983 the distinguished historian Oliver vitiated their accounts of historical events, MacDonagh proposed that a central issue and whose narratives frequently employed in Anglo-Irish relations was the different rhetorical tropes which scientific history and incompatible notions of time present found uncongenial. in the Irish and the British sense of their A more considerable obstacle was the histories. There was a cyclical, patterned
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A French bayonet and five-franc coin minted in Year 6 of the French Republic which were found on French Hill, near Castlebar, County Mayo, in 1876. The coin was worn as www.fieldday.iea medallion in the centennial celebration and it is now displayed in Daly’s Bar, Mulrany, County Mayo.
timelessness to the Irish view of history. these various factors that may have inhibited 18 Oliver MacDonagh, In essence, the characteristic Irish attitude Irish historians up to recently from using States of Mind: A Study could ‘be described as an absence of a the resource of the IFC in their accounts of in Anglo-Irish Conflict 1780–1980 (London, developmental or sequential view of past historical episodes and the historiography 1983), 6–7. events. ... this rendered and renders the attaching to them, Beiner’s work should 19 Beiner, Remembering the past an arsenal of weapons with which to challenge them to reconsider whether this Year of the French, 124. defend both inveterate prejudice and that resource might not have new insights to 20 Beiner, Remembering the Year of the French, 10. ignorance which wishes only to remain yield on other episodes in recent Irish history invincible’.18 In the public debate on the past where a ‘history from below’ perspective within Ireland the professional historians would have particular value — one may were determined to confront these other instance the Irish land war. ahistorical understandings, these other Beiner, it must be said, makes claims for versions of history with a defective concept the particular suitability of his own case of historical time. For his part, Beiner, in study, Bliain na bhFrancach as remembered discussing calendar and time in folk history, in the West and the north midlands, for acknowledges this fundamental difference: the kind of ‘historical archaeology’, based ‘While academic historiography is, by and on the notion of social memory, that he large, grounded in the concept of linear has attempted. The relative neglect of chronological time, social memory integrates the western episode, its relegation to the various frameworks and rhythms of time.’19 margins of an emerging Irish nationalist This unsettling understanding of time in historiography of 1798 as a whole, confers folk narratives, together with the formidable a number of advantages on the story for the array of motifs, images and references student of folk history. As he puts it, whereas characteristic of such narratives, must have the legacies of Ninety-Eight in south-east reinforced the instincts of professional Leinster and north-east Ulster ‘have been historians that this ‘unstable’ folk material publicly contested and subjected to overt would not prove a hospitable site for their political manipulations, by contrast, it may established practices of historical inquiry and seem that the social memory of 1798 in the explanation. West was less exposed to politicization’.20 Whatever weight we may apportion to The advantages of relative neglect, until late
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21 See, in particular, Niall in the nineteenth century, of the western the folk history of the Year of the French Ó Ciosáin, ‘Famine episode in metropolitan or hegemonic had involved embellishment and omission Memory and the Popular nationalist narratives of the story of 1798 from the very aftermath of the event. The Representation of Scarcity’, in McBride, ed., and its significance, Beiner sees as applying widespread reluctance of people to speak of History and Memory in to both of the stated purposes of his study, the events of Ninety-Eight, in the decades www.fieldday.ieModern Ireland, 95–117. the positivist and the interpretative. Implicit immediately after the rebellion, was noted 22 Beiner, Remembering the in his argument is the suggestion that by contemporaries, including the collectors Year of the French, 42. 23 Beiner, Remembering the folklore on the events of 1798 in the West, of local ‘lore’ for the topographical division Year of the French, 226. collected from informants in the 1930s of the Ordnance Survey, before the work whose age permitted a chain of transmission of that division was suspended in 1842. As to be traced directly back to the aftermath a nationalist movement began to mobilize of Ninety-Eight in those very communities mass support and promulgate an ‘official’ in the West directly affected by the French version of Irish history, the story of Ninety- expedition, has more pristine elements in Eight was absorbed (and constantly it (recovering new, alternative or corrective reinterpreted) in the evolving ‘nationalist’ ‘information’ on the actual events of 1798 history — by the Young Irelanders, the at local level) than might be the case for Fenians, and the Land League/Home Rule the rebellion in the south-east or north- movement. With increasing literacy in east; and that it has also proved more English, and a continuing language-shift robustly resistant to imposed nationalist throughout parts of the area that witnessed historiography than other areas, and more the Year of the French, the reception of vigorous in negotiating the transmission ‘official’ Irish nationalist history by the folk of local folklore as it encountered printed history of the countryside must have been a history, formal education (school history) very complex process. or the heightened moments of nationally One category of folk remembrance that directed collective remembrance and official was in short supply in the folk collections commemorations of 1798 (notably the of the 1930s was that reflecting a loyalist centenary commemoration in 1898). reading of Ninety-Eight. As Beiner notes: It may be noted, in Beiner’s favour, that the collection of folklore on 1798 Corresponding to a wider postcolonial for the IFC Main Collection (from the pattern, characteristic of newly liberated 1930s to the 1950s), and in the Schools’ countries that promoted the cultural Collection of 1937–38, did not involve a heritage of the dominant emancipated specific and detailed questionnaire on 1798, population and rejected traditions unlike the special questionnaire devised associated with previous hegemonies, oral for collecting folklore on the Famine, traditions of Protestant minorities and the ‘directive’ nature of which has been of populations that had been loyal to the highlighted as problematic in studies of Crown — though undeniably an integral the folk memory of the Famine.21 In fact, part of Irish history — were not subject to the guidelines distributed by the IFC to extensive documentation and study ...22 the schools made no explicit reference at all to 1798. Yet, in assessing what folk Whether the elision of such loyalist folk history was available to Hayes and the IFC history had occurred earlier, as successive collectors of the 1930s, we must remember infusions of nationalist ‘official’ history that the affected counties of the French impacted on the transmission of local folk march from Killala to Ballinamuck by no history, is a question considered by Beiner, means constituted an ‘uncontaminated’ particularly in the context of what he terms corridor for the transmission of folk ‘recalcitrant remembrances’.23 This term history. Indeed, the ‘reconstructions’ of is applied to ‘nonconforming references’,
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1798 monument, Ballinamuck, County Longford (unveiled www.fieldday.ie1928).
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24 Beiner, Remembering the or narratives that did not conform to the the negotiations that reconstructed social Year of the French, 262. prevalent orthodoxies that emerged within the memory did not result in its obliteration, 25 Beiner, Remembering the regional folk history, and that persisted due to and despite an excess of celebrations, Year of the French, 320. 26 Beiner, Remembering the ‘the diversity of folk historiography’. Beiner’s monuments, publications and educational Year of the French, 306. discussion of recalcitrance is suggestive, and is programs, local oral traditions persisted into www.fieldday.ieone of the few themes in the book that might the twentieth century.’26 This is a judgement have been explored at greater length. based upon a careful reading of a rich and More obvious questions arise in varied body of evidence. relation to key moments of the interaction The ‘positivist’ findings of Beiner’s between nationalist Ireland’s ‘official’ excavation of the folk traditions of Bliain commemorations of Ninety-Eight na bhFrancach lead him to conclude: that, and the folk history. Not surprisingly, in the provincial narratives of the event, the ideologically freighted centenary local incidents predominate, local heroes/ commemoration in 1898 had an especially leaders (the Franco-Irish officer, Colonel drastic impact on the reconstruction of Henry O’Kane, the insurgent General nationalist Ireland’s official version of the George Blake, the Irish pikeman Robin events, the meaning, and the inspirational Gill of Edenmore, and other local rebels; ‘logic’ of Ninety-Eight (the current the patriot priests, particularly Fr. James generation ‘owing it’ to the heroes and Conroy, Fr. Manus Sweeney and Fr. Myles martyrs of Ninety-Eight to realize their Prendergast) loom much larger and generate vision, et cetera); and its impact on the richer legends than, for example, the French folklore of the French episode in the West commander General Humbert; that local is clearly a vital issue in any evaluation of incidents are brought by the folk tradition the status of the folk traditions of Bliain into sharper relief (in some instances into na bhFrancach available for recording by the light of ‘history’ for the first time) than Hayes and by the agents of the IFC almost in mainstream nationalist historiography of 40 years later. Beiner acknowledges that by the rebellion; that the role of women in the the 1930s ‘folklore was impregnated with rebellion in the West and the north midlands centennial influences’.24 But the scale of was more extensive, varied and interesting the negotiation and reconstruction of the than the ‘official’ histories of 1798 record; local folk history of Bliain na bhFrancach that local folk history accommodates a provoked by the ‘official’ history of Ninety- variety of perspectives and complex readings Eight that washed over nationalist Ireland in of popular attitudes to the French (not 1898 strains Beiner’s careful interpretation universally supportive), to defiance and of folk tradition to the limit. His survey discretion in local responses to the rebellion, of recent scholarship on the centenary and to the class and religious dimensions of commemorations is characteristically sharp the event, as they registered with people at and thorough, and he does not seek to local level. conceal or to evade the implications of this The results, despite all the caveats that powerful mediation of Ninety-Eight for Beiner and the reader might register on the folklore deposit collected in the 1930s. the perils of seeking to recover historically The evidence presented admits of more positivist data on 1798 from folklore than one conclusion. But Beiner remains accounts recorded, in many instances, adamant that, while ‘folk history was rarely, some 140 years later, generally justify the if ever, completely independent from the claim that this source may indeed ‘recover’ pervasive influences of “official” history, yet hidden histories, at local level, of events it maintained a degree of autonomy’.25 He hitherto unknown or, in terms of official is in no doubt that: ‘Influences of nationalist historiography, underdeveloped episodes commemoration permeated folk history, but during Bliain na bhFrancach. Indeed,
323 Field Day review
this résumé of the positivist findings does further after 1922, even allowing for the 27 Beiner, Remembering the scant justice to the subtlety of Beiner’s possibility that the indifferent quality of Year of the French, 280. 28 Beiner, Remembering the examination of a wide and disparate range history teaching in the schools (and the Year of the French, 269. of utterances on the western theatre of virtual absence of local history in the 29 A compendious reflection rebellion in 1798, all the while employing syllabus) may have assisted local folk history on the bicentenary www.fieldday.ieinsights and explanatory frameworks drawn in retaining its regenerative vitality, at least debates is Thomas Bartlett, et al., eds., 1798: from the critical literature on folklore and up to the 1930s. A Bicentenary Perspective related disciplines. Few would seek to deny The reworking of folk traditions in later (Dublin, 2003). that our understanding of the mosaic of decades (since the 1930s) presents further 30 Beiner, Remembering the 1798 is all the richer for the recovery of obvious challenges of interpretation, as print Year of the French, 23. these narratives of ‘democratic’ history. and visual media increasingly dominate the It should be emphasized that in his construction and dissemination of historical exhaustive excavation of the various genres accounts. Indeed, Beiner acknowledges of folklore (forms of history-telling) that that already by the 1930s folk history was registered Bliain na bhFrancach, Beiner deeply impregnated with ‘official’ history. He examines not only seanchas (‘orally-preserved perceptively notes a striking moment in the social-historical tradition’), tales and mini- sesquicentenary commemoration of Ninety- histories, but also songs, poems and ballads Eight in Mayo: of the people, in both vernaculars, rhymes, proverbs and sayings, prophecies, toasts and A commemorative booklet produced other genres. He also discusses loyalist songs, for the Castlebar celebrations included all the more valuable for the relative dearth extensive quotations from his [Hayes’s] of folk history from a loyalist perspective monumental book, The Last Invasion contained in the IFC or Hayes’s collections of Ireland, and also reproduced the from the 1930s. entire text of a lecture on ‘Castlebar and Likewise, in considering the interpretative the Rising of 1798’, which Hayes had aspect of the folk history of Bliain na delivered in the town a decade earlier bhFrancach — that is, the transmission (17 March 1938). The historian, who and constant reworking of local ‘versions’ previously had travelled through the area of the event — Beiner’s review of the and listened to people recount traditions evidence encompasses the history-tellers of Ninety-Eight, was now informing them (seanchaithe, local historians and folk authoritatively about their past.28 collectors), the vernacular landscape (where the author conducts an assured exercise The more recent remembrances of Ninety- in ‘commemorative microtoponomy’), Eight in the later twentieth century souvenirs and mementos, monuments, — in particular, the bicentenary events, commemorations, the mediation of school publications and memorials — are briefly history and education, all the while considered in an Epilogue that is free of the carefully and sensitively recontextualizing asperity that marked some of the academic the negotiation of each stage of the exchanges on the legacy and meaning of transmission, in the light of all the surviving Ninety-Eight during the bicentenary year.29 evidence. While his general conclusion The kind of excavation that Guy Beiner is that ‘social memory was not a passive has attempted encounters difficulties at every recipient of official commemoration step. There is the obvious paradox that ‘the discourse’, nevertheless, ‘the pressures on study of oral history entails the unconscious local traditions to conform to an imposing shift from performance to text’.30 Moreover, national metanarrative’27 were already he confesses that: powerful before the establishment of the Irish state, and must have strengthened Unlike standard archaeological evidence,
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31 Beiner, Remembering the oral traditions are not concrete objects. errors (including some misplaced accents Year of the French, 320. Moreover, the validity of applying on words in Irish) that occasionally irritate. 32 Beiner, Remembering the literary deconstructive analysis to oral But it would be churlish to dwell on a few Year of the French, 317, 258. narratives, which are not stable texts, relatively minor blemishes. Beiner and his 33 Beiner, Remembering the is questionable. ... At some level, the publisher are deserving of the gratitude of www.fieldday.ieYear of the French, 5. archaeological analogy falters, as it all who value an inclusive and scrupulous 34 Galway Advertiser, 6 aims to inspect reconstructions based approach to historical inquiry, for a work March 2008. on components that have not only that is theoretically informed, analytically transformed over time but were also sharp and original, and firmly grounded in transmogrified when they were collected. scholarship across an impressive range of Multiple, often contradictory narratives rich and challenging primary and secondary coexisted in folk history ...31 source material. The final word from Beiner salutes the Indeed, ‘bricolage’ and ‘kaleidoscope’ are continuing generative capacity of folk but two of the words Beiner uses as he seeks history to reconstruct the story of Bliain to characterize the nature of his excavation na bhFrancach (the event itself and the of social memory. history of its transmission), in dialogue with The constant challenge of the constantly changing imperatives of an recontextualizing the very broad spectrum ethnographic ‘present’. He is unlikely to of utterances and representations in the be surprised, therefore, or scandalized, by folk history of Bliain na bhFrancach a notice in a western provincial paper of 6 throughout the two centuries that followed March 2008, announcing a new play by a the event, carries risks at every point Liam Heffron, titled The Year of the French, along the regenerative continuum of in the following terms: transmission. Here again Beiner concedes that ‘recontextualization of oral traditions is It is 1798 in Mayo, and Mathew Tone often speculative and inconclusive’, and that, is depressed. It’s difficult enough being ‘Positively tracing the spread of information the ignored younger brother of Theobald into folklore may prove elusive ...’32 One has Wolfe Tone, but now he’s stuck with 700 no sense, however, that these concessions are homesick Frenchmen, six months late offered simply to disarm the critic. Beiner for the rebellion, in the wrong end of the remains convinced, all risks and difficulties country ... and it’s raining. Again. Can notwithstanding, that: ‘By interrogating things get any worse?34 the ways by which provincial communities narrated, interpreted, reconstructed The remembrance of the Year of the French and commemorated their pasts, it is continues. possible to uncover traces of vernacular historiographies and discover practices of popular remembrance, which are distinct though not entirely independent of national historiography and commemoration.’33 In my view, Beiner has dealt with these difficulties and risks with a sustained intellectual subtlety and a scruple for evidence that is deeply impressive. The book is generally well produced, with generous provision for references and an ample bibliography, though some of the plates are dull and there are typographical
325 Field Day review www.fieldday.ieContributors
John Barrell is Professor of English at the Seamus Deane is the editor of The Field Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies at the Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 3 vols. University of York. His most recent books (1991) and author of numerous books in are Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative literary history, including Strange Country: Treason and Fantasies of Regicide 1793– Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing 1796 (2000) and The Spirit of Despotism: since 1790 (1997) and Foreign Affections: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (2006). Essays on Edmund Burke (2005). He was the inaugural Keough Chair of Irish Studies at the Pascale Casanova is the author of The World University of Notre Dame. Republic of Letters (2005) and Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution Terry Eagleton is Professor of English (2007). She is associate researcher at the in the University of Manchester. Among Centre for Research on Art and Language in his many books, several have achieved a Paris and a literary critic. canonical status, such as Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), The Ideology of Denis Condon is a Government of Ireland the Aesthetic (1990) and, in relation to Irish Fellow in the Centre for Media Studies in the culture, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger National University of Ireland, Maynooth. (1995). His most recent book is The Meaning Irish Academic Press will publish his The of Life (2007). Cinematograph in Ireland, 1895–1921 in 2009. David Fitzpatrick is Professor of Modern Claire Connolly is editor (with Joe Cleary) of History at Trinity College Dublin. His books The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish include Harry Boland’s Irish Revolution Culture (2005) and (with Malcolm Ballin) of (2003). Lilliput Press will publish his Irish Periodical Culture, 1937–1972 (2008). biography of Frederick MacNeice in 2008. She teaches English at Cardiff University. Luke Gibbons is the Keough Family Chair Michael Cronin writes on language and of Irish Studies at the University of Notre translation. His books include Translation Dame. He is the author of Transformations in and Identity (2001) and An Ghaeilge san Aois Irish Culture (1996), The Quiet Man (2002), Nua/Irish in the New Century (2005). He is Edmund Burke and Ireland (2004), and Director of the Centre for Translation and Gaelic Gothic (2006). Textual Studies at Dublin City University. Breandán Mac Suibhne is a social and Fintan Cullen is Professor of Art History at cultural historian. He is editor (with David the University of Nottingham. His books Dickson) of Hugh Dorian, The Outer Edge include The Irish Face: Redefining the Irish of Ulster (2000, 2001), and (with Seamus Portrait (2004) and (with John Morrison) A Deane) he edits Field Day Review (2005–). Shared Legacy: Essays on Irish and Scottish Art and Visual Culture (2005).
326 Contributors www.fieldday.ie
Deirdre McMahon writes on Irish foreign Máirín Nic Eoin has published several major policy and is editor (with Michael Kennedy) books on literature in Irish, most recently of Obligations and Responsibilities: Ireland B’Ait Leo Bean: Gnéithe den Idé-eolaíocht and the United Nations, 1955–2005 (2005). Inscne i dTraidisiún Liteartha na Gaeilge She teaches in the University of Limerick, (1998), a study of the ideology of gender, and where she is a director of the Centre for ‘Trén bhFearann Breac’: An Díláithriú Cultúir Historical Research. agus Nualitríocht na Gaeilge (2005), on cultural dislocation in modern writing. Peter McQuillan is Professor of Irish at the University of Notre Dame. His Native and Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh has written extensively Natural: Aspects of the Concepts of Right on modern history, including a key text, and Freedom in Irish (2004) was published in Ireland before the Famine, 1798–1848 the Field Day Critical Conditions series. (1972). His most recent book is (with Lillis Ó Laoire and Seán Ó Súilleabháin) Pobal Toril Moi is the author of Sexual/Textual na Gaeltachta: A Scéal agus a Dhán (2001). Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1985; He is Professor of History at the National 2002), Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of University of Ireland, Galway. an Intellectual Woman (1994); and What Is a Woman? And Other Essays (1999). She is the Sean Ryder writes on nineteenth-century Irish editor of The Kristeva Reader (1986), and of culture and literature, and on the theory and French Feminist Thought (1987). Her Henrik practice of textual editing. His books include Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, James Clarence Mangan: Selected Writings Theater, Philosophy (2006) won the MLA’s (2004) and several collections of essays on Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Irish and colonial themes. He is Director of Studies in 2007. the Thomas Moore Hypermedia Archive at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Bruce Nelson is a labour historian. He is author of Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Robert Tracy is Professor Emeritus of English Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s and of Celtic Studies at the University of (1988) and Divided We Stand: American California, Berkeley. His publications include Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality Trollope’s Later Novels (1978) and The (2001) and teaches at Dartmouth College. Unappeasable Host: Studies in Irish Identities (1998). He has also published editions of works by Synge, Trollope, Le Fanu and Flann O’Brien.
327 www.fieldday.ie www.fieldday.ie
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ay Review ay D Field 4. 2008 4.
4. 2008 Inside back cover: Thomas Allen, Thomas cover: back Inside Allen, Thomas cover: front Inside Images. Geographic/Getty Dale/National Bruce Photo: England. Greenwich, at longitude zero marks strip brass A cover: Front Knockout. Topple.