“Half-read Wisdom”: Classics, Modernism and the Celtic Fringe

By Gregory Edward Baker

A.B. University of Chicago, 2003

A.M. Brown University, 2009

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

In the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University

Providence, Rhode Island

May 2013

© Copyright 2013 by Gregory Edward Baker

This dissertation by Gregory Edward Baker is accepted in its present form by the Department of Comparative Literature as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Kenneth Haynes, Dissertation Director

Recommended to the Graduate Council

, Date~)2~113 ~ B--e~ I , Mutlu Blasing, Reade;

f\ (. ' j, -'-+---I---d ~G ~/[~7--. David Konstan, reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date----- Peter Weber, Dean of the Graduate School

iii

For Ciara – Through Aoife

______

I turn away and shut the door, and on the stair Wonder how many times I could have proved my worth In something that all others understand or share; But O! ambitious heart, had such a proof drawn forth A company of friends, a conscience set at ease, It had but made us pine the more. The abstract joy, The half-read wisdom of daemonic images, Suffice the ageing man as once the growing boy.

– W. B. Yeats, “Meditations in Time of Civil War” (1923).

Cosb yw cau dyn oddi wrth wlad ei eni,- hynt oer mewn tir na wyr Ladin iaith.

It is cruel to keep A man from his native land, A cold crossing in a place That knows nothing of Latin.

– Euros Bowen, “Cerdd Ofydd” (1981).

iv Curriculum Vitae

Gregory Baker was born on November 11, 1980 in Warwick, Rhode Island. After graduating from Cranston High School East in 1999, he went on to study classics at the

University of Chicago where in June 2003 he received a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors. Working with professors D. Nicholas Rudall and Christopher Faraone, Gregory wrote his undergraduate thesis at Chicago on Greek elegy and Homeric reception in the poetry of Theognis of Megara. In the autumn of 2005, he enrolled in the graduate program of Comparative Literature at Brown University. Since that time, while completing the requirements for a doctorate, he has worked as a teaching and research assistant for professors Mutlu Blasing, Geoffrey Russom, Meera Viswanathan, Arnold

Weinstein and Kenneth Haynes.

v Acknowledgements

Many have contributed to this dissertation. I would like to thank the staff of the

Rockefeller Library at Brown University, as well as the staffs of the National Library of

Wales, Aberystwyth, the National Library of Ireland, Dublin, and the British Library, without whose help many essential pieces of scholarly interest would have gone unnoticed. I am grateful to Thomas Dilworth for his careful critique of chapter four, and to Nicholas Elkin, Sarah Williams and the David Jones Estate for allowing me to print both David Jones’ inscription, Cara Wallia Derelicta, as well as the 1960 address Jones gave in absentia to the University of Wales. Further thanks are due to Siwan Jones and the Saunders Lewis Estate for allowing me to reprint the pamphlet, Is There an Anglo-

Welsh Literature? as well as other rare but important articles by Lewis. Most especially, I would like to thank my colleagues past and present in the departments of Comparative

Literature, Classics and English at Brown University—all of those who have contributed to the depth and scope of my graduate research and training. Foremost among these are

Nora Peterson, Brian Ballentine, Philip Walsh and Arnold Weinstein. My dissertation committee members, Mutlu Blasing and David Konstan, patiently read and improved the research and the writing of each chapter here. It was, moreover, in their classes—through their teaching—that I began to adumbrate some of the matter of this thesis. My greatest debt is to Ken Haynes. Without his good example, his unflinching criticism and his generosity of spirit, the words here would have remained just a small flame.

vi Table of Contents

Epigraph iv

Curriculum Vitae v

Acknowledgements vi

Introduction 1

I. “A noble vernacular?”: Yeats, British Hellenism & the Anglo-Irish Nation 12

II. “Hellenism—European Appendicitis”: Joyce, Antiquity & the Genesis of the ‘Cyclops’ 56

III. “Straight talk, straight as the Greek!”: Ireland’s Oedipus & the Making of Modernism 101

IV. “Heirs of Romanity”: Welsh Nationalism & the Multilingual Idiom of David Jones 155

V. “A form of Doric which is no dialect in particular”: the Cosmopolitan Classicism of Hugh MacDiarmid 207

Appendix I 252

Appendix II 264

Bibliography 285

vii 1

Introduction

For the real Gael has something which the old Greeks had… He has a craving for essentials. The miracle of literature, Of culture, in racial history, Is that it is at once the bow and the mark, The inspiration and the aim.

– Hugh MacDiarmid, “Credo for a Celtic Poet” (1967).1

The “half-read” knowledge of classical and Celtic languages exerted a major ideological impact on the development of political and linguistic nationalisms in twentieth-century Scotland, Ireland, and Wales.2 This partial understanding of ancient language also exercised a dominant influence on major forms of Modernist literary expression—forms which arose as part of a complex reaction to the impulses that motivated ‘nation-building’ in the Celtic countries of the British Isles. From the Irish

Literary Revival onwards, classical precedent was often cited and invoked in diverse attempts to examine and confront English influence in the political, literary and religious life of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Conscripted into varying ideologies of cultural

1 Hugh MacDiarmid, “Credo for a Celtic Poet”. Agenda, Double Issue: Hugh MacDiarmid and Scottish Poetry (Autumn–Winter 1967) Vol. 5.4–6.1, 12–15: 15. 2 The phrase, “half-read wisdom”, I borrow from the final couplet of W. B. Yeats’ “Meditations in Time of Civil War” (1923). The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach, eds. (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1957) 417–27: 427. 2 nationalism, Greek and Roman civilization was set out as an authoritative model for emulation—a model which legitimized the social and linguistic purification of the modern Celtic nation. No lesser figure than the Irish poet and mastermind of the 1916

Rising, Pátrick Pearse, put it well when contrasting the superior genius of the Gael with that of the Saxon:

What the Greek was to the ancient world the Gael will be to the modern; and in no point will the parallel prove more true than in the fervent and noble love of learning which distinguishes both races. The Gael, like the Greek, loves learning, and he loves it for its own sake.3

Similarly, Douglas Hyde, the president and founder of Ireland’s Gaelic League, insisted that the Gaelic peoples of the British Isles were—despite the rampant spread of English speech—the last living remnant of the civilization which first “established itself in

Greece”, a civilization which was now making its “last stand for independence in this island of Ireland”.4 And yet, this connection between the classical and the Celtic—what J.

M. Synge once described as a “Greek kinship”—was not only exploited in attempts to de- anglicize nationality throughout Ireland, Scotland and Wales.5 It was also pervasive in the experimental and multilingual forms which became characteristic of twentieth-century modernism. Having emerged in response to the political manipulation of the classics, these forms of literary expression sometimes promoted, and at times skeptically interrogated, the vision of antiquity advanced by the ideologues of Celtic nationalism.

3 P. H. Pearse, “The Intellectual Future of the Gael” (October 1897). Three Lectures on Gaelic Topics. (Dublin: M. H. Gill, 1898) 46–59: 46, as quoted in Fiona Macintosh, “The Irish Literary Revival and the Classical Tradition”. Dying Acts: Death in Ancient Greek and Modern Irish Tragic Drama (Cork: Cork University Press, 1994) 1–18: 1. 4 Douglas Hyde, “The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland” (25 November 1892). Language, Lore, and Lyrics: Essays and Lectures. Breandán Ó Conaire, ed. (Blackrock, Co. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1986) 153–70: 155. 5 J. M. Synge, “Celtic Mythology” (2 April 1904). Collected Works, Volume II: Prose. Alan Price, ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1966) 364–6: 365. 3

With this in mind, this dissertation investigates specifically how this polyglot impulse of modernism as it emerged in Ireland, Scotland and Wales arose through a largely untutored, unschooled knowledge of both classical languages and Celtic civilization. In so doing, it shows how the “lack of direct access to classics”—through a reading knowledge of Greek and Latin—was no impediment to the radical formal innovation which developed in high modernism.6 Even though W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, David

Jones and Hugh MacDiarmid, remained largely ignorant of both classical and Celtic languages, the “half-read” knowledge of ancient world which they acquired acted as a powerful motivating force on their work—a force by which they fostered new idioms of literary expression, a force which was a “positive incitement to engage classical texts in new ways.”7

At the end of the nineteenth century, the rise of English as a field of scholarly interest and academic study brought with it the slow decline of liberal education in the classics.8 Once the hallmark of public schooling across the British Isles, Greek and Latin were no longer afforded what one Cambridge classicist called “the lion’s share which has been theirs in the past.”9 At the same time as English began to supplant both Greek and

Latin, nativist movements calling for Gaelic and Welsh language purity gained greater popular favor across Ireland, Scotland and Wales. And though the strong position of

6 Kenneth Haynes, “Modernism”. A Companion to the Classical Tradition. Craig W. Kallendorf, ed. (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, Ltd. 2007) 101–14: 113. 7 Ibid. 8 See Christopher Stray, “The Politics of Cultural Pluralism: State Intervention and the Defence of Classics, 1902–1922.” Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities, and Society in England, 1830–1960 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) 235–70. 9 J. P. Postgate, “Are the Classics to Go?” Fortnightly Review, New Series, Vol. 72 (1902) 866–80: 866, as quoted in Stray, Classics Transformed, 254.

4 classics was slowly eroding in both British and Irish society, what remained of its authority was often joined to the ‘defeated’ causes of Celtic nativism and language purism. Figures as diverse as Hyde, Saunders Lewis and Hugh MacDiarmid each argued for the revival of Celtic tongues on the ground that the literatures of the Irish, the Welsh, and the Scottish possessed within themselves what MacDiarmid once called “alternative value[s] of prime consequence when set against the Greek and Roman literatures”.10

These values, he argued, “are all that most of us mean when we speak of ‘the

Classics’.”11 This evolution of the classics in the social history and language politics of the British Isles profoundly affected both the intellectual and formal character of the

Modernist movement as it slowly emerged. For very few of those writers now considered crucial to Celtic Modernism possessed an intimate knowledge of ancient languages, whether of classical, Gaelic or Brythonic origin. Few moreover had the advantages of a

British classical education which might have, earlier in the nineteenth century, distinguished them not only intellectually but socially and politically as well. This was a bitter reality of which W. B. Yeats himself was keenly aware: when writing his own autobiography in 1914, he complained that his father, John Butler Yeats, had failed to take him from school and teach him “nothing but Greek and Latin”. 12 If only he had done so, Yeats exclaimed,

I would now be a properly educated man, and would not have to look in useless longing at books that have been, through the poor mechanism of

10 C. M. Grieve (‘Hugh McDiarmid’), “English Ascendancy in British Literature”. The Criterion (July 1931) Vol. 10, No. 41 as reprinted in Hugh MacDiarmid, Selected Prose. Alan Riach, ed. (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1992) 61–80: 63. 11 Ibid. 12 W. B. Yeats, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume III: Autobiographies. William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald, eds. (New York: Scribner Press, 1999) 76. 5

translation, the builders of my soul.13

Each of the writers under consideration in this thesis endured this “poor mechanism of translation” which Yeats described, remaining throughout their lives only “half-read” in both classical and Celtic languages. And yet, in spite of this fact, Yeats, Joyce,

MacDiarmid and Jones each found new and inventive ways of bringing the foreign pressures of the ancient world into the idiom of literary modernism. By exposing their styles to Greek, Latin, Gaelic and Brythonic language, they enlarged the semantic register of English, and disrupted conventional syntax and received forms of poetic expression.

Stretching their work across many languages, they used what knowledge of the classical and the Celtic they had acquired to animate what the critic, R. P. Blackmur, once defined as a “fresh idiom”, a form of modernist writing whose polyglot experiments sought to expand “the stock of available reality” in English literature.14 Through five chapters, this dissertation documents this expansion from both an historical and formal perspective, illustrating how the multilingualism of modernism’s “Celtic fringe” was provoked into existence—incited in response to the Anglophobic conscription of both classical and

Celtic antiquity.15 In conclusion, this dissertation attempts a comparative genealogy of multilingualism in Britain and Ireland—a genealogy which tracks how Celtic civilization and ancient classical languages were syntactically registered and ideologically translated into the hybrid idiom of Yeats, Joyce, Jones and MacDiarmid.

13 Ibid. 14 R. P. Blackmur, “Art and Manufacture” (1935). Form and Value in Modern Poetry (New York: Doubleday, 1946) 337. 15 The term, “Celtic fringe”, I take from David Jones’ unpublished “Address to the University of Wales” (July 1960), Archive MS File #22724E, folio 21–7. National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. See Appendix II for a transcription of this address, pg. 279–82. 6

The first chapter, “‘A noble vernacular?’: Yeats, British Hellenism & the Anglo-

Irish Nation” examines the impact which the Victorian classical tradition had on both the language politics of the Celtic Revival and the early stylistic development of W. B.

Yeats. In 1892 Douglas Hyde, the well-known translator of Gaelic folklore, insisted that the national prosperity of Ireland depended on the eradication of English in all aspects of the country’s cultural and political life. The nation’s literature, first and foremost he thought, had to be “de-anglicised” in favor of Irish Gaelic.16 To W. B. Yeats, however, the Anglophobia of Hyde’s nationalism was untenable. The path to an Irish national literature and to nationhood itself lay, he thought, not in the suppression of English but rather in the cultivation of a hybrid literary idiom, a bilingual idiom that would merge the

Gaelic past with the English present in Ireland. By translating and adapting Gaelic folklore, the country’s poets could foster an Anglo-Irish vernacular, Yeats believed, a national language infused with the foreign inflection of Irish Gaelic. And yet, with only a poor knowledge of the Irish language, Yeats himself failed to achieve this vernacular in the early poetry of the Celtic Twilight. His efforts to fuse Irish Gaelic and English together were born, not in translation from the original, but in the appropriation of earlier methods which both the English Romantics and Victorian poets had used to anglicize the linguistic effect of ancient Greek. By analyzing Yeats’ 1889 poem, The Wanderings of

Oisin, this chapter explores how the British classical tradition, specifically the interference of Greek in English verse, exerted a more profound influence over the

Anglo-Irish idiom of W. B. Yeats than any substantive fusion between English and

Gaelic.

16 Douglas Hyde, “The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland” (25 November 1892). Language, Lore, and Lyrics: Essays and Lectures. Breandán Ó Conaire, ed. (Blackrock: Irish Academic Press, 1986) 153–70. 7

The second chapter entitled “‘Hellenism—European Appendicitis’: Joyce,

Antiquity & the Genesis of the ‘Cyclops’” investigates the evolving vision of ancient

Greece which James Joyce claimed from his earliest attacks on the Celtic Revival to the narrative experiments he achieved in Ulysses (1922). In a 1923 review of the novel, T. S.

Eliot famously insisted the “mythical method” of Joyce’s Homeric parallels was structured on principles first laid down by W. B. Yeats in his recent lyric poetry.17 By likening Joyce’s writing to that of Yeats, Eliot conscripted him as a modern classicist who had used ancient order to sort our modern disorder. But in so doing, Eliot ignored a central force at work in Ulysses, the robust skepticism which motivated not just the novel’s Homeric parallels but also the satire which Joyce leveled against both Yeats and the Celtic Revival. Joyce had not simply taken up the method adumbrated by his predecessor. For from as early as 1900, he often ridiculed the appeals which Yeats and his Irish contemporaries had made to the exempla and authority of ancient Greece.

Joyce’s antipathy towards the union of nationalism and Hellenism found its clearest expression in a 1907 lecture he entitled “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages”. And later,

Joyce used the argument of this talk in Ulysses, transforming it through the narrative experiments of the ‘Cyclops’ episode. By exploiting his partial knowledge of ancient

Greek and drawing on many ‘Wardour-Street’ style translations of Homer, Joyce built in this episode a theatre for the deep-seated skepticism he had long felt towards philhellenism in Ireland. This chapter traces the development of that skepticism, showing further how the Homeric correspondence that Joyce fostered in Ulysses both contested

17 T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order and Myth”. The Dial (November 1923) Vol. 75, No. 5: 480–3, as reprinted in James Joyce: the Critical Heritage. Robert H. Deming, ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970) Vol. 1, 268–71: 271. 8 and surmounted the forced marriage which Yeats had arranged between Greek antiquity and Irish modernity.

The third chapter, “‘Straight talk, straight as the Greek!’: Ireland’s Oedipus & the

Making of Modernism” argues that Yeats’ prolonged attempt to translate the Greek of

Sophocles with “simple speakable English dictating the result” helped trigger the radical modernist renovation of his later style.18 By documenting the political and aesthetic dimensions of Yeats’ fascination with Sophocles, this chapter examines his stylization of

Greek in light of the increasingly troubled association he maintained with nationalism in

Ireland. Because of a royal ban on staging the Oedipus Rex in England, Yeats first envisioned the Irish production of the tragedy in 1904 as key to the nationalist programme of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Yet it was only after many stops and starts that

Ireland finally had its own Oedipus The King, Yeats producing his translation well over twenty years later in 1926. Yeats possessed little knowledge of ancient Greek, but when translating the play he adapted various Victorian versions, believing that his own English idiom could better replicate the “straight talk” of Sophoclean Greek.19 And as he engaged the linguistic model presented in Sophocles, Yeats at once began to articulate principles which would become central to the Modernist transformation of his style— principles that stressed the “prose directness” and that “hard light” which both he and Ezra Pound soon came to see as best in all poetry.20 The translation was artistically successful, but by

18 W. B. Yeats, “To Lady Gregory” (7 January 1912). The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Intelex Past Masters, Entry no. 1796. 19 Ezra Pound, “7: To Harriet Monroe” (October 1912). The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941. D. D. Paige, ed. (New York, New Directions, 1971) 11. 20 Ezra Pound, “The Later Yeats”. Poetry (May 1914) Vol. 4, No. 2, 64–9: 66, 67, later reprinted as “The Later Yeats” in The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (New York, New Directions, 1935) 378–81. 9 the time Yeats completed it, his vision of an Irish nation modeled on a Sophoclean moment in history— a country delighting “in the freedom of the arts”—had passed.21 It had been thwarted not by English influence but by an assault on artistic freedom by the national government of the new Free State. Yeats’ 1926 translation of the Oedipus became not simply a stylistic renovation of the Victorian Sophocles; it was also a bitter and self-critical interrogation of the political commitments which Yeats himself had made to the Irish nation.

The fourth chapter, “‘Heirs of Romanity’: Welsh Nationalism & the Multilingual

Idiom of David Jones” explores the cultural legacy and contested reception of Romanitas in modern Wales, particularly its influential impact on both the ideology of the Plaid

Cymru and the polyglot poetry which David Jones achieved in his 1952 epic, The

Anathémata. Throughout the unpublished correspondence of Jones and the Welsh nationalist leader, Saunders Lewis, the two men often debated the role and abiding presence of Romanitas in Wales. According to Lewis, Wales still possessed the unique ingenium of the Roman Empire in its native culture and in its native language. For him its presence justified civil disobedience towards English authority, heralding the need for both a new national literature and a new national politics in Wales—a politics motivated by Welsh language purism. For the Anglo-Welsh poet, David Jones, however, the legacy of the Roman imperium was more complex. And rather than insist on a Welsh-Wales purity in literature and in politics, Jones chose instead to cultivate a multilingual form of poetry—a form whose macaronic idiom, he believed, would expose the “vast fabric” of foreign cultural deposits which had enmeshed in Wales not a cultural purity but a hybrid

21 W. B. Yeats, “To Gilbert Murray, 24 January [1905]”. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Volume IV: 1905–1907. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005) 22–24: 23. 10

Romanity.22 The multilingualism he set out in The Anathémata therefore arose, in part, as a skeptical response to the nationalist manipulation of antiquity. For Jones, the classical inheritance of Wales could not be used to justify modern policies of Welsh purism, for the lasting power of Romanitas, as he saw it, lay instead in its ability to transcend what the historian, Charles Norris Cochrane, called the “purely ‘natural’ bonds” of race, language and religion.23

The fifth and final chapter, entitled “‘A form of Doric which is no dialect in particular’: the Cosmopolitan Classicism of Hugh MacDiarmid”, surveys the influence which classical Greece had both on the founding principles of the Scottish Literary

Renaissance and on the synthetic world language which Hugh MacDiarmid attempted in the epic, Cornish Heroic Song for Valda Trevlyn. Following the 1931 publication of an essay called “English Ascendancy in British Literature”, MacDiarmid began arguing for a

“new classicism” in Scottish literature, a classicism which, he believed, might do for

Scotland “as the Greeks themselves did” creating a cosmopolitan national culture.24

Examining impact which Hellenism had had on Ireland’s Literary Revival, MacDiarmid insisted that this new Scottish classicism could only be achieved if the dialects of Scots vernacular were successfully fused with Highland Gaelic. By merging these languages through a “synthetic process”, he argued, Scottish poets could work “back from the bits to whole”, forging a national vernacular which reintegrated “all the disjecta membra of

22 A phrase I borrow from James Joyce’s “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages” (1907). The Critical Writings of James Joyce. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann, eds. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989) 153–74. 23 C. N. Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940) 73. 24 See C. M. Grieve (‘Hugh McDiarmid’), “English Ascendancy in British Literature”. Selected Prose, 61– 80; as well as C. M. Grieve, “Wider Aspects of Scottish Nationalism” (November 1927). The Raucle Tongue, Hitherto Uncollected Prose, Volume II. Angus Calder, Glen Murray, and Alan Riach, eds. (Manchester: Carcanet Press Ltd., 1998) 60–3. 11 the Doric”.25 However, upon being expelled from the National Party of Scotland in 1933,

MacDiarmid’s opinion of contemporary nationalism began to darken just as his literary ambitions grew ever bolder. He turned his model of heteroglossic synthesis into a polyglossic form, a form which he believed would bring together all language and all knowledge. Frustrated by his nationalist contemporaries, MacDiarmid believed that this new multilingual idiom could better transform contemporary literature, giving expression to the materialist ontology at the heart of all human history. Living in isolation on the

Shetland Islands, MacDiarmid tried to set down this vision in an international epic poem that could, he thought, be both cosmopolitan and yet faithful to the “new classicism” he had outlined in “English Ascendancy and British Literature”. By bringing together in one work the classical ingenia of all countries, this epic would substantiate a poetry gone

μυριόνους, MacDiarmid argued, a ‘myriad-minded’ literature which, though universal, did not erode the lasting value of the local, the particular and the national.26

25 See Hugh MacDiarmid, “Towards a Synthetic Scots” (13 August 1926). Contemporary Scottish Studies. Alan Riach, ed. (Manchester: Carcanet Press 1995) 368–73; as well as Hugh MacDiarmid, “The New Movement in Vernacular Poetry: Lewis Spence, Marion Angus” (November 1925). Contemporary Scottish Studies. Alan Riach, ed. (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1995) 196–204. 26 Hugh MacDiarmid, “The Kind of Poetry I Want”. Complete Poems, Volume II. Michael Grieve and W. R. Aitken, eds. (Manchester: Carcanet Press Ltd., 1994) 1001–35. 12

Chapter One

“A noble vernacular?”: Yeats, British Hellenism & the Anglo-Irish Nation27

In an 1892 speech entitled “The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland,” Douglas

Hyde (1860–1949), translator of Irish folklore, lamented “the failure of the Irish people in recent times”, for Ireland was at one time, he asserted, “one of the most classically learned and cultured nations in Europe, [and it] is now one of the least so.”28 As Hyde saw it, Irish art and literature had decayed to such an extent that

one of the most reading and literary peoples has become one of the least studious and most un-literary, and…the present art products of one of the quickest, most sensitive, and most artistic races on earth are now only distinguished for their hideousness.29

This erosion in learning and in the arts had emerged, he thought, out of a paradox in popular Irish sentiment, “sentiment”, he declared, which “sticks in this half-way house…imitating England and yet apparently hating it. How can [Ireland] produce anything good in literature, art, or institutions as long as it is actuated by motives so

27 I take this phrase, “a noble vernacular” from sections LXX and CXVII in Geoffrey Hill, The Triumph of Love (Boston: Houghton Mufflin Company, 1998) 36, 61. 28 Douglas Hyde, “The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland” (25 November 1892). Language, Lore, and Lyrics: Essays and Lectures. Breandán Ó Conaire, ed. (Blackrock, Co. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1986) 153–70: 153. 29 Ibid. 13 contradictory?”30 For Hyde, the “half-way house” which Ireland inhabited was most apparent in the dominant spoken tongue of contemporary society. The prominence of the

English language in the country’s daily life and political affairs advanced, he believed, the political supremacy of Britain, fostering within the Irish people a deep-seated compulsion to mimic modern English culture. In spite of this fact, nationalists often bemoaned English dominance, but Hyde felt his countrymen were blind, for they refused to scrutinize the linguistic source of their nation’s cultural as well as political captivity.31

Hyde saw little reason to expect nothing less than the deep entrenchment of English in

Ireland. Soon he felt the last remnants of Irish Gaelic would be extinct, for the native tongue had been devastated by the crippling reality of the Great Famine of 1845, the prohibition of its teaching in national schools until 1871, as well as the slow assimilation rural Catholics were making into the Anglophone middle class.32 For Hyde, the death of

Gaelic would mark not just the loss of an ancient tongue but the loss of a distinctive nationality that provided “every external” which

at present differentiates us from the English…all our Irish names of places and people [will be] turned into English names; the Irish language completely extinct; the O’s and the Macs dropped; our Irish intonation changed, as far as possible by English schoolmasters into something English; our history no longer remembered or taught; the names of our rebels and martyrs blotted out…the fact we were not of Saxon origin dropped out of sight and memory, and let me now put the question – How many Irish are there who would purchase material prosperity at such a price?33

30 Ibid., 154. 31 Ibid., 155, 160. 32 On the decline of Irish Gaelic, see Cathair Ó Dochartaigh, “Irish in Ireland”. Languages in Britain & Ireland. Glanville Price, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000) 6–36. 33 Hyde, “The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland”, 155. 14

Alarmed at this, Hyde vociferously attacked those who believed that an Irish national literature could still be forged from the common language of Spenser, Shakespeare,

Arnold and Shelley.34 If encouraged in place of Gaelic, this so-called Anglo-Irish literature would, he thought, betray the very linguistic roots of Ireland’s history and polity.35 Traffic in English would only enfeeble the last vestige of “our once great national tongue”, he argued, creating in its stead a hybrid vernacular whose presence would further corrupt Ireland along “racial lines”, spreading that plague of English imitation, “West-Britonism” across the nation.36

We must create a strong feeling against West-Britonism, for it…will overwhelm us like a flood, and we shall find ourselves toiling painfully behind the English at each step following the same fashions, only six months behind the English ones...We will become, what, I fear, we are largely at present, a nation of imitators, the Japanese of Western Europe, lost to the power of native initiative and alive only to second-hand assimilation.37

Unless the Irish were willing to accept the permanent loss of Gaelic civilization—and ultimately the degradation of their own race—English could have not the “smallest quarter” in the country.38 The language had to be eradicated. For this reason, Hyde

34 “I have often heard people thank God that if the English gave us nothing else they gave us at least their language. In this way they put a bold face upon the matter, and pretend that the Irish language is not worth knowing”. Ibid., 160. 35 Ibid., 158. 36 Ibid., 160, 169 On “West-Britonism” in the Irish Literary Revival, see Tony Crowley, “Language and revolution, 1876– 1922”. Wars of Words, The Politics of Language in Ireland 1537–2004 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) 128–63: 136–40; and also Laura O’Connor, “Beyond the Pale”. Haunted English: The Celtic Fringe, the British Empire, and De-Anglicization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) 1– 65: 39–53. 37 Hyde, “The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland”, 169. 38 Ibid. 15 predicated the development of a new national literature on both the revitalization of

Gaelic as well as the annihilation of Irish bilingualism.39

Having heard Hyde deliver this address before the National Literary Society in

Dublin late that fall, W. B. Yeats confessed that he was moved greatly. Hyde’s words brimmed, he thought, with a great deal of “learning…profound sincerity…[and] passionate conviction”.40 Nevertheless, Yeats found himself greatly “depressed” by the scholar’s suggestions regarding the revitalization of Irish literature.41 Later that autumn, he responded to these publicly in a letter to the editor of the United Irishman. There

Yeats insisted that the coming extinction of Irish Gaelic would be regrettable but it was not inevitable: “the Gaelic language”, he declared, “will soon be no more heard, except here and there in remote villages, and on the wind-beaten shores of Connaught.”42 What was left of the language still needed to be preserved, Yeats felt, for Irish remained the

“learned...fountain of nationality in our midst.”43 However, as the common tongue for the

39 When looking back on the beginning of the Literary Revival later in 1905, Hyde remained resolute: the hybrid character of Anglo-Irish could not sustain a national literature. “It was a literature in which they strove to compete with England herself upon England’s own lines…English gum is no substitute, and never can be a substitute for Irish sap. Fifty years of bitter experience have taught us that the Young Ireland heroes did not arrest, and to my thinking could not arrest, the denationalization of Ireland by a literature which, rousing and admirable as it was, was still only a literature written in the English language and largely founded upon English models.” Douglas Hyde, “The Gaelic Revival.” Language, Lore, and Lyrics: Essays and Lectures. Breandán Ó Conaire, ed. (Blackrock, Co. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1986) 171–92: 178–9. 40 W. B. Yeats, “The De-Anglicising of Ireland” (17 December 1892). Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats. J. P. Frayne, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970) 254–6: 255. On Yeats’ immediate reaction to Hyde’s address, see R. F. Foster, “The Battles of the Books 1891– 1893”. W. B. Yeats, A Life. I. The Apprentice Mage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 112–34: 125–7. 41 Yeats, “The De-Anglicising of Ireland”, 255. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., 256. 16 country’s emerging “hopes of nationhood,” it could not serve.44 Rather than cultivate only a Gaelic purism, Yeats believed the best chance for forging a modern national literature lay in developing a new Anglo-Irish vernacular—a literary language rooted in the translation and creative adaptation of ancient Gaelic folklore.

Is there, then, no hope for the de-Anglicising of our people? Can we not build up a national tradition, a national literature, which shall be none the less Irish in spirit from being English in language? Can we not keep the continuity of the nation’s life, not by trying to do what Dr. Hyde has practically pronounced impossible, but by translating or retelling in English, which shall have an indefinable Irish quality of rythm [sic] and style, all that is best in ancient literature?45

According to Yeats, Hyde’s own success in anglicizing Irish folklore demonstrated the viability of such a new idiom. Modern literary work, he insisted—work that looked and sounded distinctively Irish—could be effective in Anglo-Irish, for this new vernacular would build, Yeats promised, “a golden bridge between the old and the new” in Irish culture.46 “[We] are not failing”, he wrote,

Mr. Hyde, Lady Wilde in her recent books, and Mr. Curtin, and the editor of the just published ‘Vision of M’Comaile,’ are setting before us a table spread with strange Gaelic fruits, from which an ever-growing band of makers of song and story shall draw food for their souls.47

The English employed in these stories and translations had now laid the foundation for more creative work—work which Yeats envisioned as a “great school of ballad poetry in

Ireland”.48 “I thought one day”, he later recalled, “—I can remember the very day when I

44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., 255. 47 Ibid., 256. 48 W. B. Yeats, “What is ‘popular poetry’?” (March 1902). The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume IV: Early Essays. Richard J. Finneran and George Bornstein, eds. (New York: Scribner Press, 2007) 5–11: 5. 17 thought it—‘If somebody could make a style which would not be an English style and yet would be musical and full of colour, many others would catch fire from him’”.49

Since composing The Wanderings of Oisin in 1888, Yeats himself had been engaged in such work, and he believed he had successfully begun to submerge his

English in what he called “that wild Celtic blood, the most un-English of all things.”50

And yet, with no understanding of Irish Gaelic, Yeats faced great difficulty in realizing an approximate fusion between Gaelic and English. To have a literary vernacular best suited to the kind of national epic or ballad poetry he wanted for Ireland, he could not, as

Hyde had, translate directly from Irish folklore.51 From a young age, he had languished when trying to master both ancient and modern languages, but Yeats was now not deterred by his own ignorance. 52 When crafting his earliest attempt at Anglo-Irish epic in

Oisin, he relied on other more indirect methods of approximating a syntax and diction which could sound both ancient and persuasively Celtic. Rather than adapt the style of the original Gaelic, he combined stylistic elements drawn from the classical tradition in recent English poetry with themes he took from the Spenserian quest literature he knew and loved as a child. In particular, Yeats was drawn to poetic techniques which Matthew

49 Ibid. 50 Yeats, “The De-Anglicising of Ireland”, 256. Yeats completed the draft manuscript of The Wanderings of Oisin in March, 1888. The poem, however, was not published until January 1889, when the London firm, Kegan Paul, printed an initial run of 500 copies (300 bound). On the history of the poem’s composition and publication, see George Bornstein’s introduction in W. B. Yeats, The Early Poetry: Manuscript Materials. George Bornstein, ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994) Vol. 2, 1–23: 3–10.

51 Yeats, “What is ‘popular poetry’?”, 5. 52 Yeats’ knowledge of languages other than English is dealt with at some length in chapter three of this thesis. “…on leaving the High School Yeats had some knowledge of Latin and Greek, but…it was inadequate. He had held his own in these subjects initially, but a report for the quarter ending 15 October 1883 confirms that, after he had taken up French and German as well, his Greek and Latin suffered drastically: Yeats received only twenty-eight marks out of 100 in Classics.” Brian Arkins, Builders of My Soul: Greek and Roman Themes in Yeats (Savage, Maryland: Barnes and Noble Books, 1990) 3–4. 18

Arnold (1822–1888) and Percy Shelley (1792–1822) had employed when attempting to show ancient Greek interference in nineteenth-century English poetry.53 In adapting these elements in a Celtic context, Yeats believed his verse would effectively evoke an ancient ethos, a Gaelic ethos that distinguish a national epic in Anglo-Irish from the late

Victorian lyric styles of English poetry still popular across the British Isles.

______

It was not long after he first responded to Hyde that Yeats began to ruminate more deeply on the questions first raised by his friend’s speech. Could a national literature be effectively achieved in Anglo-Irish? Yeats believed it could, but when lecturing in Dublin in May of 1893, he pointedly put the question forth again: “But are we really at the outset of a literary epoch? Or are we not, perhaps, merely a little eddy cast up by the advancing tide of English literature and are we not doomed, perhaps, to its old age and coming

53 Yeats did use two literal English translations of the Oisín legend, but these were not sources he drew on to develop the style of his Celtic ballads. Neither of these versions was artistically distinguished. The first entitled, “The Lay of Oisin on the Land of Youths,” was completed in 1856 by the linguist, Bryan O’Looney. O’Looney’s translation is syntactically simple and conventional, conveying most Gaelic clauses in little more than a single line of verse. His literalism does not sacrifice clarity in English when attempting to convey the foreign nuances of Irish Gaelic. The second source is David Comyn’s version, Laoid Oisín air Tír na n-Óg. Published by the Gaelic Union in 1880, this “exactly literal rather than elegant” translation was prepared especially for the teaching of Gaelic in schools. With the student in mind, Comyn claimed that his particular method of translation would show the special preeminence of the Gaelic original. Where a literal rendering of the Gaelic could not be produced, Comyn marked with parentheses the “words required to bring out clearly in English the meaning of each clause…and when…the literal meaning requires still further to be idiomatically explained, a second version of the clause is given in italics.” This method, he claimed, would encourage students toward a further knowledge of the difficulties in the original language, for Comyn believed that an awareness of these difficulties would further expand the semantic register of English. “Translation from one language into another enriches the language into which the translation is made. The language is rendered more copious and pliable by being, as it were, put through a process of expansion to render it more capable of transmitting clearly the ideas conceived and expressed at first in a different idiom. English has been enriched in this way from many sources.” Despite this goal, Comyn’s translation remained little more than a crib. On these sources, see David Comyn, Laoid Oisín air Tír na n-Óg (Dublin: A. E. Chamney, 1880) and also Russell K. Alspach, “Some Sources of Yeats’s The Wanderings of Oisin.” PMLA, Vol. 58, No. 3 (September 1943) 849–66. On Shelley’s impact in The Wanderings of Oisin, see Harold Bloom, “Anglo-Irish Poetry and The Wanderings of Oisin”. Yeats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970) 81–103. 19 decline?”54 Yeats feared that if the foreign accent of Gaelic were not heard in Anglo-

Irish, the national character of Ireland’s literature might be dismissed simply as a late flowering of English Romanticism, a “neo-romantic” movement derived from the popular taste for the “Celtic note” in literature.55 In Britain interest in the “Celtic note” had been rising slowly for over a century, at least since James Macpherson’s fabrication of a

“Northern Homer” in Scotland in 1761.56 Macpherson’s finding of Ossian (in Irish:

Oisín), the epic poet of the ancient Gaelic world, was met with great fanfare at the time, but soon it was exposed as an elaborate hoax, first by the Irish antiquarian, Charles

O’Conor (1710–1791) and then by Samuel Johnson (1709–1784). Over a century later,

Yeats remained anxious about the legacy of Ossian. He feared that contemporary Irish poets might be tempted to follow the path Macpherson had cut, forging a literature dressed in Celtic fringe but made only for common English consumption.57

The desire for an inauthentic Celticism in poetry was growing in Ireland, and as it did so, Yeats became increasingly defiant.58 In this 1893 lecture which he entitled

54 W. B. Yeats, “Nationality and Literature” (19 May 1893). Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats. J. P. Frayne, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970) 266–75: 273. 55 The term, “neo-romantic”, was an epithet Yeats used to describe his juvenilia and earliest unpublished poetry. At 22 years old, he told Katherine Tynan that “we shall have a school of Irish poetry — founded on Irish myth and History — a neo-remantic [sic] movement.” W. B. Yeats, Letter to Katherine Tynan, 27 [April 1887]. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Volume I: 1865–1895. John Kelly and Eric Domville, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986) 10–12: 10–11. 56 On the Ossian controversy, see Thomas M. Curley, Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud, and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) as well as Kirsti Simonsuuri, Homer's Original Genius: Eighteenth-century Notions of the Early Greek epic (1688-1798) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) 108–42. 57 On the significance of the Ossian controversy to the Celtic Revival, see Curley, “Charles O’Conor and the Celtic Revival”. Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud, and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and Ireland, 123–55. On its significance for Yeats’ The Wanderings of Oisin, see G. J. Watson, “Yeats, Macpherson and the Cult of Defeat”. From Gaelic to Romantic: Ossianic Translations. Fiona Stafford and Howard Gaskill, eds. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998) 216–25. 58 On his disavowal of the “Celtic note”, see W. B. Yeats, “To the Editor of The Leader, 26 August [1900]”. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Volume II: 1896–1900. Warwick Gould, John Kelly and 20

“Nationality and Literature”, he staunchly defended his vision of Anglo-Irish and came to the conclusion that unlike monoglot England, the bilingual genius of contemporary

Ireland needed new expression in a national epic poem. In so doing, Yeats did not savage the toxic influence of West-Britonism. He did not condemn the English language with the hope of restoring Gaelic purity. Instead, he set out to classify and contrast the state of both Irish and English letters by comparing them with the most exalted literary tradition of the ancient world—that of classical Greece. In this way, Yeats intentionally set out to undermine a central point in the criticism of Matthew Arnold. Arnold had, in his inaugural lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry, contrasted the literature of modern

England with what he called “the absolute, the enduring interest of Greek literature, and, above all, of Greek poetry.”59 In Arnold’s view, the literature of ancient Greece, specifically the works of fifth-century Athens, had emerged in a parallel age, a highly developed and corresponding modernity like that of contemporary England. “Now the culminating age in the life of ancient Greece”, Arnold declared,

I call, beyond question, a great epoch; the life of Athens in the fifth century before our era I call one of the highly developed, one of the marking, one of the modern periods in the life of the whole human race…There was the utmost energy of life there, public and private; the most entire freedom, the most unprejudiced and intelligent observation of human affairs.60

Despite the innate similarity, contemporary writers in England could not equal what the

Athenians had achieved, for English poets had failed, Arnold claimed, to achieve “a

Deirdre Toomey, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) 562–9: 567–8. See also Laura O’Connor, “‘Eater and Eaten’, The Haunted English of W. B. Yeats”. Haunted English: The Celtic Fringe, the British Empire, and De-Anglicization, 66–110: 76–7. 59 Matthew Arnold, “On the Modern Element in Literature” (14 November 1857). The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold. Volume I: On the Classical Tradition. R. H. Super, ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961) 18–37: 37. 60 Ibid., 23. 21 comprehensive, a commensurate, an adequate literature” that could meet the modern demands of the “critical spirit, [and] the endeavour after a rational arrangement and appreciation of facts.”61 In light of this fact, Arnold insisted that Attic literature— especially “the poetry of Pindar, Aeschylus, and Sophocles”—was a suitable model for

English imitation.62 With “the legitimate demands of our age,” he asserted, “the literature of ancient Greece is, even for modern times, a mighty agent of intellectual deliverance; even for modern times, therefore, an object of indestructible interest.”63

In his own lecture, Yeats likewise laid claim to the “indestructible interest” of ancient Greek literature. He did not believe, however, that the poetry of antiquity could be manipulated as models for modern imitation. Instead, Yeats used examples from

Greek literature to do a “little philosophy”, to rationalize what he called a “general law” of literary development, a law which he believed could expose a vast chasm between contemporary Irish letters and the receding power of modern English literature.64

I wish to separate the general course of literary development and set it apart from mere historical accident and circumstance, and having so done, to examine the stages it passes through, and then to try and point out in what stage the literature of England is, and in what stage the literature of Ireland is.65

By scrutinizing the classics, Yeats felt he could establish a law of literary history, a law raised above the vicissitudes of shifting taste and changing fashion. The history of ancient

Greek literature and civilization, he argued, ought to be divided into “three clearly-

61 Ibid., 22, 25. 62 Ibid., 29, 19, 29. 63 Ibid., 20. 64 Yeats, “Nationality and Literature,” 268. 65 Ibid. 22 marked periods” of political and artistic development, each defined by the rise of a dominant poetic genre. These three were, as he saw them, “the period of narrative poetry, the period of epic or ballad poetry; next the dramatic period; and after that the period of lyric poetry.”66 Success in any genre, Yeats argued, did not depend entirely on the individual talent of a poet but on the moment in national history as well, for each country required different literary forms in each stage of its political development. “In Greece”, he asserted,

the first period is represented by Homer, who describes great racial and national movements and events, and sings of the Greek race rather than any particular member of it. After him come Aeschulus [sic] and Sophocles, who subdivide these great movements and events into characters who lived and wrought in them…After the dramatists come the lyric poets, who are known to us through the Greek anthology. And now not only have the racial events disappeared but the great personages themselves, for literature has begun to centre itself about this or that emotion or mood.67

For Yeats, the slow development of a literary tradition moved naturally in accord with discrete shifts in the political evolution of a country. Over time, he argued, as literary form advanced from the epic to the lyric, each country found its national character transformed, its particular genius becoming ever more “divided and subdivided” as it moved “unity to multiplicity, from simplicity to complexity”.68

66 Ibid., 269. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid., 271, 268. Throughout the lecture, Yeats used the growth of a tree to describe the thematic individuation of national literature, its growth from “unity to multiplicity”: “It grows from a simple seed, and having sent up a little green sprout of no great complexity, though much more complex than its seed, it develops a complex trunk at last and all innumerable and intricate leaves, and flowers, and fruits. Its growth is unity to multiplicity, from simplicity to complexity, and if we examine this method of growth, we find that it takes place through constant sub-division of the constituent cells. I hope to show you that a literature develops in an analogous way, and that this development takes place by a constant sub-division of moods and emotions, corresponding to the sub-division of the cells in a tree.” Ibid., 268–9. 23

The poets had at the beginning for their material the national character, the national history, and the national circumstances, and having found an expression of the first in the second, they divided and sub-divided the national imagination…They could but investigate and express ever more minutely and subtly the character, and history, and circumstance of climate and scenery, that they had got.69

When applying this law to England, Yeats felt that the country had long been mired in the

“age of lyric poetry” where “every kind of subtlety, obscurity, and intricate utterance prevails, for the human spirit has begun to look in upon itself with microscopic eyes and judge of ideas and feelings apart from their effects upon action.”70 Because English poetry now encouraged a language “too fine, [and] too subjective”, its collective national character was obscured from view.71 No longer an expression of the entire race, literature in England had devolved into the “impalpable” idioms of Byron, Keats, and Shelley, whose verse “scattered”, Yeats declared, “into a thousand iridescent fragments, flashing and flickering” the general life of modern England.72 The Romantics, he argued, prized the temporal accidents of individual existence and subjective experience over the more permanent racial themes and collective events that impacted all English civilization. As poets in a lyric age, he asserted, they had refused to draw “their inspiration mainly from external activities and from what are called matters of fact, for they must express every phase of human consciousness no matter how subtle, how vague, how impalpable.”73 For this reason, poetry in nineteenth-century England had slowly stepped “out of the market-

69 Ibid., 269–70. 70 Ibid., 271. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid., 271, 270. 73 Ibid., 271. 24 place, out of the general tide of life”, becoming bit by bit “a mysterious cult, as it were, an almost secret religion made by the few for the few.”74

In Ireland, however, the situation was markedly different. The accusation Yeats aimed at Byron, Shelley, and Keats did not reflect contemporary Irish poetry. The political character of the country was drastically different, so much so that a crucial generic difference had emerged between Ireland and England. “[N]ot only is this literature of England different in character from the literature of Ireland,” he wrote, “as different as the beech tree from the oak…the two literatures are at quite different stages of their development.”75 As Yeats saw it, Ireland’s growth into a nation had been abruptly halted during the Middle Ages. “When the day of battle came”, he wrote, Ireland

could not combine against the invader. Each province had its own assembly and its own king. There was no focus to draw the tribes into one. The national order perished at the moment when other countries like Germany and Iceland were beginning to write out their sagas and epics in deliberate form.76

With the country mired in political disarray, the “national imagination” remained unexpressed.77 Rather than emerge as the foundation of a legitimate literary tradition,

Gaelic folklore and the tales of early Irish history never found the first necessary literary form of the “epic or ballad period”.78 Instead, the country’s legends languished, becoming what Yeats called

74 Ibid. 75 Ibid., 269. 76 W. B. Yeats, “Bardic Ireland” (4 January 1890). The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume IX: Early Articles and Reviews. John P. Frayne and Madeleine Marchaterre, eds. (New York: Scribner Press, 2004) 109–12: 111–12. 77 Yeats, “Nationality and Literature”, 269. 78 Ibid. 25

a vast pell-mell of monstrous shapes: huge demons driving swine on the hill-tops; beautiful shadows whose hair has a peculiar life and moves responsive to their thought; and here and there some great hero like Cuchulain, some epic needing only deliberate craft to be scarce less than Homer.79

With no deliberate craft, the Irish had failed to produce a Homer all their own. And now after seven hundred years of subjugation and colonization, only scattered fragments of the country’s folklore remained alive. Such folk tales were, Yeats lamented, “seeds that never bore stems, stems that never wore flowers, flowers that knew no fruitage. The literature of ancient Ireland is a literature of vast, half-dumb conceptions…Instead of the well-made poem we might have had, there remains but a wild anarchy of legends.”80

Nevertheless, in spite of this fact, Yeats believed that poetry could now be forged from what still remained of the Gaelic past. If shaped with “deliberate craft”—the kind of craft an Anglo-Irish idiom could bring—a new national epic might emerge.

“We are a young nation”, he explained,

with unexhausted material lying within us in our still unexpressed national character, about us in our scenery, and in the clearly marked outlines of our life, and behind us in our multitude of legends. Look at our literature and you will see that we are still in our epic or ballad period.81

The poet, Samuel Ferguson (1810–1886), had already produced “truly bardic” translations of Irish in his 1865 collection, Lays of the Western Gael and Other Poems.82

These, Yeats believed, had advanced the cause for a new epic in Anglo-Irish, for

79 Yeats, “Bardic Ireland, 112. 80 Ibid. 81 Yeats, “Nationality and Literature,” 273. 82 W. B. Yeats, “The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson – II” (November 1886). The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume IX: Early Articles and Reviews. John P. Frayne and Madeleine Marchaterre, eds. (New York: Scribner Press, 2004) 10–27: 24. 26

Ferguson’s English idiom was highly distinctive.83 Unlike his contemporaries, he was

“like the ancients; not that he was an imitator, as Matthew Arnold in Sohrab and Rustum, but for a much better reason; he was like them—like them in nature, for his spirit had sat with the old heroes of his country.”84 Rather than mimic the neo-classical impulse which motivated Arnold, Ferguson had tried to emulate Homer by cultivating—even in translation—the original genius of Irish Gaelic. In so doing, Yeats insisted that he had begun to draw from native sources “a fragment of the buried Odyssey of Ireland.”85

Because he had “worn the pathway” toward a new epic, Ferguson’s example proved powerful for the young Yeats.86 “[L]iving waters for the healing of our nation”, he insisted, could be drawn if modern poets were willing to follow his example, for like

Homer, Ferguson had begun to write epic by gathering together the folk legends scattered through the country.87 By the end of the eighteenth century, it was widely believed across

Europe that Homeric epic had been composed in a like manner. In his 1795 treatise entitled, Prolegomena ad Homerum, the German philologist, F. A. Wolf (1759–1824), famously insisted that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not the products of an individual genius. They had rather emerged gradually through emendation and the arrangement of pre-existing poetry and ballads.

83 “If fate compelled me to review his work, and to review some princely ancient Homer or Aeschylus, and to do this by the method of short quotations, the admirable Londoner, in the minds of many readers, would rule the roost.” Ibid., 14. 84 Ibid., 14. On Ferguson’s practice of translation, see Peter Denman, Samuel Ferguson; The Literary Achievement. Irish Literary Studies Series, Volume 39. (Savage, Maryland: Barnes and Noble Books, 1990) 73–112. 85 Yeats, “The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson – II”, 14. 86 W. B. Yeats, “The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson – I” (9 October 1886). The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume IX: Early Articles and Reviews. John P. Frayne and Madeleine Marchaterre, eds. (New York: Scribner Press, 2004) 3–9: 4. 87 Ibid. 27

The Homer that we hold in our hands now is not the one who flourished in the mouths of the Greeks of his own day, but one variously altered, interpolated, corrected, and emended from the times of Solon down to those of the Alexandrians. Learned and clever men have long felt their way to this conclusion by using various scattered bits of evidence; but now the voices of all periods joined together bear witness, and history speaks.88

According to Wolf, each epic had existed first as a series of rhapsodies and traditional songs—songs that were transmitted orally, and then later collected by a guild of

Homeridae on the island of Chios. Over time the poem slowly took shape, adapted and emended into a kind of poetic unity generation after generation. Wolf’s historicist understanding of Homer, as one scholar put it,

swept the field. Henceforth, the Homeric texts themselves began to appear as something like an archaeological site, with layers of history built into them in a palpable stratigraphy: the disparate effects of multiple compositional layers…the temptation was to separate out these layers of accretion – indeed, just to detect them was already to prise them apart – with the result that Homer and his texts slowly unraveled, even if there was something sublime about this heap of threads.89

In the English-speaking world, this approach to Homer had a powerful impact on the practice of translation and the composition of new poetry during the long nineteenth- century. For it was thought that “if the Iliad and the Odyssey had been produced by a preliterate oral culture, then there might be similar cultural monuments preserved in obscure manuscript collections or still alive in oral traditions of remote parts of

Europe.”90 For this reason, translators and poets begun to try to anglicize the oral, archaic

88 F. A. Wolf, Prolegomena To Homer, 1795. Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and James E. G. Zetzel, trans. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) 209. 89 James I. Porter, “Homer: the history of an idea”. The Cambridge Companion to Homer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 324–43: 336. 90 Bruce Graver, “Romanticism,” A Companion to the Classical Tradition. Craig W. Kallendorf, ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007) 72–86: 76. 28 character of Homeric verse, believing that epic characteristics could be grasped in

English by using ballad metres and by drawing on the vulgar dialects of country folk.91

Matthew Arnold, for his part, despised such ballad-style translations of Homer, and attacked with particular ferocity both William Maginn’s Homeric Ballads (1839–

1842) and Francis Newman’s 1856 unrhymed versification of the Iliad. According to

Newman, Homeric epic required a “more antiquated style” whose idiom could be both

“fundamentally musical and popular” at the same time.92 Settling upon the English ballad as “a metre of the same genius”, Newman felt—as Lawrence Venuti has noted—that ballad rhythms in English could best replicate the “direct, popular, forcible, quaint, flowing, [and] garrulous” qualities of Homeric poetry.93 Arnold, however, contested this description of Homer, arguing that Newman’s own translation had achieved very little.

He had not successfully anglicized the “eminently noble” character of the Iliad, but instead merely joined “to a bad rhythm so bad a diction that it is difficult to distinguish exactly whether in any given passage it is his words or his measure which produces a

91 Richard Hamilton Armstrong, “Translating Ancient Epic”. A Companion to Ancient Epic. John Miles Foley, ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005) 174–95: 177. “Wolf’s theories were at first greeted with enthusiasm in England; the romantics enjoyed the notion that the Homeric epics were the rude virile utterances of a barbarous people, like those old English and Scottish ballads which so fascinated them. They saw Homer as they saw Shakespeare, spontaneous, natural, gloriously imperfect and unpredictable.” Richard Jenkyns, “Homer and the Homeric Ideal.” The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980) 192–226: 197. 92 F. W. Newman, “Preface”. The Iliad of Homer, Faithfully Translated into Unrhymed English Metre (London: Walton and Maberly, 1856) ix, v, xii. 93 “The moral qualities of Homer’s style being like to those of the English ballad, we need a metre of the English ballad, we need a metre of the same genius. It must be fundamentally musical and popular. Only those metres which, by the very possession of these qualities, are liable to degenerate into doggerel, are suitable to reproduce ancient Epic.” Ibid., v, iv. See Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, A History of Translation. Second edition. (New York: Routledge, 2008) 106. 29 total impression of such an unpleasant kind.”94 Maginn’s work too, Arnold asserted, was worthless. The Cork-born journalist had constructed his Odyssey as twelve separate folk ballads, believing one could artificially roll back the emendation which the centuries had laid on the Greek. According to Arnold, Maginn despite his best effort had achieved only

“a true ballad-slang”, a “detestable dance…jigging in my ears, to spoil the effect of

Homer, and to torture me. To apply that manner and that rhythm to Homer’s incidents, is”, Arnold insisted, “not to imitate Homer, but to travesty him.”95

According to Arnold, the grand style of Homeric verse was almost inimitable in its plainness, its directness, its simplicity and its nobility. For this reason, Arnold believed that the translator of Homer had to “penetrate himself with a sense of the plainness and directness of Homer’s style; of the simplicity with which Homer is evolved and expressed.”96 Each of these qualities had, at one time or another, eluded all English translators of Homer. Even George Chapman’s seventeenth-century work had been “too active” and had “interposed the mist of the fancifulness of the Elizabethan age, entirely alien to the plain directness of Homer’s thought and feeling.”97 But even the fancifulness of Chapman was a significant literary achievement, especially when compared with the

94 Matthew Arnold, “On Translating Homer” (1860–1861). The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold. Volume I: On the Classical Tradition. R. H. Super, ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961) 97–216: 102, 132–3. On Arnold’s criticism of Newman and its impact on the practice of classical translation, see Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 106–17; and Matthew Reynolds, “Principles and Norms of Translation”. The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Volume 4: 1790–1900. Peter France and Kenneth Haynes, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press) 61–82: 67–70. On F. A. Wolf’s impact in Arnold’s debate with Francis Newman, see Porter, “Homer: the history of an idea”, 338–41. 95 Arnold, “On Translating Homer”, 131–2. 96 Ibid., 111. 97 Ibid., 113, 103. 30 new ballad-style translations emerging in the mid-nineteenth century. These had fostered, instead, a “cloud of more than Egyptian thickness”—a thickness that totally obscured the four praiseworthy qualities Arnold attributed to the original Greek.98

This proposition that Homer’s poetry is ballad-poetry, analogous to the well-known ballad-poetry of the English and other nations, has a certain small portion of truth in it, and at one time, probably served a useful purpose, when it was used to discredit the artificial and literary manner in which Pope and his school rendered Homer. But it has been extravagantly over-used.99

Despite the conclusions of Wolf had drawn in 1795, Homer could not be effectively anglicized, Arnold argued, by equating the nobility and directness of his Greek with the rustic character and vulgar simplicity of English folk culture. “It is time to say plainly”, he explained, “that, whatever the admirers of our old ballads may think, the supreme form of epic poetry, the genuine Homeric mould, is not the form of the Ballad of Lord

Bateman.”100

During Ireland’s Literary Revival, Yeats showed no interest in translating Homer, nor did he agree with Arnold’s stance on the works of Newman and Maginn.

Nevertheless, Yeats did believe that what remained of Gaelic folklore was akin to the source material Homer himself had used when composing the Iliad and the Odyssey.

“[T]he celtic races love the soil of their countries vehemently,” he told a friend in 1897,

98 Ibid., 103. 99 Ibid., 126. 100 Ibid., 128. Arnold refers to a popular song sung in English taverns and public houses. The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman was published in an 1839 edition, complete with illustrations by George Cruikshank, and an unattributed preface written by Charles Dickens. In the “Warning to the Public concerning The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman” Dickens insisted that the “ancient ditty” frequently heard outside houses of “general refreshment” possessed “some remote and distance resemblance to the following Epic poem” lifted from a collection of old English Ballads. See The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman (London: Charles Tilt, 1839) v; as well as “53. Young Beichan”. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Francis James Child, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1884) Part 2, 454–83. 31

& have as great a mass of legends about that soil as Homer had about his…The true foundation of literature is folklore, which was the foundation of Homer & of Shakespeare but has not been the foundation of more modern writers…the life that is in legends is still the life of Homers people.101

Because of this “mass of legends”, Yeats thought contemporary Ireland was, much like archaic Greece, on the cusp of first articulating its literary genius in epic form. The country was ready for a national poem, he thought, for its folklore had been “made by no one man, but by the nation itself through a slow process of modification and adaption, to express its loves and its hates, its likes and its dislikes.”102 With such an unexhausted abundance of material, the modern poet could write and speak collectively, Yeats thought, about those central events of which had defined the race and the character of

Irish nation. “Our best writers,” he explained,

De Vere, Ferguson, Allingham, Mangan, Davis, O’Grady, are all either ballad or epic writers, and all base their greatest work, if I except a song or two of Mangan’s and Allingham’s, upon legends and upon the fortunes of the nation. Alone, perhaps, among the nations of Europe we are in our ballad or epic age.103

Contemporary Ireland stood in an age parallel to that of Homer, but Yeats was quick to insist that Homeric epic was worthy only of emulation, not concrete imitation or even translation. As he saw it, modern poets could not effectively compose an epic for Ireland by employing in verse the mythology of classical civilization. For centuries, the heroes and gods of Greek antiquity had been tediously recycled through the various literatures of early modern Europe. These were exhausted of use for Irish poets, Yeats claimed, and

101 W. B. Yeats, “To Richard Ashe King, 5 August [1897].” The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Volume II: 1896–1901. John Kelly, Warwick Gould, Deirdre Toomey, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 129–31: 129–30. 102 Yeats, “Nationality and Literature,” 273. 103 Ibid. 32 now native sources could be cultivated alone. “The folk-lore of Greece and Rome lasted us a longtime;” he wrote,

but having ceased to be a living tradition, it became both worn out and unmanageable like an old servant. We can now no more get up a great interest in the gods of Olympus than we can in the stories told by the showman of a travelling waxwork company.104

Nothing worthy of Ireland’s ancient history or its cultural genius could be found in the foreign mythology of the classics. To use them to define nationhood would be tantamount, Yeats believed, to imitating the English Romantics, in particular Shelley who, rather than cultivate native folklore, saturated his verse with elements drawn from classical myth. Because he wrote in this way, Shelley’s “symbols and types and stories”,

Yeats explained, came to possess little imaginative power. He was engrossed in foreign mythology, and as such, his verse lacked the “adequate folklore” necessary to articulate the essence of modern nationhood in Britain.105

Shelley had but a mythology; and a mythology which had been passing for long through literary minds without any new inflow from living tradition loses all the incalculable instinctive and convincing quality of the popular traditions. No conscious invention can take the place of tradition, for he who would write a folk tale, and thereby bring a new life into literature, must have the fatigue of the spade in his hands and the stupor of the fields in his heart.106

In primarily cultivating classical sources—sources whose meaning was intelligible only to an educated elite—Shelley had, Yeats thought had replaced folklore with a “waxwork” classicism, a poor substitute whose inorganic relationship to English nationality made it

104 W. B. Yeats, “The Message of the Folk-lorist” (19 August 1893). The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume IX: Early Articles and Reviews. John P. Frayne and Madeleine Marchaterre, eds. (New York: Scribner Press, 2004) 209–13: 210. 105 Ibid., 212. 106 Ibid., 212–13. 33 impossible to reflect “the voice of some race celebrating itself, embalming forever what it hated and loved.”107

In light of Shelley’s example, Yeats eschewed direct allusions to Greek and

Roman antiquity in his earliest verse. To adopt such material would not encourage the kind of undeniably Irish epic he sought. And yet, though Yeats heaped scorn on artificial classicism he saw in English poetry, he insisted that Irish poets still had “to go where

Homer went, if we are to sing a new song.”108 But to follow Homer did not mean forsaking folklore and Irish history for Greek literature and Roman myth. It entailed rather a renewed commitment to the translation and the versification of Ireland’s native materia, for by drawing similar tales and legends together in archaic Greece, “Homer himself”, Yeats declared, had “found the great banquet on an earthen floor and under a broken roof.”109 The parallel Yeats drew between Homeric Greece and Ireland had, by

1893, already received substantial attention in prominent studies by Celtic philologists, most notably in the work of Marie Henri d’Arbois de Jubainville (1827–1910), John Rhys

(1840–1915) and Alfred Trübner Nutt (1856–1910). Yeats read each if these scholars with great interest and enthusiasm, believing that their research had collectively amassed a great deal of historical, anthropological and mythological evidence to suggest that

Gaelic folklore and the mythology of Homeric Greece emerged from a common Indo-

107 Yeats, “The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson – I”, 3. 108 W. B. Yeats, “Thoughts on Lady Gregory's Translations” (1902). The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume VI: Prefaces and Introductions. William H. O'Donnell, ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1989) 119– 34: 131–2. 109 Ibid. 34

European origin.110 In a review of Nutt’s essay, “The Happy Otherworld,” Yeats praised what Synge later called the “Greek kinship” of Celtic legends, for these

are…our principal way to an understanding of the beliefs out of which the beliefs of the Greeks and other Europeans races arose…‘Greek and Irish alone have preserved the early stages of the happy other world conception with any fulness’ and…Ireland has preserved them ‘with greater fulness and precision’ than the Greeks.111

Yeats cared little whether these claims were accurate: the common source Nutt posited between the Greek and the Irish served his larger nationalist vision of literature and society. With a unique, unbroken link to classical antiquity, poets in Ireland, he wrote, would soon rediscover “the habit of mind that created the religion of the muses.”112 They would forge a distinctively Irish epic equal to the achievements of ancient Greece, and in so doing, Irish poetry would finally emerge from the remains of English Romanticism— redefined not in terms of anti-English sentiment but in light of the deep connection

Ireland still possessed with Homeric Greece. However, with the extinction of Gaelic looming, Ireland’s unbroken connection to Greek antiquity was under threat. For this reason, Yeats insisted that the creative adoption of folklore was indispensable to preserving Ireland’s cultural genius. Infused with the foreign accent of Irish Gaelic, this

110 The popularity in Ireland of d’Arbois de Jubainville’s study led to its 1903 English translation by Richard Irvine Best. The translation expressly served the political aims of popular nationalism, aiming to give “Irishmen…a knowledge of these great traditions of their race, which was old when many of the proud nations of to-day were young.” H. d’Arbois de Jubainville, The Irish Mythological Cycle & Celtic Mythology. Richard Irvine Best, trans. (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis & Co., Ltd., 1903) 34. 111 W. B. Yeats, “Celtic Beliefs about the Soul” (September 1898). The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume IX: Early Articles and Reviews. John P. Frayne and Madeleine Marchaterre, eds. (New York: Scribner Press, 2004) 415–17: 416. See also J. M. Synge, “Celtic Mythology” (2 April 1904). Collected Works, Volume II: Prose. Alan Price, ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1966) 364–6: 365. 112 W. B. Yeats, “The Literary Movement in Ireland” (December 1899). The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume IX: Early Articles and Reviews. John P. Frayne and Madeleine Marchaterre, eds. (New York: Scribner Press, 2004) 459–70; 467. 35 new literary language would, he thought, sustain the privileged “kinship” the ancient

Gaels shared with Greek antiquity.113

______

In 1921 when reflecting on the days he spent with the Rhymer’s Club in London,

W. B. Yeats recalled how he, like the other poets of his circle, had aspired to the vision

Shelley had created of the ancient Greek world. “Might I not,” he wrote,

with health and good luck to aid me, create some new Prometheus Unbound; Patrick or Columcille, Oisin or Finn, in Prometheus’ stead; and, instead of Caucasus, Cro-Patrick or Ben Bulben? Have not all races had their first unity from a mythology that marries them to rock and hill? We had in Ireland imaginative stories, which the uneducated classes knew and even sang, and might we not make those stories current among the educated classes.114

Even though Yeats disliked the artificial classicism of Shelley’s verse, he greatly admired the Prometheus Unbound (1820), a work he called the “sacred book” of his youth.115

What appealed to him was not the use of Greek mythology, but rather the attempt to recreate and reinvigorate the ancient world and an ancient language in a modern English context. The Prometheus Unbound had been unsuccessful, Yeats thought, not because of

Shelley’s interest in ancient myth, but because the mythological material he used had been drawn from sources foreign to the British imagination. For this reason, Shelley could not adequately fix his poetry in the known landscape and imagination of his modern English audience. “If Shelley had nailed his Prometheus,” Yeats wrote,

or some equal symbol, upon Welsh or Scottish rock, [his] art would have entered more intimately, more microscopically, as it were, into our

113 Here I borrow from Synge’s term “Greek kinship”. See Synge, “Celtic Mythology”, 365. 114 W. B. Yeats, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume III: Autobiographies. William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald, eds. (New York: Scribner Press, 1999) 166–7. 115 Ibid., 95. 36

thought and given perhaps to modern poetry a breadth and stability like that of ancient poetry.116

Because his drama was not set in Britain, Shelley could not effectively recreate the passion and ethos of Aeschylean tragedy in English. Moreover, his verse, with its dependence on a foreign mythology, did not speak for the whole race in Britain; it appealed only, Yeats thought, to a social elite educated in the classics.

In Shelley’s failure, however, Yeats recognized a model of composition that would guide his first attempt to forge an Anglo-Irish epic, an epic powered, as he saw it, by the adaptation of Gaelic folklore. From an early age, Yeats had admired Shelley, and he confessed later in life to writing many bad imitations of him throughout his youth.

However, with the 1889 publication of the narrative poem, The Wanderings of Oisin,

Yeats believed he had, at last, freed his verse from such juvenile flaws and grasped the

“breadth and stability” which had earlier eluded Shelley.117 In Oisin he set out to reclaim what one scholar has called

two originary moments in the history of Western epic: first, the Ossianic matter that Macpherson had confiscated for Scotland a century earlier; then, back behind that…the primitive of glory of Homer, the bard of archaic wanderings whose pre-classical vigor metropolitan Victorians like

116 Ibid., 137. 117 Ibid. “I wanted to be wise and eloquent...I had begun to write poetry in imitation of Shelley and Edmund Spenser, play after play—for my father exalted dramatic poetry above all other kinds—and I invented fantastic and incoherent plots. My lines but seldom scanned, for I could not understand the prosody in the books, although there were many lines that taken by themselves had music. I spoke them slowly as I wrote and only discovered when I read them to somebody else that there was no common music, no prosody.” Ibid., 81. See also George Bornstein, “Imitation of Shelley”. Yeats and Shelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970) 13–27. 37

W. E. Gladstone and Matthew Arnold had done their best to recruit into the institutional service of an imperial Englishness.118

Despite his bold intentions, however, contemporary critics were not convinced that the finished product warranted much attention. The poem’s initial publication met with mixed critical success, early reviewers sensing the confusion Yeats suffered while forming Oisin’s elaborate style. For this reason, many were quick to point out the poem’s

“besetting sins”.119 “Mr. Yeats has yet to rid his mind of the delusion”, one critic wrote in the Freeman’s Journal,

that obscurity is an acceptable substitute for strenuous thought and sound judgment. People who desire to occupy their time in solving riddles and similar exercises can buy riddle books or mechanical puzzles; Mr. Yeats does justice neither to himself nor to his readers when he hides a jumble of confused ideas in a maze of verbiage and calls it all “The Wanderings of Oisin.120

Even more sympathetic reviews, like those by Oscar Wilde and John Todhunter, also noted the “strange crudities and irritating conceits” of Oisin’s syntax and diction.121 The poem was marred, Todhunter wrote, with “real flaws of execution – slovenly lines, awkward and uncouth constructions, exuberances which are not beauties, [and] concentrations of expression which are crude and stiff rather powerful”.122 Nevertheless, in spite of these imperfections, Oscar Wilde insisted that Yeats had achieved “at least

118 Herbert Tucker, “For All the World: Eclectic Epic 1870–1895”. Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790– 1910. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) 462–548: 541. On Gladstone’s appropriation of Homer, see Jenkyns, “Homer and the Homeric Ideal”, 199–204. 119 “Some Recent Poetry”, Freeman’s Journal, (1 February 1889). 120 Ibid. 121 Oscar Wilde, “Three New Poets: Yeats, Fitzgerald, Le Gallienne”. Pall Mall Gazette (12 July 1889), as reprinted in W. B. Yeats: The Critical Heritage. A. Norman Jeffares, ed. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977) 72–3: 73. 122 John Todhunter, a review of The Wanderings of Oisin and other Poems. The Academy (30 March 1889) No. 882, 216–17: 216, as reprinted in W. B. Yeats: The Critical Heritage. A. Norman Jeffares, ed. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977) 68–72: 69. 38 something of the epical temper”, even if the poem as a whole failed to offer what he called “the grand simplicity of epic treatment.”123

Whatever epic qualities Oisin had achieved were not lost on Yeats’ close friend and classicist, Lionel Johnson. In an effusive review Johnson penned for The Academy in

1892, he praised Yeats for “his ability to write Celtic poetry, with all the Celtic notes of style and imagination, in a classical manner.”124 “Like all men of the true poetical spirit,” he declared, Yeats “is not overcome by the apparent antagonism of the classical and romantic in art. Like the fine Greeks or Romans, he treats his subject according to its nature. Simple as that sounds, it is a praise not often to be bestowed.”125

According to Johnson, Yeats’ art was “full of reason” for in taking “a Celtic theme, some vast or epic legend”, he had not simply reflected “the mere confused vastness” of

Ireland’s folk ballads.126 Instead, Yeats had crafted from the ancient past “a masterpiece of severe art”—a masterpiece that set “monstrous, barbaric frenzy…in verse of the strictest beauty.”127 For this reason, Johnson thought Yeats had effectively recreated “a beautiful childishness and freshness” like that of ancient Greek poetry.128 Though his verse possessed nothing of the “gravitas, that auctoritas, which belongs to the poetry of

123 Wilde, 73. In an unsigned review for the Evening Telegraph (6 February 1889), a critic named George Coffey likewise complained that the poem failed to provide a “bardic treatment” of the original Gaelic legend: “The principal poem, ‘The Wanderings of Oisin,’ runs to some fifty pages. It is, perhaps, the least satisfactory; we had looked for a more bardic treatment.” 124 Lionel Johnson, “A review of ‘The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics’ (1892)”. The Academy (1 October 1892) No. 1065, 279–80, as reprinted in W. B. Yeats: the Critical Heritage. A. Norman Jeffares, ed. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977) 78–82: 79. 125 Ibid., 79–80. 126 Ibid., 80. 127 Ibid., 80. 128 Ibid., 82. 39

Rome and of England”, Yeats’ work did still reflect a classical character, built from the kinship between “the Greeks and Celts” upon which the French historian, Jules Michelet

(1798–1874) had placed great emphasis: “‘[l]a genie [sic] celtique…sympathise profondément avec la genie [sic] grec’”.129 According to Johnson, the Greek and the

Celtic shared a mutual “gift of simple spirituality, a quickness and adroitness in seizing the spiritual relations of things”.130 But such praise not withstanding, the “classical manner” Johnson detected had little to do with “severe art” or the treating of a “subject according to its nature”. The manner was realized rather by the deliberate manipulation of literary techniques that were sometimes used in the nineteenth century to convey the presence and pressure of Greek on English verse.131

During the nineteenth century, two divergent styles for conveying the force of

Greek emerged in English literature.132 Both of these impacted the vision of ancient

Ireland which Yeats set out in The Wanderings of Oisin. The first of these styles has been described as a strict “neo-classicism largely derived from Winckelmann and his idealization of the ‘noble simplicity and tranquil grandeur’ of the Greeks; in literature this corresponded to a style which emphasized swiftness and clarity, simplicity, crystalline transparency.”133 By mid-century, Matthew Arnold emerged as the greatest advocate for this kind of stylization of Greek antiquity. In the preface to the first edition of Poems,

129 Ibid. See also Jules Michelet, Histoire de France (Paris: Librarie Classique de L. Hachette, 1835) Volume 1: 121. 130 Johnson, “A review of ‘The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics’ (1892)”, 82. 131 On the poem’s “classical manner”, see also Martin McKinsey, “Counter-Homericism in Yeats’s ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’”. W. B. Yeats and Postcolonialism (West Cornwall, Connecticut: Locust Hill Press, 2001) 235–51. 132 On these styles, see Kenneth Haynes, “Some Greek Influences on English Poetry.” English Literature and Ancient Languages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) 104–37. 133 Ibid., 115. 40

Arnold insisted that modern English writers needed to model their work on the “clearness of arrangement, rigour of development, [and] simplicity of style” once achieved in ancient Greek poetry, for the mounting “multitude of voices counselling different things bewildering”, he declared, could now no longer be tolerated.134 To make sense of “the confusion of the present times”, the young writer had to aim for what Arnold called the

“eternal objects of poetry, among all nations”, objects which the “Greeks understood far more clearly than we do.”135 “The radical difference”, he explained,

between their poetical theory and ours consists, as it appears to me, in this: that, with them, the poetical character of the action in itself, and the conduct of it, was the first consideration; with us attention is fixed mainly on the value of the separate thoughts and images which occur in the treatment of the action. They regarded the whole; we regard the parts.136

Because Greek poets had not subordinated “great action treated as a whole” to the transient aspects of expression, Greek literature remained rooted in the “permanent elements of…nature”.137 These elements were expressed with great eloquence and lucidity, Arnold argued, particularly in the work of Sophocles and of Homer whose

“grand style” reflected an “intense significance”, a “noble simplicity” and “calm pathos”.138 For these reasons, Sophocles and Homer remained “excellent models” for modern poetry.139 Though their achievements were of the highest order, their simplicity and “baldness of expression” could show the contemporary English poet, he thought,

134 Matthew Arnold, “Preface to the First Edition of Poems (1853)”. The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold. Volume I: On the Classical Tradition. R. H. Super, ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961) 1–15: 12, 8. 135 Ibid., 8, 3, 5. 136 Ibid., 5. 137 Ibid., 12, 6. 138 Ibid., 5, 12. 139 Ibid., 8–9. 41

“how unspeakably superior is the effect of the one moral impression left by a great action treated as a whole”.140

In his own work Arnold tried to recast these characteristics in English, fashioning through his 1853 narrative poem, Sohrab and Rustum what Coventry Patmore called “a vivid reproduction of Homer’s manner and spirit.”141 In telling a story drawn from

Persian myth, Arnold anglicized the “perfect plainness and directness” he found present in Homeric Greek.142 He used a paratactic syntax and appended literal translations of

Homeric similes to the narrative, hoping to replicate the “noble simplicity” and “baldness of expression” he attributed to Greek poetry.143 Conceptually, however, the vision of antiquity, which Arnold communicated through Sohrab and Rustum, did not appeal to

Yeats, for Yeats believed that the ancient literature of Ireland possessed little clarity and less restraint. The country itself had emerged from antiquity as a fractured primitive civilization, overwhelmed with what he called “a wild anarchy of legends”.144 Where

Arnold saw sublime order in Greek poetry, Yeats believed nothing like Homer’s genus sublime dicendi had as yet emerged in Ireland. The country had instead produced only a

140 Ibid., 6, 12. 141 Coventry Patmore, Rev. of Poems (London 1853) by Matthew Arnold. North British Review 21 (August 1854) 258–64: 259. “The poem Sohrab and Rustum is the work of a modern poet whose mind was steeped in the poetry of Homer. It is the work of a poet who combined high poetic gifts with scholarly accuracy in the use of language, who possessed remarkable felicity in the turning of phrases, and who was able, in spite of the complex influences which affected his mental make-up, to attain again the simplicity of the early Homeric epic. No poem more clearly exhibits the direct influence of Greek upon English.” Frank L. Clark, “On Certain Imitations or Reminiscences of Homer in Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum.” Classical Weekly (1 October 1923) Vol. 17, No. 1: 3–7. See also John Holloway, Widening Horizons in English Verse (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967) 34–7. 142 Arnold, “On Translating Homer”, 116. 143 Arnold, “Preface to the First Edition of Poems (1853)”, 6, 12. 144 Yeats, “Bardic Ireland”, 112. 42 fragmented literature, a scattered collection of folk tales still in need of its first epic form.

“There behind the Ireland of to-day,” Yeats wrote, lost in the ages, this chaos [that] murmurs like a dark and stormy sea full of the sounds of lamentation.”145 Because of this fact, Yeats hoped to create in Oisin an Anglo-Irish idiom that might be worthy of modern epic poetry. And though his vision of Ireland was at odds with Arnold’s description of

Greek antiquity, and even though he often ridiculed the overwhelming influence the

English critic exerted over contemporary poetry, Yeats found the syntactic style of

Arnold’s epic imitations useful.146

As Arnold had done, Yeats utilized a paratactic syntax to pace his narrative poetry in a way that might capture something of an epic, grand treatment. Throughout Sohrab and Rustum, Arnold had employed parataxis while trying to imitate the “eminently rapid” quality Homer had achieved in both the Iliad and the Odyssey.147 In a similar way Yeats tried to keep the narrative of Oisin unburdened by embedded clauses and subordinate

145 Ibid. 146 Yeats often attacked as utilitarian and moralistic Arnold’s belief that poetry was a mere “criticism of life”. “Great poetry does not teach us anything”, he wrote in 1886, “—it changes us…Heroic poetry is a phantom finger swept over all the strings, arousing from man’s whole nature a song of answering harmony. It is the poetry of action, for such alone can arouse the whole nature of man. It touches all the strings—those of pity, of fear and joy. It ignores morals, for its business is not in any way to make us rules for life, but to make character. It is not, as a great English critic has said, “a criticism of life,” but rather a fire in the spirit, burning away what is mean and deepening what is shallow. Yeats, “The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson – I”, 6. On Yeats’ disavowal of Arnold, see George Watson, “Yeats, Victorianism and the 1890s”. The Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats. Marjorie Howes and John Kelly, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 36–58; also Nicholas Grene, “Bitter/Sweet”. Yeats’s Poetic Codes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) 194–219: 197–8; also, Ronald Schuchard, “Spiritual Democracy”. The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) 191– 218: 191–3. 147 Matthew Arnold, “On Translating Homer,” 102. 43 complexities. Because of this, he preferred using simple coordinating conjunctions—a hallmark of parataxis—as in this passage excerpted from the first book.148

And then I mounted and she bound me With her triumphing arms around me, And whispering to herself enwound me; But when the horse had felt my weight, He shook himself and neighed three times: Caoilte, Conan, and Finn came near, And wept, and raised their lamenting hands, And bid me stay, with many a tear; But we rode out from the human lands. (I.106–14) 149

In this passage, Yeats recounts the journey of Oisin who, having resolved to marry

Niamh, “daughter of the King of the Young,” rides on to the strange earthly paradise of

Tír na nÓg, the homeland of his bride where no man has ever grown old. The syntactic similarities to Sohrab and Rustum can be heard in the pacing of this excerpt. Hoping to effect a similar sound of epic rapidity, Yeats employs a mass of simple independent clauses, loosely connecting them with conjunctions that drive the action of the sequence forward. In Sohrab and Rustum, Arnold wrote in this manner consistently, as in this excerpt, where the Persian lord, Rustum, at last recognizes the identity of his dying son.

But Sohrab answered him in wrath; for now The anguish of the deep-fixed spear grew fierce, And he desired to draw forth the steel, And let the blood flow free, and so to die— But first he would convince his stubborn foe; And, rising sternly on one arm, he said …… He spoke; and all the blood left Rustum's cheeks, And his knees tottered, and he smote his hand Against his breast, his heavy mailed hand,

148 On the use of parataxis in modern English, see Sylvia Adamson, “Literary Language”. The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume IV: 1776–1997. Suzanne Romaine, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 589–692: 630–46. 149 W. B. Yeats, The Wanderings of Oisin. The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach, eds. (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1957) 1–63: 9–10. 44

That the hard iron corslet clanked aloud; And to his heart he pressed the other hand, And in a hollow voice he spake…(lines 649–68)150

Despite the similarity in syntax, Arnold was more successful in replicating the pace and rapidity he praised in Homer. Loosely linked together, his clauses in this passage propel the narrative forward, exposing in a slow and dramatic fashion the filial identity and origin of the dying Sohrab.

By contrast, Yeats’ syntax in Oisin often became mired in what Oscar Wilde called the “outglittering” effect of the poem’s diction.151 Hoping to distinguish Celtic myth from that of the classical world, Yeats described Tír na nÓg in a florid and pictorial fashion. Using forms of polysyndeton, he heaped together elaborate images which stressed, through enargeia, the visual unlikeness and mythical strangeness of Ireland’s

Celtic Otherworld. As in this passage below, Niamh entices Oisin, invoking all the pleasures that will consume him, bit by bit, on the Island of Youth.

And the days pass by like wayward tune, Where broken faith has never been known, And the blushes of first love never have flown; And there I will give you a hundred hounds; No mightier creatures bay at the moon; And a hundred robes of murmuring silk, And a hundred calves, and a hundred sheep Whose long wool whiter than sea-froth flows; And a hundred spears and a hundred bows, And oil, and wine and honey and milk, And always never-anxious sleep; While a hundred youths, mighty of limb, But knowing nor tumult nor hate nor strife, And a hundred ladies, merry as birds, Who when they dance to a fitful measure

150 Matthew Arnold, Sohrab and Rustum. The Poems of Matthew Arnold. Kenneth Allott, ed. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., Ltd., 1965) 302–31: 324. 151 Wilde, “Three New Poets: Yeats, Fitzgerald, Le Gallienne”, 73. 45

Have a speed like the speed of the salmon herds, Shall follow your horn and obey your whim, And you shall know the Danaan leisure, And Niamh be with you for a wife. (Book 1, 83–102)152

With its enumeration of objects and conjunctions, this passage typifies the “outglittering” effect—the visual intensity—Yeats tried to achieve throughout Oisin. Such intensity overburdened the poem’s narrative with an excess of images, robbing it not only of drama and excitement, but also of the rapidity and clarity Arnold prized in good epic poetry. By stressing the infinite pleasures of the Celtic Otherworld, Yeats sacrificed the poem’s dramatic action for a painted vividness—a vividness which failed to show why heroic struggle was even necessary in the mythical land of Tír na nÓg.

Arnold’s attempt to anglicize Homeric syntax helped show Yeats how English could be composed in a manner suitable for a modern epic. And yet, in spite of this fact,

Yeats rejected his insistence that a simple, transparent diction—a “baldness of expression”—could best reflect the essence of ancient epic.153 As Yeats saw it, Ireland’s ancient legends had arisen in a strange world brimming with “a people full of restless energies…as it might be said of Greece.”154 As such, any attempt to translate the Gaelic past could not simply reflect the “calm pathos” Arnold saw in Greek antiquity.155 The diction of modern Anglo-Irish poetry had to capture instead, he thought, the “persistence of Celtic passion”, and those “monstrous shapes” which produced in Ireland a “wild anarchy of legends”.156 To anglicize this untamed vision of Celtic pathos, Yeats therefore

152 Yeats, The Wanderings of Oisin, 8–9. 153 Arnold, “Preface to the First Edition of Poems (1853)”, 6. 154 Yeats, “Bardic Ireland”, 111. 155 Arnold, “Preface to the First Edition of Poems (1853)”, 12. 156 Yeats, “Bardic Ireland”, 112. 46 chose not to emulate the reputed clarity of Arnold’s Homer; he relied instead on a different stylization of the ancient Greek world, a “rough, high style, modelled especially on Aeschylus”, a style featured prominently in the English poet Yeats admired most in his youth, Shelley.157 Shelley, Yeats thought, had portrayed archaic Greece in much the same way as he envisioned antiquity in early Ireland. His Prometheus had depicted primitive world overrun with untrammeled energy, chaos and divine strife. Stressing the disorder of antiquity through “agglutination and abruption rather than lucidity, translucence and clarity”, Shelley had attempted to anglicize in verse what Walter Pater would later describe as the “unglorified” origin of ancient Greek religion.158 Drawing on his example, Yeats tried to communicate this darker vision of antiquity in The

Wanderings of Oisin, hoping that by foreignizing the diction of his idiom, he might expose the alien character and “vast pell-mell of monstrous shapes” present in ancient

Gaelic folklore.159

In the diction of Oisin, Yeats drew on Shelley’s stylization of Greek antiquity in two discernible ways. First, throughout the poem, he employed numerous privatives or negative adjectives in English. In the Prometheus, Shelley had used these generously, hoping to anglicize a common feature in ancient Greek, the alpha-privative. More than

157 Haynes, 116. 158 Ibid., 153; see also Walter Pater, “Demeter and Persephone”. Greek Studies: a Series of Essays. New Library Edition (London: Macmillan, 1910) 81–151: 137. In two articles on “The Myth of Demeter and Persephone”, Pater wrote extensively on the darker origin of ancient Greek religion. In tracing the mythological development of the cult of Demeter, Pater argued that the cult of the goddess had undergone a radical transformation. “The worship of Demeter”, he wrote, “belongs to that older religion, nearer to the earth, which some have thought they could discern behind the more definitely national mythology of Homer. She is the goddess of dark caves, and is not wholly free from monstrous form.” In spite of this form, Pater observed, the image of Demeter had gradually given way over time to that “more beautiful image in the new style, with face and hands of ivory…in tone and texture some subtler likeness to women’s flesh.” Ibid., 102, 139. 159 Yeats, “Bardic Ireland”, 112. 47 any other Indo-European language, classical Greek provides what one study has called “a richer variety of forms of the negative prefix in compounds…The simple, and by far the most common, prefix is a-, before a vowel an-.”160 In Shelley’s work, however, the negative adjective was not exploited simply to register the semantic presence of Greek.

As John Buxton has shown, Shelley’s reliance on privatives was closely linked to his

Platonism; by using the negative adjective, he hoped to generate an “obscuring effect” on the concrete imagery of his poetry—an effect which dramatized in the very composition of each privative what Buxton calls the stripping away of the “sensuous character of experience”.161

For Shelley, the veil was the composition of the material world between finite mind and Platonic idea; it was also the obscuring effect of concrete imagery, with its appeal to our senses, which his negative epithets were intended to remove. They withdraw the veil of sense-perception.162

In this way, the semantic character of the negative adjective helped drive the Prometheus away from material reality, pushing it closer “to the intellectual, ideal world of Platonic forms”.163 Yeats had little interest in replicating the deep Platonic resonance Shelley intended. He, instead, manipulated negative adjectives to make foreign his idiom and to stress the unfamiliar ancient landscape of the Celtic Otherworld.

‘Flee from him,’ pearl-pale Niamh weeping cried, ‘For all men flee the demons’; but moved not My angry king-remembering soul one jot. There was no mightier soul of Heber's line; Now it is old and mouse-like. For a sign I burst the chain: still earless, nerveless, blind,

160 A. C. Moorhouse, Studies in the Greek Negatives (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1959) 47. 161 As quoted in Haynes, 128–9. See John Buxton, “Percy Bysshe Shelley”. The Grecian Taste: Literature in the Age of Neo-Classicism, 1740–1820 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1978) 147–69: 159. 162 Ibid. 163 Ibid. 48

Wrapped in the things of the unhuman mind, In some dim memory or ancient mood, Still earless, nerveless, blind, the eagles stood. (Book 2, 92–100)164

In this excerpt, the privatives obscure the psychic reverie of Oisin’s adversaries, these

“two old eagles, full of ancient pride”, servants of the Irish sea god, Manannán mac

Lir.165 With “unhuman” minds, these animals remained transfixed in the Celtic past, their

“dim minds” wrecked by the unseen “ancient things” that now keep them from sight and the sound in the present.166 In this passage, Yeats’ negatives operate as Buxton described

Shelley: they deny the material “presence of the attribute, which the positive describes”.

But in so doing, Yeats did not simply use them to sacrifice “sensuous experience” for

Platonic form.167 Instead, his negative composition emphasizes the gulf that still remains between the ancient mythological world of Ireland and the present experience of the epic hero. For the reader, moreover, the privatives push one’s attention beyond the material sense of English to an extrasensory Gaelic world, a world of “ancient things” whose radical unlikeness with modernity Yeats was keen to stress by any syntactic or semantic means necessary.

Secondly, and more significantly, Yeats created numerous compound epithets in

English. From as early as the sixteenth century, constructions of this kind were regarded as visible signs of ancient Greek pressure on the English language. In his Defence of

Poesie (1595), Philip Sidney (1554–1586) praised English for being “particularly happy

164 Yeats, The Wanderings of Oisin, 35–36. 165 Ibid., 34. 166 Ibid., 36, 34. 167 Buxton, 159. On the philosophical impact of the Prometheus Unbound over Yeats’ early work, see George Bornstein, “Yeats as ‘Alastor’” and “Yeats as Athanase”. Yeats and Shelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970) 29–109. 49 in compositions of two or three words together, near the Greek”, “one of the greatest beauties [that] can be in a language.”168 Likewise in The Arte of English Poesy (1589), the rhetorician, George Puttenham (1529–1590) encouraged the translation of Greek compounds into English, for the “freedome and liberty” of the Greek language, he argued, had allowed the ancients “to invent any new name that they listed, and to peece many words together to make of them one entire, much more significative than the single word.”169 Following the death of Milton in 1674, the use of Greek-inflected compounds became less prevalent, “restricted”, as one critic has noted, “to a limited school or group of poets; and even these men were not, by later standards, fully enlightened in their use of language.”170 However, with the rise of Romanticism in English poetry, the use of the compound epithet once again gained strength, and its pervasive use in the verse of Keats and Shelley was greeted “with a whole-hearted enthusiasm not known before”.171

Shelley, in particular, was drawn to the construction in a sustained attempt to anglicize the diction of Aeschylean tragedy. Hoping to experiment with the semantic register of English, Shelley believed the diction of the Prometheus Unbound could effectively reflect the agglutinated “heavy compounds” of Aeschylean Greek.172

Famously satirized by Aristophanes in the ancient comedy, the Frogs, Aeschylus was

168 Philip Sidney, “The Defence of Poesy”. Sir Philip Sidney: Selected Prose & Poetry. Second edition. Robert Kimbrough, ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983) 99–158: 155. 169 George Puttenham, Book 3, Chapter 9. The Arte of English Poesy: A Critical Edition. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn, eds. (Cornell University Press, 2007) 241–2. 170 Bernard Groom, “The Formation and Use of Compound Epithets in English Poetry from 1579.” S. P. E. Tract No. XLIX (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937) 295–322: 309. 171 Ibid., 309–10. 172 “The first impression made on most readers of Aeschylus is that he employs a multitude of long words; and that impression is correct. Aeschylus constantly builds an iambic trimeter out of four words and not rarely out of three words; and of those words heavy compounds form a large part…Aeschylus in fact grows bolder in the formation of new compounds, not, like Sophocles, more cautious.” F. R. Earp, The Style of Aeschylus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948) 6–38: 6, 9. 50 renowned for employing a “multitude of long words” in his poetic drama, and Shelley, taking great licence with the received myth of Prometheus, attempted to replicate this verbal saturation, generously employing the English compound epithet.173 The results, however, troubled nineteenth-century critics, for many found Shelley’s macaronic idiom ruined by a “ the very exaggeration, [the] copiousness of verbiage, and incoherence of ideas which we complain of as intolerable.”174

If the poet is one who whirls round his reader’s brain, till it becomes dizzy and confused; if it is his office to envelop he knows not what in huge folds of a clumsy drapery of splendid words and showy metaphors, then, without doubt, may Mr. Shelley place the Delphic laurel on his head. But take away from him the unintelligible, the confused, the incoherent, the bombastic, the affected, the extravagant, the hideously gorgeous, and Prometheus…will sink at once into nothing.175

According to the American poet, James Russell Lowell (1819–1891), the Prometheus embodied “Shelley at his worst period”, the poem’s final version possessing what he called an “unwieldy abundance of incoherent words and images, that were merely words and images without any meaning of real experience to give them solidity”.176 In spite of these remarks, Shelley had sought to create visual depth and a solidity in his idiom, not one rooted in the familiar conventions of English verse, but one based in radical experimentation with ancient Greek, in the desire to strain native speech through the

173 Ibid. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Preface to the Prometheus Unbound, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Norton Critical Edition, Second edition. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Freistat, eds. (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2002) 206–9: 206. 174 W. S. Walker, The Quarterly Review (October 1821–January 1822) Volume 26: 168–80, as reprinted in Shelley: The Critical Heritage. James E. Barcus, ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975) 254–67: 263. 175 Ibid., 264. 176 James Russell Lowell, Review of The Life and Letters James Gates Percival. North American Review (1866), as reprinted in Shelley: The Critical Heritage. James E. Barcus, ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975) 269. 51

“elaborate and grandiose diction” which Aeschylus had realized in his “bold and novel” style.177

Though the initial reception of the Prometheus was mixed, Yeats felt the work was a “sacred book”.178 Thus when he set out to invent an Anglo-Irish idiom for The

Wanderings of Oisin, he returned to Shelley eagerly, hoping to emulate how the British poet had foreignized his verse through ancient Greek. Using the Prometheus as a model for de-anglicizing the diction of his own English, Yeats saturated Oisin with many compound epithets and privative adjectives—elements which had been essential in the

Hellenization of diction in Shelley’s Prometheus.179 These, he thought, would help complement and balance the syntactic style he drew from Arnold, allowing him to avoid the dull translationese which had earlier marred two scholarly attempts to anglicize the

Oisín legend. A diction Hellenized after the fashion of the Prometheus would make

Yeats’ idiom appear more elaborate and ornamental, evoking an unfamiliar pitch that might approximate the character of Gaelic folklore. With this in mind, Yeats drew on the compound epithet to strengthen the sonic depth and visual quality of his poetry. The construction’s ability to convey a multiplicity of visual impressions helped him recast in

English the fantastic terrain of the Celtic Otherworld, as in this passage below where

Oisin and his fairy-bride, Niamh, travel on to Tír na nÓg.

And passing the Firbolgs’ burial-mounds, Came to the cairn-heaped grassy hill Where passionate Maeve is stony-still; And found on the dove-grey edge of the sea

177 Earp, The Style of Aeschylus, 10, 9. 178 Yeats, Autobiographies, 95. 179 On the training Yeats did have in Greek and Latin, see Brian Arkins, Builders of My Soul: Greek and Roman Themes in Yeats (Savage, Maryland: Barnes and Noble Books, 1990) 1–5. 52

A pearl-pale, high-born lady, who rode On a horse with bridle of findrinny… But down to her feet white vesture flowed, And with the glimmering crimson glowed Of many a figured embroidery; And it was bound with a pearl-pale shell. That wavered like the summer streams, As her soft bosom rose and fell.180 (Book 1, 16–30)

Believing he could create visual excitement with a vivid diction, Yeats layered this passage with many compounds. But despite best intentions, the result was disappointing.

Though he hoped otherwise, his desire for strange and visually compelling imagery drove him to a derivative diction whose “exaggeration” was not nearly as radical as Shelley’s, and whose abundance betrayed the same lack of “real experience” with language James

Russell Lowell had sensed in the Prometheus.181 The “stony-still” “dove-grey”, “high- born” and “pearl-pale” epithets of this passage expose the youth and immaturity of the poet—a poet who when groping for a pitch worthy of epic, composed instead with a hand-me-down diction absorbed from recent stylistic developments in nineteenth-century

English literature.

______

Although Yeats hoped to create a unique and distinctive literary vernacular for a modern Irish epic, by late 1894 he had begun to grow despondent. For thus far, his own attempts to do good work in Anglo-Irish had failed to meet the high demands which he placed on the country’s new national literature. Instead of foreignizing his English with the literary styles of Gaelic folklore in mind, Yeats first tried rather to forge a Celtic mask in The Wanderings of Oisin, an unconvincing mask born out from a bewildering jumble

180 Yeats, The Wanderings of Oisin, 3–4. 181 Lowell, 269. 53 of poetic tics, tics which he inherited from the Greek-inflected idioms of Matthew Arnold and English Romanticism. When brought together, these created, stylistically speaking, a poem more in keeping with the excess and decadence of pre-Raphaelite verse than with the simple Gaelic folklore Yeats believed necessary for a national epic. Later, when discussing Oisin in his Autobiographies, Yeats willingly admitted this fact. Oisin was

“too elaborate, too ornamental”, marred with “vagueness of intention, and the inexactness of speech.”182 However, as he saw it, the poem’s failure did not result from his ignorance of Irish Gaelic. It was rather his own immaturity and the all-consuming influence of the

Romantics that kept him from seeing the simplicity, “prose directness” and “hard light” which both he and Ezra Pound would soon come to attribute to all that was best in ancient literature.183

Oisin’s “vagueness of intention” was further reflected in the lukewarm reception the poem enjoyed at the time of its publication. Yeats’ work did little to rouse the kind of

“national idea” he hoped to mobilize in all Irish society, the idea of the Irish as a people set apart, a nation distinguished by its own epic and its own unique literary vernacular.

Because of this, Yeats was, by the autumn of 1894, growing increasingly skeptical that any poet could now “awaken or quicken or preserve” the notion of nationhood in all of the country’s social classes.184 “My experience of Ireland, during the last three years,” he wrote,

has changed my views very greatly, & I now feel that the work of an Irish

182 Yeats, Autobiographies, 279, 127. 183 Ezra Pound, “The Later Yeats”. Poetry (May 1914) Vol. 4, No. 2, 64–9: 66, 67, later reprinted as “The Later Yeats” in The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (New York, New Directions, 1935) 378–81. 184 W. B. Yeats, “To Alice Milligan, 23 September [1894]”. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Volume I: 1865–1895. John Kelly and Eric Domville, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986) 399–400: 399. 54

man of letters must be not so much to awaken or quicken or preserve the national idea among the mass of people but to convert the educated classes to it on the one hand to the best of his ability, & on the other —& this is the more important —to fight for moderation, dignity, & the rights of the intellect among his fellow nationalists. Ireland is terribly demoralized in all things—in her scholourship [sic], in her criticism, in her politics, in her social life.185

As Yeats saw it, what Ireland needed now was not excess—not in literary style nor in the political world where anti-intellectual extremism was beginning to restrict the freedom of the country’s foremost poets and artists.186 What was needed, he believed, was a creditable literary tradition, a national literature written with “laborious care” and a newfound “studied moderation of style”.187 Only this would “convert the educated classes”. 188 As such, Yeats began to slowly purge his Anglo-Irish work of its false

Celticism. And as he did so, he began to see how clouded his vision of antiquity had been, how infected it was by that “yellow” and “dull green…all that overcharged colour”, he later wrote, “inherited from the romantic movement”.189 These influences kept him

185 Ibid. 186 Ibid. 187 Ibid. 188 Ibid. 189 “When I had finished The Wanderings of Oisin, dissatisfied with its yellow and its dull green, with all that overcharged colour inherited from the romantic movement, I deliberately reshaped my style...I cast off traditional metaphors and loosened my rhythm, and recognizing that all the criticism of life known to me was alien and English, became as emotional as possible but with an emotion which I described to myself as cold. Yeats, Autobiographies, 74. In 1894, when the London firm, T. Fisher Unwin, offered to print a “new and corrected edition” of all Yeats’ previous poetry, the poet used the opportunity to significantly revise The Wanderings of Oisin with a “studied moderation of style”, creating what he believed was a better and more definitive version. In the preface to the 1895 edition, entitled Poems, Yeats himself wrote of this revision: “This book contains all the writer cares to preserve out of his previous volumes of verse. He has revised, and to a large extent re-written, The Wanderings of Usheen and the lyrics and ballads from the same volume, and expanded and, he hopes, strengthened The Countess Cathleen. He has, however, been compelled to leave unchanged many lines he would have gladly re-written, because his present skill is not great enough to separate them from thoughts and expressions which seem to him worth preserving.” On the 1895 revision see Thomas Parkinson, “Exclusions and Revisions: 1889–1901”. W. B. Yeats, Self-Critic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971) 1–50. 55 from achieving in Oisin the kind of national vernacular he wanted. But Yeats’ efforts, though unsuccessful, were not in vain. For his early work brought to bear on a modern

English idiom the imaginative pressure and linguistic force of the classical and the Celtic.

Yeats had no Irish. He had no ancient Greek. But he pushed the legacy of Hellenism in literature—and to a lesser extent, even the residual presence of the ancient language itself—into contact with the absence of Irish Gaelic. And by triangulating his own

English against the historical reception of both Gaelic and Greek antiquity, he began to sow the field of modern literature with seeds of linguistic interference. These seeds would later flower and flourish across the British Isles, in Ireland, in Scotland and in Wales where new multilingual forms of Celtic Modernism—found most prominently in the works of James Joyce, Hugh MacDiarmid and David Jones—drew strength by interrogating the forced marriage Yeats had once tried to arrange between the Greek past and the emerging Irish present.

56

Chapter Two

“Hellenism—European Appendicitis”: Joyce, Antiquity & the Genesis of the ‘Cyclops’

In late November 1923, after reading T. S. Eliot’s review of Ulysses published that month in The Dial, James Joyce wrote to his longtime friend and patron, Harriet

Weaver:

I suppose you have seen Mr. Eliot’s article in the Dial. I like it and it comes opportunely. I shall suggest to him when I write to thank him that in alluding to it elsewhere he use or coin some short phrase, two or three words, such as one he used in speaking to me ‘two plane’.190

The phrase which Joyce colloquially termed “two plane” had been Eliot’s first description of the “mythical method” at work in the composition of Ulysses.191 In his piece entitled “Ulysses, Order and Myth,” Eliot insisted that despite the novel’s title, the central role of the Odyssey in the structure of Ulysses had been unappreciated. Too often both critics and readers had neglected it in the first years since the novel’s serialization in

The Little Review. “I have seen nothing,” Eliot wrote, “…which seemed to me to appreciate the significance of the method employed—the parallel to the Odyssey, and the

190 James Joyce, “To Harriet Shaw Weaver” (19 November 1923). Letters of James Joyce, Volumes II and III. Richard Ellmann, ed. (New York: Viking Press, 1966) Vol. 3: 83. 191 T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order and Myth”. The Dial (November 1923) Vol. 75, No. 5: 480–3, as reprinted in James Joyce: the Critical Heritage. Robert H. Deming, ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970) Vol. 1, 268–71: 271. 57 use of appropriate styles and symbols to each division.”192 Many writers, Eliot believed, had simply dismissed Joyce’s Homeric parallel as “an amusing dodge”, a replaceable

“scaffolding erected by the author for the purpose of disposing his realistic tale, of no interest in the completed structure.”193 As Eliot saw it, all reviewers of Ulysses had failed to understand the importance of Homer, yet Richard Aldington, whose review had appeared in April 1921 before the novel was published in full, had failed “more honourably than the attempts of those who had the whole book before them”, for “Mr.

Aldington and I are more or less agreed”, Eliot asserted, “as to what we want in principle, and agreed to call it classicism. It is because of this agreement that I have chosen Mr.

Aldington to attack on the present issue.”194

According to Eliot, Aldington had willfully mistaken the stylistic complexity of

Ulysses for a simple “invitation to chaos”—“an expression of feelings which are perverse, partial, and a distortion of reality.”195 Because Joyce had used “his marvelous gifts” only “to disgust us with mankind” Aldington denounced the novel as a mere “libel on humanity”—a work whose considerable “influence,” he wrote,

cannot be a wholly good one. [Joyce] is disgusting with reason; others will be disgusting without reason. He is obscure and justifies his obscurity; but how many others will write mere confusion and think it sublime? How many dire absurdities will be brought forth, with Ulysses as a midwife?196

192 Ibid., 268, 270. 193 Ibid., 268. 194 Ibid., 268–9. 195 Ibid., 269. 196 Richard Aldington, “The Influence of Mr. James Joyce” in the English Review, Vol. 32 (April 1921) 333–41, reprinted as “Mr. James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’”. Literary Studies and Reviews (New York: The Dial Press Incorporated, 1924) 192–207: 201, 205–6. 58

Eliot, for his part, could not abide Aldington’s insistence that the “dire absurdities” of

Ulysses would but only push the modern novel further into obscenity and obscurity. That conceit, Eliot claimed, exposed Aldington’s “pathetic solicitude for the half-witted.”197

[T]he influence which Mr Joyce’s book may have is from my point of view an irrelevance. A very great book may have a very bad influence indeed; and a mediocre book may be in the event most salutary. The next generation is responsible for its own soul; a man of genius is responsible to his peers, not to a studio-full of uneducated and undisciplined coxcombs.198

Whatever its impact on contemporary writing, the complexity of Ulysses did not betray the chaos and confusion Aldington thought so “deplorable”.199 The various styles of the novel had allowed Joyce to recast sequences and allusions from the Odyssey in modern

Dublin. In so doing, the novel had, Eliot argued, ordered the chaos and “living material” of modernity into the intelligible structure of Homeric epic and the classical tradition. “In using myth,” Eliot claimed,

in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him…It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.200

By exploiting Homeric poetry, Joyce was, Eliot believed, drawing on “a method already adumbrated by Mr. Yeats, and of the need for which I believe Mr. Yeats to have been the first contemporary to be conscious.”201 In appealing to the authority of the then Nobel

Laureate, Eliot was determined to refute, once and for all, Aldington’s charge that

197 Eliot, “Ulysses, Order and Myth”, 269. 198 Ibid. 199 Aldington, “Mr. James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’”, 192. 200 Eliot, “Ulysses, Order and Myth”, 270. 201 Ibid., 271. 59

Ulysses was simply the work of a “great, undisciplined talent” who—as one “more dangerous than a shipload of Dadaistes”—had begun to encourage only “sloppiness”,

“loose thinking” and a “heterogeneous style degenerated into incoherence, affectation and wordy confusion”.202 As Eliot saw it, the stylistic complexity of Joyce’s new work arose not from confusing “eccentricities” but from an internal order derived from that

“continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity”.203 This was Joyce’s principle method of composition—a “mythical method”, Eliot argued, for the genius of the novel lay in the fact that Joyce had succeeded in modulating a variety of English styles in accord with narrative sequence of Homeric poetry.204 Thus what appeared at first to be a labored and confusing pastiche was, in reality, a form of classicism whose “two plane” structure had made Bloom’s Dublin intelligible through its correspondence with the Homeric past.205

The importance of the Odyssey in the genesis and final shape of Ulysses is undeniable. But Eliot’s eagerness to conscript Joyce as a classicist obscures rather than illuminates the complex relation which Joyce and Ulysses had both with Greek antiquity and with the modern reception of classical civilization in turn-of-the-century Ireland. In the novel’s structure Eliot believed he saw at work compositional principles first laid down in Yeats’ recent lyric poetry, especially the powerful use of Homeric epic he set out in the 1910 collection, The Green Helmet and Other Poems.206 But Joyce had hardly

202 Aldington, “Mr. James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’”, 203. 203 Ibid.; Eliot, “Ulysses, Order and Myth”, 270. 204 Ibid., 271. 205 Joyce, “To Harriet Shaw Weaver” (19 November 1923), 83. 206 Denis Donoghue has observed: “what Eliot had in view as adumbrations of the mythical method were the Maud Gonne poems in The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910) in which Yeats presented a 60 taken up and simply affirmed the “mythical method” adumbrated by his predecessor. By likening Joyce to Yeats, Eliot ignored the robust skepticism at work in Ulysses, a skepticism which motivated not only the novel’s manipulation of Homer but also its satirical attack on the vision of Greek antiquity vigorously advanced by Yeats during the

Celtic Revival.

From as early as 1900, Joyce had persistently ridiculed appeals made by modern

Irish poets to the exempla and implicit authority of ancient Greek literature. Amid the height of Ireland’s Literary Revival, Yeats in 1897 had boldly told a friend that the “first principle” of his work was to “make the land in which we live a holy land as Homer made Greece.”207 “I beleive [sic]”, he continued,

that the celtic literature which is now beginning will find it possible to do this, for the celtic races love the soil of their countries vehemently, & have as great a mass of legends about that soil as Homer had about his…the life that is in legends is still the life of Homers [sic] people.208

To Joyce, however, this romantic and nationalist vision of the ancient past was utterly fatuous. Thus when lecturing on modern drama before a University College, Dublin

personage distinct from himself; and did so precisely by relating that personage to a legendary or mythic figure more distant still. I mean such poems as ‘A Woman Homer Sung,’ ‘Words,’ ‘No Second Troy,’ ‘Reconciliation,’ ‘A King and No King,’ and ‘Peace.’” Denis Donoghue, “Yeats, Eliot, and the Mythical Method”. The Sewanee Review (Spring 1997) Vol. 105, No. 2, 206–26: 214–15. 207 W. B. Yeats, “To Richard Ashe King, 5 August [1897]”. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Volume II: 1896–1901. John Kelly, Warwick Gould, Deirdre Toomey, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 129–31: 129. 208 Ibid. Yeats publicly reiterated this view later in a 1901 lecture to the Literary Society of Dublin, comparing Irish legends with those of Greece: “The Greeks looked within their borders, and we like them, have a history fuller than any modern history of imaginative events; and legends which surpass, as I think, all legends but theirs in wild beauty, and in our land, as in theirs there is no river or mountain that is not associated in the memory with some event of legend…I would have Ireland recreate the ancient arts, the arts as they were understood in Judaea, in Scandinavia, in Greece and Rome, in every ancient land; as they were understood when they moved a whole people and not a few people who have grown up in a leisured class and made this understanding their business.” W. B. Yeats, “Ireland and the Arts” (August 1901). The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume IV: Early Essays. Richard J. Finneran and George Bornstein, eds. (New York: Scribner Press, 2007) 150–5: 151–2. 61 audience in 1900, Joyce attacked the degree of influence ancient Greek examples still exerted over modern literature. Attempts to keep to the “code of laws” which Greek dramatic art had encouraged would only kill, he argued, the emergence of genius in contemporary literature.209 “The Greeks,” Joyce asserted,

handed down a code of laws which their descendants with purblind wisdom forthwith advanced to the dignity of inspired pronouncements…It may be a vulgarism, but it is literal truth to say that Greek drama is played out. For good or bad it has done its work, which, if wrought in gold, was not upon lasting pillars.210

With this assertion, Joyce abjured Greek draw and insisted broadly that classical antiquity could have little impact in creating a cosmopolitan national literature in Ireland. The conscription of the Greeks would not reveal the character of contemporary Ireland.

“Hellenism”, he declared in 1904, was now merely a “European appendicitis”, a sickness which in coming to Ireland was destroying all that remained of its living tissue.211 For this reason, Joyce renounced the call to emulate ancient Greece in literature, casting doubt on a pivotal tenet which had motivated the ideology of nationalism during the

Literary Revival. The vision of history, of nationality and of literature then being adopted

209 “The conditions of the Attic stage suggested a syllabus of greenroom proprieties and cautions to authors, which in after ages were foolishly set up as the canons of dramatic art, in all lands.” Because Irish poets could not reproduce the cultic practices behind the Athenian theatre, devoted to Dionysus, Joyce believed that the power of Attic drama would always elude them. It could not be set out in modern form, and literary works written in imitation would remain, he argued, “not of dramatic but of pedagogic significance.” In the absence of the shared religious practices which had given rise to classical drama, Irish poets could—by imitation of the Greeks—produce only derivative literature possessing no distinctive mark of modern Ireland’s national character. See James Joyce, “Drama and Life” (1900). The Critical Writings of James Joyce. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann, eds. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989) 38–46: 39. 210 Ibid., 39. 211 James Joyce, “Section 5, The Pola Notebook”. The Workshop of Daedalus: James Joyce and the Raw Materials for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Robert Scholes and Richard M. Kain, eds. (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1965) 80–91: 91. The Pola Notebook was first transcribed in Herbert Gorman’s biography, James Joyce (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, Inc., 1939) 138. The original manuscript has since been lost. 62 by Celtic enthusiasts—not only by Yeats, Synge, Hyde and Lady Gregory, but also by figures such as Oscar Wilde, George Moore and the revolutionary Patrick Pearse—was informed by what a recent scholar has called as a widespread “cultural practice at the heart of which was correspondence with classical Greece.”212 This correspondence or

“broad analogy” drawn between the Gael and the Greek emerged as central to

the jargon of contemporary critical approval amongst revivalists, so that Moore applauded The Countess Cathleen as ‘a play as beautiful as Maeterlinck’ containing ‘verse equal to the verses of Homer’, and Wilde who thought the Irish ‘the greatest talkers since the Greeks’ compared Yeats’s art of story-telling to Homer’s’ (Yeats, Auto, 135). Yeats came away from a performance of an old-fashioned historical melodrama by Alice Milligan with his ‘head on fire. I want to hear my own On Baile’s Strand, to hear Greek tragedy spoken with a Dublin accent’.213

The “continuous parallel” between Irish modernity and Greek epic which Eliot thought vital to the genius of Ulysses was indebted both historically and formally to revivalist notions of essential correspondence with ancient Greece, a phenomenon which in the literature and political rhetoric of the Celtic Twilight proved “much more potent than

212 Len Platt, “Corresponding with the Greeks”. Joyce and the Anglo-Irish: A Study of Joyce and the Literary Revival (Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 1998) 99–127: 113. On the contested use of Greek antiquity during the Irish Literary Revival, see Fiona Macintosh, “The Irish Literary Revival and the Classical Tradition”. Dying Acts: Death in Ancient Greek and Modern Irish Tragic Drama. (Cork: Cork University Press, 1994) 1–18. See also P. H. Pearse, “The Intellectual Future of the Gael” (October 1897). Three Lectures on Gaelic Topics. (Dublin: M. H. Gill, 1898) 46–59. 213 Platt, “Corresponding with the Greeks”, 113. Standish O’Grady, an Irish writer of popular history, was among the first of the revivalists to enlist ancient Greece in the service of the nationalist cause. In his History of Ireland: Critical and Philosophical (1881), O’Grady insisted that Ireland stood on the precipice of a great literary renaissance, whose ‘intrinsic’ merit would soon surpass the achievements of ancient Greek civilization. “I cannot help,” he wrote, “regarding this age and the great personages moving therein as incomparably higher in intrinsic worth than the corresponding ages of Greece. In Homer, Hesiod, and the Attic poets, there is a polish and artistic form, absent in the existing monuments of Irish heroic thought, but the gold, the ore itself, is here massier and more pure, the sentiment deeper and more tender, the audacity and freedom more exhilarating, the reach of imagination more sublime, the depth and power of the human soul more fully exhibit themselves.” Standish O’Grady, History of Ireland: Critical and Philosophical (London and Dublin, 1881) Vol. 1, 201. 63 simple parallelism. A new Irish Odysseus was on the agenda before Joyce wrote a word.”214

______

Shortly after finishing the ‘Cyclops’ episode late in the summer of 1919, Joyce confided to his friend, Frank Budgen, that the radical narrative experiments he was attempting in Ulysses were “the work of a sceptic. I don’t want it to appear the work of a cynic”, he insisted. “I don’t want to hurt or offend those of my countrymen who are devoting their lives to a cause they feel to be necessary and just.”215 The cause of Irish nationality was, Joyce felt, both “necessary and just”, but Ulysses had been motivated by a profound skepticism—a skepticism which no longer dismissed Hellenism as a mere

“appendicitis”. Instead, Joyce embraced the legacy of Homeric antiquity in a new multilingual and Menippean form of modernist satire, and through the ‘Cyclops’ he began to confront the conscription of ancient Greek civilization into the ideology of cultural nationalism. Drawing on a critique he had begun years earlier in Trieste, Joyce further exploited what knowledge of ancient Greek he had managed to acquire, combining it with mock-heroic imitations of ‘Wardour-Street’ translationese, all in an effort to interrogate that “Greek kinship” which had become “a standard feature” in the rhetoric of the Literary Revival.216

It was not until early 1907 while Joyce was living abroad in Trieste that he turned back to reconsider the “appendicitis” he had once diagnosed in Ireland. That winter,

214 Platt, “Corresponding with the Greeks”, 113. 215 Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, and Other Writings (London: Oxford University Press, 1972) 156. 216 Platt, Joyce and the Anglo-Irish, 111–12. 64

Joyce received an invitation to give a series of lectures on the Celtic Revival and Irish literature nearby at the Università Populare.217 The request came at an opportune time, for late that January, John Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World had opened to riots and violent protests at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Although Joyce was living on the continent, he was engrossed in the news of Synge’s reception.218 Less than two weeks later, he wrote his brother, Stanislaus, mocking the national controversy which had broken out over the play’s alleged “calumny on the Irish people”.219 “The debate”, he declared, “must have been very funny…As I told you before I think the Abbey Theatre is ruined. It is supported by the stalls, that is to say, Stephen Gwynn, Lord X, Lady Gregory etc who are dying to relieve the monotony of Dublin life.”220 Joyce had no sympathy for the Abbey, but he lobbed his most severe criticism at Yeats whose public defense of

Synge was, he felt, entirely preposterous.221 According to a published report in the

217 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce. Revised edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) 258–60. 218 Ibid., 239–42. 219 Mathias Bodkin, “The People and the Parricide”, Freeman’s Journal (29 January 1907) 6, as quoted in W. B. Yeats, The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Volume IV: 1905–1907. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) 870. See also James Kilroy, The ‘Playboy’ Riots (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1971) 18–20: 19. 220 James Joyce, “To Stanislaus Joyce” (11 February 1907). Letters of James Joyce, Volumes II and III. Richard Ellmann, ed. (New York: Viking Press, 1966) Vol. 2, 211–14: 211–12. The Abbey Theatre had long been the target of Joyce’s ridicule. See “The Holy Office”, the broadside he published just before leaving Ireland in late 1904. James Joyce, “The Holy Office” (1904). The Critical Writings of James Joyce. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann, eds. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989) 149–52. 221 Yeats’ unstinting support for the Irish Literary Theatre [Abbey Theatre] never ceased to be a source of wonderment to Joyce: “It is equally unsafe at present to say of Mr. Yeats that he has or has not genius”, he wrote in October 1901. “In aim and form The Wind among the Reeds is poetry of the highest order, and The Adoration of the Magi…shows what Mr. Yeats can do when he breaks with the half-gods. But an aesthete has a floating will, and Mr. Yeats’s treacherous instinct of adaptability must be blamed for his recent association with a platform from which even self-respect should have urged him to refrain.” James Joyce, “The Day of the Rabblement” (1901). The Critical Writings of James Joyce. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann, eds. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989) 68–72: 71. Stanislaus Joyce later spoke of the curious mixture of admiration and scorn that marked his brother’s esteem for Yeats at the turn of the century. Joyce “regarded with disdain Yeats’s attempts to write 65

Freeman’s Journal—a report that Joyce had sent to him in Rome—Yeats had led a public discussion “at the Abbey Theatre…on the Freedom of the Theatre and ‘The Playboy of the Western World’” on February 4th 1907. There Yeats defended Synge with the typically affected bombast for which he had become known amid proceedings that were

“noisy, farcical, and at one period disgusting”.222 “Mr. W. B. Yeats” claimed, according to the account offered in the Freeman’s Journal,

that the dispute that lay between them [between Yeats, Synge and the public] was one of principle (A Voice—‘That won’t wash’)...He was not a public entertainer (laughter), he was an artist (renewed laughter), setting before them what he believed to be fine works (hisses and laughter), to see and insist that they shall receive a quiet and respectful attention (laughter, hisses, and cheers).223

The arrogance with which Yeats conducted himself throughout the affair irritated Joyce deeply, so much so that he declared the poet “a tiresome idiot: he is quite out of touch with the Irish people, to whom he appeals as the author of the ‘Countess Cathleen.”224

Furthermore, Joyce found laughable the way in which Yeats doggedly and irresponsibly

popular drama and to win the favour of an Irish mob and its leaders, who derided him openly. He could not understand Yeats’s avowed intention of singing ‘to lighten Ireland’s woe’. A couple of years later Yeats wrote The King’s Threshold, in which he magnified the poet and his importance in the state. It is among the least of his works, a weak and unconvincing play, because words alone are not certain good. My brother, too, believed in words (that, at least, was common ground) but not pour s’en payer.” Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper: James Joyce’s Early Years. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Da Capo Press, 2003) 181–2. 222 Freeman’s Journal (5 February 1907). as quoted in W. B. Yeats, The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Volume IV: 1905–1907. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) 879–84: 879–80. 223 Ibid., 883. 224 Joyce, “To Stanislaus Joyce” (11 February 1907), 211. Joyce here confused The Countess Cathleen for Yeats’ play, Cathleen Ní Houlihan on whose authority and legacy he had addressed the crowd at the Abbey that February. See Freeman’s Journal (5 February 1907), as quoted in W. B. Yeats, The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Volume IV: 1905–1907, 883. On Yeats’ behavior, see the first-hand newspaper accounts republished in Kilroy, The ‘Playboy’ Riots, (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1971) as well as Peter Kavanagh, “Fighting the Audience”. The Story of the Abbey Theatre: From its Origins in 1899 to the Present Day (New York: Devin-Adair Company, 1950) 53–60. 66 likened Synge’s work to ancient Greek tragedy. “About Synge himself I cannot speak”, he wrote, for “I have read only one play of his Riders to the Sea, which made Yeats first think of the Greeks (who are always with us)”.225

Through the remainder of that winter, Yeats’ defense of Synge and the crisis which had engulfed the Irish theatre remained on Joyce’s mind so much so that he complained to his brother:

This whole affair has upset me. I feel like a man in a house who hears a row in the street and voices he knows shouting but can’t get out to see what the hell is going on. It has put me off the story I was ‘going to write’—to wit, The Dead…What am I to do?226

With Synge’s “‘slander on Ireland’” on his mind, what Joyce did in fact do was start preparing his lecture series on Irish literature for the Università Populare.227 However, rather than merely mock Yeats, Synge and the alleged controversy swirling around the

Irish theatre, Joyce chose instead to examine the “Greek kinship” which had informed and communicated, his contemporaries insisted, “a breadth and stability like that of

225 Joyce, “To Stanislaus Joyce” (11 February 1907), 212. From as early as the autumn of 1904, Joyce had taken to mocking Yeats’ attribution of “Greek” qualities to his contemporaries. In the Pola Notebook he parroted the poet: “‘Synge’s play is Greek,’ said Yeats, etc.” Yeats had made this remark when, according to Robert Scholes and Richard Kain, the poet “was engaged in trying to find work for both young men [Synge and Joyce] in London, while Joyce was on his way to Paris in 1903. Joyce resented this praise, and when he saw Synge and his manuscript in Paris attacked the play as un-Aristotelian, concealing the grudging admiration which led him to translate it into Italian some years later.” See Joyce, “Section 5, The Pola Notebook”, 85. In a 1952 BBC broadcast commemorating Synge’s life and literary work, R. I. Best recalled Yeats praising the playwright in a similar way. “Best: I was sitting on a bench beside him and Yeats said to me in that impressive way—intoning his words—that he had just discovered a man who had all the talent of Aeschylus and Sophocles combined. I said to him, ‘How wonderful, who is he?’ ‘He is a man of the name of Synge.’ “J. M. Synge”. Irish Literary Portraits. W. R. Rodgers, ed. (New York: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1973) 94–115: 104. 226 Joyce, “To Stanislaus Joyce” (11 February 1907), 212. 227 Joyce, “To Stanislaus Joyce” (?1 February 1907). Letters of James Joyce, Volumes II and III. Richard Ellmann, ed. (New York: Viking Press, 1966) Vol. 2, 207–9: 208. Joyce had encountered this phrase, “slander on Ireland”, first in an article entitled “Riot in a Dublin Theatre” published that January in London’s Daily Mail. 67 ancient poetry” into the new national drama performed at the Abbey Theatre.228 The following April, Joyce delivered the first of his lectures, “Ireland, Island of Saints and

Sages”. In it he attacked the Anglophobic ethos which many revivalists had encouraged, and wasted little time in drawing the central comparison between Ireland and ancient

Greece for which he had often ridiculed Yeats and many associated with the Celtic

Twilight. “Nations,” he began,

have their ego, just like individuals. The case of a people who like to attribute to themselves qualities and glories foreign to other people has not been entirely unknown in history, from the time of our ancestors…or [from the time] of the Greeks, who called all those who lived outside the sacrosanct land of Hellas barbarians. The Irish, with a pride that is perhaps less easy to explain, love to refer to their country as the island of saints and sages.229

Unlike Yeats, who often recalled ancient Greece to magnify praise of himself and his friends, Joyce drew attention to a less laudable characteristic of Greek civilization, hoping to encourage suspicion of the vanity he found amongst his contemporaries. By claiming for themselves the “qualities and glories foreign to other people,” the Greeks, he

228 I take the word, “Greek kinship”, from John Synge’s 1904 review of Marie Henri d’Arbois de Jubainville’s work, The Irish Mythological Cycle and Celtic Mythology, translated from the original French by Richard Irvine Best. In praising both Best’s translation and the scholarship of d’Arbois de Jubainville, Synge professed faith in “the Greek kinship of these Irish legends,” for they still expressed what he called “the oldest mythology that can be gathered from the Homeric poems, the most archaic phase of Indo-European religion.” J. M. Synge, “Celtic Mythology” (2 April 1904). Collected Works, Volume II: Prose. Alan Price, ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1966) 364–66: 365. See also W. B. Yeats, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume III: Autobiographies. William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald, eds. (New York: Scribner Press, 1999) 137. Synge’s enthusiasm for Gaelic folklore developed first from his interest in “Homeric realism”. As his nephew later made clear: “It was when he was studying Irish in Trinity College that he began to read the epic tales of ancient Ireland. They caught his folk imagination as the Greek tales had done…These tales were local and belonged to a people among whom their imagery was still living. For him they had the same force in their references to Tara Hill and other places he knew as the Homeric stories might have had for a Greek in their references to the blue water, the shores and islands of the eastern Mediterranean.” Edward Stephens, My Uncle John, Edward Stephens’s Life of J. M. Synge. Andrew Carpenter, ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1974) 66. 229 James Joyce, “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages” (1907). The Critical Writings of James Joyce. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann, eds. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989) 153–74: 172–3. 68 argued, had fortified the Peloponnese against the perceived impurities of the barbarian.230

Such impurities were likewise now unwelcome, he thought, in contemporary Ireland where nationalists often appropriated the triumphs “of the ancient race” in the hope that the nation could be revived by reclaiming its far-gone Gaelic past.231

Throughout the Revival, Yeats had been driven by this belief, persistently exhorting his contemporaries to claim, anglicize and creatively adapt the country’s native folklore for themselves. Within these tales, Yeats argued, “a fountain of nationality” remained present for the emerging Anglo-Irish nation.232 But Joyce was not persuaded.

No modern national literature based in legends, he thought, could effectively restore and translate Ireland’s national genius for a modern and largely Anglophone audience. Thus, from the outset, Joyce scoffed at Yeats’ overweening enthusiasm for folklore and his interest in literary politics, ridiculing in particular his insistence that Gaelic folklore had maintained an unbroken connection with ancient Greek literature.233 “The root-stories of the Greek poets”, Yeats once proclaimed, “are told to-day by the cabin fires of

Donegal.”234 For Joyce, the essence of ancient Gaelic civilization could not be resurrected

230 Ibid. 231 Ibid., 161. 232 W. B. Yeats, “The De-Anglicising of Ireland” (December 1892). Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats. J. P. Frayne, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970) Vol. 1, 254–6: 256. 233 When Yeats and Joyce met for the first time in October 1902, Joyce greeted the poet by reproaching him for using folk tales in his work. Stunned by his surliness that day, Yeats later recalled Joyce asking: “‘Why had I concerned myself with politics, with folklore, with the historical setting of events, and so on? Above all why had I written about ideas, why had I condescended to make generalizations? These things were all the sign of the cooling of the iron, the fading out of inspiration…I had been doing some little plays for our Irish theatre, and had founded them all on emotions or stories that I had got out of folklore. He objected to these particularly and told me that I was deteriorating.’” See Ellmann, James Joyce, 102. 234 W. B. Yeats, “The Message of the Folk-lorist” (19 August 1893). The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume IX: Early Articles and Reviews. John P. Frayne and Madeleine Marchaterre, eds. (New York: Scribner Press, 2004) 209–13: 210. 69 in enthusiasm for fIrish olklore, no matter what connections it might have with Greek,

Roman or Egyptian civilization. “Ancient Ireland is”, he asserted, “dead just as ancient

Egypt is dead. Its death chant has been sung, and on its gravestone has been placed the seal.”235 Any modern vision of nationality built on the presumption that Englished versions of Irish folklore would provide a literature of classical merit was, he argued, simply “a convenient fiction” motivated by a stale Anglophobia.236

In doubting the usefulness of comparisons between Greek and Gaelic antiquity,

Joyce was not merely attempting to free himself from a popular Victorian practice towards classical imitation, he was also denying a central principle in the nationalist vision of the Irish Literary Theatre. Established in 1899, the Theatre had promised to restore in Ireland what Yeats called “a dramatic art which…the Greek of the time of

Sophocles and the Spaniard of the time of Calderon and the Indian of the time of

Kaladasa would have recognised as akin to their own great art.”237 Yeats himself was convinced that audiences would hear in his own work something of “Greek tragedy,

235 Joyce, “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages”, 173. 236 Ibid., 166. 237 W. B. Yeats, “To the Editor of the United Irishman” (c. 21 April 1902). The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Volume III: 1901–1904. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) 177–9: 179. Yeats and MacGregor Mathers were, in fact, attempting to imitate a liturgical model of the Athenian theatre. As James Flannery has observed, they together formulated “a distinctive set of rituals for what was to be called the Order of Celtic Mysteries…Through extensive research parallels were drawn between ancient Celtic and Graeco-Roman gods…In ancient Greece, the wedding of Homeric mythology with Dionysian and Eleusinian rites had resulted in the sublime yet splendidly communal drama of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes. Yeats dreamed of creating an Irish equivalent of the Theatre of Dionysius, a national theatre in which the people would watch ‘the sacred drama of its own history, every spectator finding self and neighbour, finding all the world there as we find the sun in the bright spot under the looking glass.’” James Flannery, “Creating a Unity Through Ireland and an Irish National Theatre”. W. B. Yeats And The Idea Of A Theatre: The Early Abbey Theatre In Theory And Practice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976) 58–100: 65. 70 spoken with a Dublin accent.”238 This accent, however, was lost on Joyce. And by the time of his lecture in Trieste, he had grown weary, and could now no longer suffer the naïvete of such appeals to antiquity.239 “I do not see the purpose”, he declared,

of the bitter invectives against the English despoiler, the disdain for the vast Anglo-Saxon civilization, even though it is almost entirely a materialistic civilization, nor the empty boasts that the art of miniature in the ancient Irish books, such as the Book of Kells, the Yellow Book of Lecan, the Book of the Dun Cow, which date back to a time when England was an uncivilized country, is almost as old as the Chinese, and that Ireland made and exported to Europe its own fabrics for several generations before the first Fleming arrived in London to teach the English how to make bread. If an appeal to the past in this manner were valid, the fellahin of Cairo would have all the right in the world to disdain to act as porters for English tourists.240

A coherent sense of Irish nationhood could not be recovered by comparing the achievements of the Gaelic past with other ancient civilizations. It would not emerge, he asserted, by appropriating ancient Greece as a literary and cultural model for emulation or imitation in Ireland. Likenesses attributed to the Gael and the Greek could not mend the

“old national soul”, for that soul which “spoke during the centuries through the mouths of fabulous seers, wandering minstrels, and Jacobite poets disappeared from the world with the death of James Clarence Mangan…today other bards, animated by other ideals, have the cry.”241

238 Yeats, Autobiographies, 331. 239 Joyce identified this abuse of history, not only with the nationalist movement in Ireland, but also with the irredentist nationalism of Trieste to which he had been exposed during the winter of 1907. As John McCourt points out, “The Triestine irredentists turned a blind eye to the complexities of the past in order to present a mythical vision of it which they hoped to re-create in the future…Joyce would never accept this use of history, whether it was written by [Attilio] Tamaro or [Pádraig] Pearse, whose version of patriotism, as enunciated in 1914, was close to what the irredentists sought from their supporters in Trieste.” See John McCourt, “Was ist eine Nation?” The Years of Bloom, James Joyce in Trieste 1904– 1920. (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin, 2000) 79–136: 98–9. 240 Joyce, “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages”, 173. 241 Ibid., 173–4. 71

As Joyce saw it then, the imitation or appropriation of ancient literatures— whether of Gaelic, Greek, Egyptian or Chinese origin—were of little value for contemporary writers. The bond between modernity and the ancient past had been radically severed in nineteenth-century Ireland.242 And it was now therefore pointless to try to recapture something of that “old national soul” by bringing ancient achievements into the struggle for a purity of race and of language.243 “What race, or what language”, he asked in 1907, “…can boast of being pure today? And no race has less right to utter such a boast than the race now living in Ireland.”244 According to Joyce, modern Irish civilization was not pure but rather “a vast fabric, in which the most diverse elements are

242 “For Yeats the nineteenth century marked the resurgence of a national culture; for Joyce it saw the final destruction of a native Irish culture. Yeats saw himself as the inheritor of traditions rediscovered in the nineteenth century; for Joyce there were no real traditions to be had from this period of Ireland’s history, except that this century produced Mangan”. L. H. Platt, “Joyce and the Anglo-Irish Revival: The Triestine Lectures.” James Joyce Quarterly (Winter 1992) Vol. 29, No. 2, 259–66: 262. 243 With the rise in nationalist sentiment, exhortations to restore Ireland to Gaelic purity intensified during the Revival. Fear of racial annihilation often drove popular writers to attribute to the Irish language an integrity which could keep the country from assimilating English modernity. The revival of the language was seen as pivotal to purifying the race of what D. P. Moran diagnosed as the traits of that “English- speaking, English-imitating mongrel”. Without it Ireland could not be an independent nation, but would continue, as Douglas Hyde argued in 1906, “to imitate the English on lines that are natural and instinctive to the English, but that are the reverse of natural to ourselves...all imitation is barren.” Along similar lines, Dermot Chenevix Trench insisted in 1912 that Ireland’s “passion for imitation” would leave its natives racially impoverished and in danger of biological ruin. As Trench saw it, the physical structure of the “Irish brain” and “Irish larynx” demanded the “subtle architecture of the Gaelic sentence”. “Irish idiom is the logic of Irish psychology”, he wrote, “… an Irish sentence, apart from its explicit meaning, commits the speaker, by its grammar and order, to an Irish theory of life.” In practice, however, the Irish committed themselves to the language of “outsiders for everything that provides for our intellectual and material life”. Unless this was halted, the deterioration of the Irish mind would become not just a fact of history, but a biological fact expressed in the genetic degeneration of the race. See D. P. Moran, The Philosophy of Irish Ireland. (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2006) 35; and Douglas Hyde, “The Great Work of the Gaelic League” (17 February 1906). Language, Lore, and Lyrics: Essays and Lectures. Breandán Ó Conaire, ed. (Blackrock, Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1986) 193–9: 193, as well as Dermot Chenevix Trench, What is the Use of Reviving Irish? (Dublin: Maunsel and Co., 1912) 26–27, 4. On the view of Irish Gaelic as a “repository of Irishness” in twentieth-century debates over nationality, see Tony Crowley, “Language and Revolution, 1876–1922”. War of Words: The Politics of Language 1537–2004 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) 128–63. 244 Joyce, “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages”, 165–6. 72 mingled, in which nordic aggressiveness and Roman law, the new bourgeois conventions and the remnant of Syriac religion are reconciled.”245 The linguistic, racial, and religious character of the Irish people had never been “pure and virgin without having undergone the influence of a neighbouring thread.”246 From its origins, the country’s history and language had been marked by repeated infusions of foreign influence, both welcome and unwelcome. Early Irish civilization drew much of its materia, he argued, from races and languages foreign to the native inhabitants living in Ireland. And since the late Middle

Ages, a “new Celtic race” had started to emerge, a people “compounded of the old Celtic stock and the Scandinavian, Anglo-Saxon, and Norman races. Another national temperament rose on the foundation of the old one, with the various elements mingling and renewing the ancient body.”247

For this reason, Joyce thought fatuous any attempt to extract from the Gaelic past a thread of linguistic or racial purity. As he saw it, the essential hybridity of Irish history exposed as spurious all contemporary efforts “to exclude from the present nation all who are descended from foreign families”.248 “[T]o deny”, Joyce declared, “the name of patriot to all those who are not of Irish stock would be to deny it to almost all the heroes of the modern movement.”249 No lesser figure than Charles Stewart Parnell himself had not “even a drop of Celtic blood”, but he remained, Joyce argued, “perhaps the most

245 Ibid., 165. 246 Ibid. 247 Ibid., 161. 248 Ibid., 161–2. “Most radically, Joyce refuses to accept the view that an authentic national culture, protected and cultivated by an Anglo-Irish intelligentsia, had managed to survive and even flourish beyond the eighteenth century. For Joyce the Gael was dead and beyond resurrection”. Platt, “Joyce and the Anglo- Irish Revival: The Triestine Lectures”, 259. 249 Joyce, “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages”, 162. 73 formidable man that ever led the Irish”.250 No contemporary notion of Irish nationality would cohere if the “backward and inferior” people now dwelling in the country insisted on stubbornly attaching cultural identity to notions of racial and linguistic purity.251 If however, the Irish were willing to embrace the multiethnic and multilingual nexus—that

“vast fabric” which made up their history and culture, then a new sense of nationhood might emerge. For “[n]ationality,” he told his audience, “must find its reason for being rooted in something that surpasses and transcends and informs changing things like blood and the human word.”252 Those writers committed to this kind of vision could no longer put off the difficulty of representing in artistic form the country’s complex history.

250 Ibid. 251 Ibid. 252 Ibid., 166. Paraphrasing a quotation from Pseudo-Dionysius’ fifth century work, De coelesti hierarchia (chapter 9.2) Joyce further defined his multiethnic view of Irish nationality. “The mystic theologian who assumed the pseudonym of Dionysius, the pseudo-Areopagite, says somewhere, ‘God has disposed the limits of nations according to his angels’, and this probably is not a purely mystical concept. Do we not see that in Ireland the Danes, the Firbolgs, the Milesians from Spain, the Norman invaders, and the Anglo-Saxon settlers have settled to form a new entity, one might say under the influence of a local deity?” The choice of Pseudo-Dionysus, a Greek Father of the early Church, was made in contrast to the more canonical classical Greek poets Yeats had exploited in bolstering his vision of Ireland’s national literature. As Platt has suggested, this choice was, perhaps, evidence of Joyce’s belief that the Anglo-Irish Protestants of the Literary Revival had significantly underestimated the lasting contributions which Catholic Christianity made in the development of Irish civilization, for throughout his lecture, Joyce repeatedly stressed the importance of the Irish church in developing “a catalogue of apostolic achievement in art, history, and science”. See Platt, “Joyce and the Anglo-Irish Revival: The Triestine Lectures”, 259–60. Though Joyce may not have known it, the original Greek used by Pseudo-Dionysius for ‘nations’ suited his definition of nationality well. The original Greek of the relevant passage reads: <<Ἔστησε >> γὰρ ὁ ὕψιστος << ὅρια ἐθνῶν ἀ ριθμὸν κατὰ ἀγγέλῶν θεοῦ.>> ἔθνος broadly signifies, as the LSJ suggests, “a number of people living together”, but it is notable that its definition differs from the ancient Greek, γένος or ‘race,’ which is customarily regarded as “a subdivision of ἔθνος”, ἔθνος comprising within itself the notion of many races. For the Greek of De Coelesti Hierarchia, see Corpus Dionysiacum. Günter Heil and Adolf Martin Ritter, eds. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1991) 5–61: 37. See also Pseudo-Dionysius, “On the Heavenly Hierarchy”. The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite, Part II – The Heavenly Hierarchy and The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. Rev. John Parker, trans. (London and Oxford, 1899) 1–66.

74

Modern Irish culture demanded full articulation, an articulation that went well beyond popular Gaelic nostalgia and the naïve nationalist appropriations of Greek antiquity which Yeats and his associates had offered during the Celtic Revival.

And yet, even as Joyce ridiculed his Irish rivals and scoffed at their romantic notions of Hellenism, he refused to abandon the example of the Greeks when debating pressing matters touching on national identity in Ireland. The overreaching correspondence between Irish modernity and ancient Greece which his contemporaries had alleged roused his appetite for the satirical. But as Joyce concluded his lecture in

April 1907, he—surprisingly—turned back and began to rethink that “appendicitis”,

Hellenism, which he once diagnosed across Europe. Speculating aloud, Joyce wondered whether modern Ireland was ready, in fact, to “resume its ancient position as the Hellas of the north some day?”253 “Is the Celtic mind”, he inquired,

…destined to enrich the civil conscience with new discoveries and new insights in the future? Or must the Celtic world, the five Celtic nations, driven by stronger nations to the edge of the continent, to the outermost islands of Europe, finally be cast into the ocean after a struggle of centuries? Alas, we dilettante sociologists are only second-class augurers...Only our supermen know how to write the history of the future.254

Joyce refused to answer these questions. He could not predict the future of either Irish or

Celtic civilization, but his initial question in these remarks signaled an important shift in his thinking about the role of Hellenism in modern Ireland. He rejected nationalist appropriations of Hellenic antiquity, and refused to be hostage to the rash judgment of those “supermen” of the Celtic Revival. Yet beginning with this lecture, Joyce began to

253 Joyce, “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages”, 172. 254 Ibid., 172–3. 75 see creative potential in a different kind of imaginative engagement with ancient Greek literature—an engagement set against the revivalist conscription of antiquity, but one which balanced his profound skepticism about the use of classics with the desire for something new in Ireland—something definitive which could at last make good on the

Greek traits Oscar Wilde had once attributed to the Irish. ‘We Irishmen’, said Oscar

Wilde one day to a friend of mine,” Joyce asserted,

‘have done nothing, but we are the greatest talkers since the time of the Greeks.’ But though the Irish are eloquent, a revolution is not made of human breath and compromises. Ireland has already had enough equivocations and misunderstandings. If she wants to put on the play that we have waited for so long, this time let it be whole, and complete, and definitive.255

Wilde had mordantly compared the boasts of Irishmen to the achievements of ancient

Greece, and the irony of this remark was not lost on Joyce. For he knew that as yet,

Ireland’s poets and artists—particularly those associated with the Abbey—had produced only talk and little literary work of enduring value, nothing which was hitherto “whole, and complete, and definitive.”256 But in this void, Joyce saw opportunity, a chance not only to confront the Revival but to construct a deeper imaginative parallel with ancient

Greece, one whose satire might expose as bogus any claims of a clear cultural correspondence between the classical past and Ireland’s future.

Following his lecture in Trieste, Joyce did not publicly comment on the role of

Hellenism in Irish literature for more than twelve years.257 Apart from the nine short articles he published in the Triestine newspaper, Il Piccolo della Sera in 1912, Joyce

255 Ibid., 174. 256 Ibid. 257 Initially, Joyce had been asked to deliver three public lectures at the Università Popolare in 1907, but after completing a draft of the second lecture, he decided to give only the first. See Ellmann, 258. 76 offered few public pronouncements on literary or political matters in Ireland. Even with revolutionary events starting to shape the emerging Free State and the eruption of the

Great War across Europe, Joyce wrote little and lectured less between 1912 and 1919.

That silence then led Yeats to assume that Joyce wanted little

to do with Irish politics, extreme or otherwise, and I think [he] disliked politics. He always seemed to me to have only literary and philosophic sympathies. To such men the Irish atmosphere brings isolation, not anti- English feeling. He is probably trying at this moment to become absorbed in some piece of work till the evil hour is passed.258

Living far afield from those national controversies which embroiled Yeats’ own poetry,

Joyce appeared to his contemporary a disaffected and apolitical aesthete. But this characterization was self-serving, for Yeats mistook Joyce’s skepticism in politics for a lack of civic commitment to Ireland. Between 1912 and 1919, the political fate of the nation—specifically the continuing failure to achieve Home Rule—was never far from

Joyce’s mind. In March 1914 Joyce approached the socialist publisher, Angelo

Formiginni, and proposed a slim volume for publication. The book would collect in

Italian the nine essays on Irish politics Joyce had written for Il Piccolo della Sera over the previous decade. “This year,” Joyce told Formiginni,

the Irish problem has reached an acute phase, and indeed, according to the latest news, England, owing to the Home Rule question, is on the brink of civil war. The publication of a volume of Irish essays would be of interest to the Italian public…I am an Irishman (from Dublin): and though these articles have absolutely no literary value, I believe they set out the problem sincerely and objectively.259

258 W. B. Yeats, “To Edmund Gosse” (28 August [1915]). The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Intelex Past Masters, Entry no. 2754. 259 The letter was translated and published by Giorgio Melchiori in “The Politics of Language and the Language of Politics”. James Joyce Broadsheet (February 1981) Vol. 1, No. 4. 77

And yet, the manuscript for the book he was set to entitle L’Irlanda alla Sbarra never went to press.260 But the energy which Joyce might have expended revising and republishing his opinions on contemporary political matters he later channeled more effectively into the multilingual satire of Ulysses’ twelfth episode, the ‘Cyclops’.

Through radical narrative and stylistic experiments, Joyce not only articulated in this episode his skeptical commitment to political debate in Ireland, he also expanded the withering critique of revivalist Hellenism he had first espoused in his 1907 lecture,

“Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages”.

Following the 1916 Rising, increasingly militant forms of anti-English sentiment had begun to grow steadily across Ireland.261 Even though popular opinion of the nationalist rebellion had first been marked with what F. S. L. Lyons has called “bitter recrimination against the men who had brought ruin to the city in vainglorious pursuit of an obviously lost cause”, the cause started to gain a wide acceptance, exerting influence in particular over the collective religious imagination of Ireland’s Catholic majority.262

260 With no response from Formiginni, the exact reasons for this remain unclear. Giorgio Melchiori conjectured that, “Probably the letter was never answered. The outbreak of the First World War, involving Austria immediately in the conflict, made communication with Trieste very difficult, and attention was diverted from the Irish problem. What is significant is Joyce’s involvement, the care with which he had chosen the one Italian publisher who might have been interested in the issue, and the role in which he saw himself: that of the objective though not detached observer. He had rearranged the nine articles written for Piccolo della Sera, placing them not in the order of publication reserving the more strictly political ones for the first and last sections of the projected book, while placing those of literary interest in the central part.” See Melchiori, “The Politics of Language and the Language of Politics”. 261 On the political climate of Ireland in this time, see Jason K. Knirck, “Irish Nationalism and Irish Revolution, 1912–1921”. Imagining Ireland’s Independence: The Debates over the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2006) 11–74; as well as Arthur Mitchell, Revolutionary Government in Ireland: Dáil Éireann 1919–22 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1995). 262 “Within weeks of the executions the dead leaders [of the Rising] were being elevated to the status of martyrs. Commemorative masses in the churches were marked by the gathering of large and sullen crowds, threatening some new explosion of violence. Pearse, in particular, was singled out for this kind of idolatry and prayers were already being addressed to him not long after his death.” F. S. L. Lyons, Culture & Anarchy in Ireland, 1890–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) 100. 78

With the tide turning in favor of a more immediate and indeed more violent solution to the problem of English dominance in Ireland, the general election of December 1918 saw the disenfranchisement of the moderate Irish Parliamentary Party, the political party founded by Charles Stewart Parnell and the one which also held the allegiance and enthusiasm of the young Joyce.263 But with the “moral assassination” of Parnell in 1891 and with each successive defeat of Home Rule for Ireland, the party had in Joyce’s view slowly “gone bankrupt”.264 Although its members were still seeking a constitutional solution to Irish question, the IPP lost nearly all political clout in the aftermath of the

1918 election.265 More radical Sinn Féin candidates now captivated the mind of the electorate with their promise to both withdraw “Irish Representation from the British

Parliament” and forcefully deny “the will of the British Government or any other foreign

Government to legislate for Ireland”.266 In place of Westminster, Sinn Féin established its own “counter-state” in January 1919, creating an unsanctioned lawmaking body in

263 Joyce professed his devotion to Parnell and Home Rule in a 1912 article for Il Piccolo della Sera entitled “L’Ombra di Parnell”. There he castigated those Irish critics who had recently “tried to minimize the greatness of this strange spirit”. Before political disenfranchisement, Parnell had “like another Moses, led a turbulent and unstable people from the house of shame to the verge of the Promised Land.” Despite the scandal of his downfall and premature death, he remained Ireland’s “ghost of the ‘uncrowned king’”—a king whose betrayal would “weigh on the hearts of those who remember him when the New Ireland in the near future enters into the palace ‘fimbriis aureis circumamicta varietatibus’”. James Joyce, “The Shade of Parnell” (1912). The Critical Writings of James Joyce. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann, eds. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989) 223–28: 223, 228. 264 James Joyce, “Home Rule Comes of Age” (19 May 1907). The Critical Writings of James Joyce. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann, eds. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989) 193–6: 193, 196. Joyce’s low estimation of the party in 1907 was not uncommon. Many thought “it had become a mere shadow of the once-dedicated and united party that Parnell had led to Westminster.” See Christopher M. Kennedy, Genesis of the Rising, 1912–1916: A Transformation of Nationalist Opinion. Irish Studies, Vol. 10. Christopher Berchild, ed. (New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc., 2010) 12–25: 12. 265 Of the 67 seats the IPP held before the 1918 election, only six remained. See Knirck, “Irish Nationalism and Irish Revolution, 1912–1921”, 45–8. 266 Éamon De Valera, “Manifesto to the Irish People”. The Testament of the Republic. (Dublin: Irish Nation Committee, c. 1924) 4–5. 79

Dublin, the first Dáil Éireann.267 From there, the Irish were now, they declared, a nation free to repudiate “in arms against [a] foreign usurpation…based upon force and fraud and maintained by military occupation against the declared will of the people.”268 With this declaration, the last vestiges of Parnellite constitutionalism—with its vision of a non- violent, legislative solution to the question of Irish sovereignty—were irrevocably crushed.

Living abroad at the time, Joyce was unmoved by the rising influence of Sinn

Féin. He had long been disabused of his youthful enthusiasm for the Parliamentarians, but the “recent events in his country”, as Richard Ellmann observed, also “had not pleased him even though they represented the triumph of the Sinn Féin principles which in Rome and Trieste he had vigorously espoused.”269 During the summer of 1919, widespread fervor for more belligerent forms of nationalism led to outbreaks of violence against the Royal Irish Constabulary and men suspected of working as covert intelligence officers in the British Army.270 Amid these conditions of suspicion, recrimination and violent reprisal, Joyce began composing the ‘Cyclops’—an episode in which he was able to link Odysseus’ confrontation with Polyphemus with the skepticism he felt towards that

“Fenian giant, representative of the most one-eyed nationalism”.271 But as Joyce started

267 A phrase I borrow from Arthur Mitchell’s analysis in “Building the Counter-State”. Revolutionary Government in Ireland: Dáil Éireann 1919–22, 43–119. 268 Éamon De Valera, “Declaration of Independence of Dáil Éireann, First Parliament of the Irish Republic, 21st January 1919”. The Testament of the Republic. (Dublin: Irish Nation Committee, c. 1924) 8–9. 269 Ellmann, 534. 270 Lawrence McCaffrey, “The Rose Tree, 1914–1922”. The Irish Conflict: Two Centuries of Conflict (Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1995) 133–52. 271 Budgen, 155. On the impact which contemporary social violence exerted on Ulysses, see W. J. McCormack, “James Joyce: Bás Nó Beatha”. Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History (Oxford: Clarendon 80 to draw this new episode together, he began to despair. His mind, he told Harriet Weaver, had lapsed into “a state of blank apathy out of which it seems that neither I nor the wretched book will ever more emerge.”272 “I have little hope”, he lamented,

that the Cyclops…will be approved of: and, moreover, it is impossible for me to write these episodes quickly. The elements needed will only fuse after a prolonged existence together. I confess that it is an extremely tiresome book.273

Frustrated by his slow pace, Joyce finally completed a draft of the episode by early

September. To push the ‘Cyclops’ from the “blank apathy” of his mind, he had had to look back intently at the critique of Hellenism and its place in the ideology of Irish nationalism which he offered in 1907. In creatively expanding the criticism of his lecture,

Joyce drew on a multiethnic view of Irish nationality, merging the “vast fabric” he espoused in Trieste into the “two-plane” Homeric structure of Ulysses. To forge this parallel effectively Joyce drew not simply on direct allusions to Greek epic but on the contested reception which Homer had enjoyed throughout the literature of the Celtic

Revival and the long nineteenth century in England. In doing so, he deliberately imitated a mock-heroic manner of classical translation while manipulating his own half-read knowledge of ancient Greek into new radical experiments in modernist narrative—

Press, 1985) 253–92. McCormack insists on a “thoughtful consideration of events occurring between the conception and publication of the novel – among them, massive labour unrest in Dublin, the Rebellion, the murder of Joyce’s friend Sheehy-Skeffington, the Great War, the internment of Stanislaus Joyce in Austria, Revolution in Russia and Germany. Across Europe and within Ireland, historical change had rendered 16 June 1904 no longer contemporary. Seen in this light the changing styles of Ulysses do not so much chronicle the events of one specific day as they seek to come to terms with the changing perspectives upon a ‘fixed’ day which a revolutionary period generated. Ulysses is thus historical in two senses, first in that it takes as its setting a date which is progressively seen as historical; and second, as a stylistic consequence, the process of composition itself is historicized.” McCormack, 280. 272 James Joyce, “To Harriet Shaw Weaver” (19 July 1919). Letters of James Joyce. Stuart Gilbert, ed. (New York: Viking Press, 1957) Vol. 1, 128–9. 273 Ibid. 81 experiments which both satirized the strident rhetoric of cultural nationalism and lampooned the reputed “Greek kinship of Irish legends” so prized by Yeats and Synge.274

______

On hearing that Leopold Bloom’s surname had once been changed from the

Hungarian, Virag, to the more native-sounding Bloom, the citizen of the ‘Cyclops’ episode blurts out: “That’s the new Messiah for Ireland!...Island of saints and sages!”275

With this retort, Joyce incorporated an allusion to the title of his first Triestine lecture into the debate over Bloom’s dubious identity at Barney Kiernan’s pub. As John McCourt has recently observed, this was apt for it was in Trieste that Joyce himself first began to sketch the “theoretical skeleton of the ideas that Bloom would later come to embody, most importantly his refutation of ‘the old pap of racial hatred’ (L II 167) in its anti-Irish, anti-English and anti-Semitic configurations.”276 Nationality in modern Ireland, Joyce had then argued, existed as a “vast fabric”, a complex mesh of native and foreign threads, threads of culture, threads of language. Central to view Joyce outlined was his examination of Hellenism in contemporary Irish politics. Throughout the Literary

Revival, ancient Greek precedent was widely invoked in diverse attempts to confront the overreach of English influence in Irish society. Often Greek literature was set out as a model for imitation and emulation—a model which could justify the social purification and de-anglicization of Ireland. As one scholar put it, “efforts to celticise Ireland from the

274 Synge, “Celtic Mythology”, 365. 275 James Joyce, Ulysses. Hans Walter Gabler, ed. (New York: Random House, 1986), (12.1642–3) 277. 276 John McCourt, “Trieste”. James Joyce in Context. John McCourt, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) 228–38: 233–4. 82

1880s onwards were…veiled attempts to ‘hellenise’ Ireland by aligning the burgeoning nation with what was perceived to be the ideal nation-state, fifth-century Athens.”277

Throughout the first decade of the century, Joyce remained skeptical of the correspondence, or “kinship”, which so many of his contemporaries saw between Irish folklore and Homeric poetry. For this reason, Joyce remained uninterested in the study of classical Greek civilization throughout the first decade of the twentieth century.

However, in the summer of 1915—having moved with his family from Trieste to

Zürich—Joyce found himself more and more engrossed in the study of both ancient

Greek and classical translation. In Zürich he became acquainted with a group of intellectuals—a group that called themselves the Club des Étrangers—and there he found two new friends, Pavlos Phokas and Paulo Ruggiero. With them Joyce began practicing and expanding the meager knowledge of modern Greek which he had first started to acquire in Trieste.278 And according to Ellmann, it was during that time that he began to feel ever more “keenly his ignorance of classical Greek”, for while he slowly improved his knowledge of the modern tongue, Joyce struggled to learn enough ancient Greek to read Homer without the crutch of translation.279 This fact always remained a “sore point” with him, for as Frank Budgen later recalled, Joyce did know “some Greek”, but he “was not a Greek scholar by high academic standards”.280 “I told him”, Budgen remarked,

that I left school and went to work in my thirteenth year, but that the only thing I regretted about my lack of schooling was that I was never able to learn Greek. He thereupon regretted his insufficient knowledge of that language but, as if to underline the difference in our cases (or so I

277 Macintosh, “The Irish Literary Revival and the Classical Tradition”, 4. 278 Ellmann, 408; see also Budgen, 173–5. 279 Ellmann, 408. 280 Budgen, “Further Recollections of James Joyce”, 359. 83

interpreted it) he said with sudden vehemence: ‘But just think: isn’t that a world I am peculiarly fitted to enter?’281

His ‘sudden vehemence’ not withstanding, Joyce never entered that world for which he felt himself “peculiarly fitted”, at least not with a great deal of fluency in ancient Greek.

“I don’t even know Greek”, he later told Harriet Weaver, “though I am spoken of as erudite. My father wanted me to take Greek as third language, my mother German and my friends Irish. Result, I took Italian.”282 And yet, though he failed to gain a sure footing in the language, Joyce took extensive notes on Greek, notes which survive in a few of the copybooks he used at the time.283 These coupled with his annotation of an interlinear

Greek–Italian edition of The Odyssey illustrate the fervent but erratic nature of his study in the ancient language.284 From 1915 to 1919, he tried to gain a more thorough knowledge of Homeric poetry and Greek antiquity, and though he failed to learn the

281 Ibid. 282 James Joyce, “To Harriet Shaw Weaver” (24 June 1921). Letters of James Joyce. Stuart Gilbert, ed. (New York: Viking Press, 1957) Vol. 1, 165–7: 167. 283 On dating the Greek notebooks, see Rodney Wilson Owen, “Late 1915 to Early 1917: Notebooks and Miscellaneous Writings”. James Joyce and the Beginnings of Ulysses (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1983) 85–104: 96–102. 284 These copybooks have been published in facsimile in the Garland edition. See James Joyce, “Greek (Buffalo VIII.A.6.a–j, 4, 2, 1)”. Notes, Criticism, Translations & Miscellaneous Writings. Prefaced and arranged by Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1979) Vol. 2, 288–352. Joyce owned and annotated the third Italian edition of L'Odissea: Testo, costruzione, versione letterale e argomenti. Libro I, published in 1905 by Societá Editrice Dante Alighieri di Albrighi, as well as a version of Book 14 entitled, Il libro XIV dell’Odissea (Livorno: Raffaello Giusti, Editore, 1915). As Ronald Schork has noted, “this school edition of book 1” contained “copious notes of every sort and a line-by-line translation into grotesquely literal Italian. On several pages of this book Joyce wrote occasional notes, almost all of them involving a mechanical transfer of a vocabulary word from the commentary into the text…This mechanical process, however, does not mean that Joyce could ‘read’ even a single verse of the original Odyssey. Rather, with the appropriate lexical and syntactical clues, he would have been able to decipher the meaning of individual words and to explain how they functioned in the context…Such effort, which can sometimes yield sophisticated results for a single word or phrase, falls far short of a claim to be able to ‘read’ the original—and Joyce would be the first to admit that such was the case.” R. J. Schork, Greek and Hellenic Culture in Joyce (University of Florida Press, 1998) 85. See also Michael Patrick Gillespie, James Joyce's Trieste Library: A Catalogue of Materials at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Texas (Austin: Harry Ransom Center, 1986) 120. 84 original language outright, the partial knowledge of Greek he did acquire impacted not only the phonetic and etymological inventions he would later employ throughout Anna

Livia Plurabelle, but also more immediately, the critique of Irish cultural nationalism he had set out in Ulysses.

In the Zürich copybooks Joyce scrawled out long notes and dashed off extensive vocabulary lists in Greek. But he marked down only two short, two-verse passages from the Odyssey, copying both in careful handwriting.285 The first selection he drew from the second book of the poem, where Athena provides fair winds to Telemachus and his crew, as they attempt to escape the suitors at Ithaca, journeying on to Sparta and Pylos for news about the fate of Odysseus.

τοῖσιν δ᾽ικμενον οὖρον ῖει γλαυκῶπις Ἀθήνη ἀκραῆ Ζέφυρον, κελαδοντ᾽επι οῖνοπα πόντον. (2.420–1)286

And grey-eyed Athene sent them a favourable gale, a fresh West Wind, singing over the wine-dark sea.287

The common Homeric phrase, επι οῖνοπα πόντον, employed here looms large in the initial scene of the ‘Telemachus’ episode, where standing high atop the Martello Tower at

Sandycove, Stephen Dedalus looks out over Dublin bay. His garrulous and gregarious friend, Malachi “Buck” Mulligan, is there with him, shaving. “Lend us a loan of your noserag to wipe my razor”, Mulligan demands.

Then, gazing over the handkerchief, he said: –The bard’s noserag! A new art colour for our Irish poets: snotgreen. You

285 “The careful (though not flawless) placement of diacritical marks in the Greek show that Joyce was consulting a printed text here.” Schork, 87. The inaccurate accentuation and inconsistent punctuation of the Greek are Joyce’s own. See James Joyce, “Greek (Buffalo VIII.A.6.a–j, 4, 2, 1)”, 331. 286 Joyce, “Greek (Buffalo VIII.A.6.a–j, 4, 2, 1)”, 331. 287 As translated in S. H. Butcher and A. Lang, trans. “Book II”. The Odyssey, Done into English Prose (London: Macmillan and Co., 1879) 16–30: 29. 85

can almost taste it, can’t you? He mounted to the parapet again and gazed out over Dublin bay, his fair oakpale hair stirring slightly. –God! he said quietly. Isn’t the sea what Algy calls it: a great sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks! I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother. Come and look…God, Kinch, if you and I could only work together we might do something for the island. Hellenise it.288

By setting the Homeric phrase against the coarse idiom of Mulligan’s modern English,

Joyce lampooned the nationalist conscription of ancient Greece, whose rhetoric he had grown accustomed to hearing. Like Dedalus himself, he would not work willingly for the

Hellenization of Ireland, at least as it had been imagined by Yeats and his fellow compatriots at the Abbey Theatre. Instead, by drawing a wry equivalence between the heroic epithet, οῖνοπα, and the color of nasal mucus and cultural nationalism itself,

Joyce reminded his readers of the crude reception which Ireland’s Literary Revival had given to classical antiquity. “The mockery of it”, Mulligan exclaims, for since the Irish

Confederate Wars of 1641–1652, green flags had been flown both officially and unofficially to mark Irish rebels, Irish patriots and Irish nationalists.289 But here what waves on the battlements is no flag, but instead only a snot rag whose owner is not

Homer nor even a national poet, but a failed “bard” with little chance for fame or widespread renown. And the color of this new standard is not that of pure patriotism but is rather a compound epithet, “snotgreen”. And by juxtaposing this construction against

οῖνοπα, Joyce deepened the satirical impulse of ‘Telemachus’, driving it further into the

288 Joyce, Ulysses (1.72–81, 157–8), 4–5, 6. 289 Ibid., (1.34), 1. On Irish military practices during the Eleven Years’ War, see Jane Ohlmeyer, “The Civil Wars in Ireland”. The Civil Wars: A Military History of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 1638–1660. John Kenyon and Jane Ohlmeyer, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 73–102. 86 history of literary translation, into the complex connection which English has had with ancient Greek.

As discussed in the first chapter, since the late sixteenth century, the presence of compound epithets in English has been regarded as a visible sign of ancient Greek pressure on or interference in the language. In a 1605 Epistle Concerning The

Excellencies of the English Tongue, the Cornish antiquary, Richard Carew (1555–1620), expressed his profound admiration for the “Compositione of wordes” in English for

“therein our Languadge hath a peculier grace,” he claimed, “a like significancy, and more shorte then the Greeke”.290 Later, in the eighteenth-century, Alexander Pope similarly praised the ‘Fruitfulness of [Homer’s] Invention” in the compound epithet, a feature which had, he thought, “heighten’d the Diction” of Greek epic and effectively thrown

Homeric “Language out of Prose”.291 In late nineteenth-century Ireland, writers closely associated with the Revival—writers like Hyde, Lady Gregory, Synge and Yeats—were eager not just to toss their idiom out of prose, but to throw it out of common English speech altogether. For this reason, as they strove after a new national vernacular, Irish writers looked to methods commonly used in classical translation. And though ancient

Greek was rarely a direct inspiration for specific neologisms in Anglo-Irish, the language and its translation history was an instructive model, showing poets how one might foreignize English, and by parallel, bring Anglo-Irish closer in tone and character to Irish

290 Richard Carew, Epistle Concerning the Excellencies of the English Tongue first appeared in William Camden’s Remains Concerning Britain (1605), as cited in Richard J. Watts, Language, Myths and the History of English. R. D. Dunn, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) 134. See also the modern edition of Carew’s epistle in William Camden, Remains Concerning Britain (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984) 37–44: 38. 291 Alexander Pope, “Preface”. The Iliad of Homer, Books I–IX. Maynard Mack, ed. The Poems of Alexander Pope, Vol. 7. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967) 10, as quoted in Kenneth Haynes, English Literature and Ancient Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) 110. 87

Gaelic. Thus in many translations of Gaelic folklore and especially in more ambitious adaptations of Celtic legend—works such as Yeats’ 1889 narrative poem, The

Wanderings of Oisin—the compound epithet was featured prominently.

But often what even the best writers of the Revival managed to do with compounds was neither inspired nor inventive. Rather than help foreignize their language, most were the product of a more conventional idiom of English translation, an idiom which at the time had been widely used to domesticate classical texts, to make them sound at once more antique and more native. This kind of translationese commonly came to be known as “Wardour-Street English” in the late nineteenth century, a “perfect modern article”, one critic exclaimed, but

with a sham appearance of the real antique about it. There is a trade in early furniture as well as in Early English, and one of the well known tricks of that trade is the production of artificial worm-holes in articles of modern manufacture. The innocent amateur, seeing the seemingly worm- eaten chair or table, is filled with antiquarian joy, and wonders how so precious a relic of the past can be so exceedingly cheap. So in the Wardour Street of literature. Take whole handfuls of dights and cow-kinds and men-folk; season, according to taste, with howes and mayhappens and smithying carles.292

Throughout Ulysses Joyce sporadically manipulated “Wardour-Street English” in a mock-heroic fashion, and as the narrative experiments of his novel grew bolder, he eventually chose to let a ‘Wardour-Street’ speaker invade the work and take over, in part,

292 Archibald Ballantyne, “Wardour-Street English”. Longman’s Magazine (October 1888) No. 72, 585–94: 589–90. Ballantyne’s review specifically attacked the idiom found in William Morris’ translation of Odyssey (1887–1888). As Lawrence Venuti has indicated, the significance of this term originated with “the shops in Wardour Street [in the Soho neighborhood of London] that sold antique furniture, both authentic and imitation…Wardour-Street English eventually came to be used as a term of abuse for archaic diction in any kind of writing—applied to widely historical novels, particularly imitations of Scott, but also to nonfiction prose”. Lawrence Venuti, “Nation”. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. Second edition (New York: Routledge, 2008) 83–124: 117–18; see also The Quarterly Review (October 1888) Vol. 167, No. 334, 398–426. 88 the entire narration of the ‘Cyclops’ episode. There, as Hugh Kenner has observed, the objective narrator ventriloquizes highly affected passages whose archaizing tone and formal character reflected Victorian practices of classical translation.293

And lo, as they quaffed their cup of joy, a godlike messenger came swiftly in, radiant as the eye of heaven, a comely youth and behind him there passed an elder of noble gait and countenance, bearing the sacred scrolls of law and with him his lady wife a dame of peerless lineage, fairest of her race.294

Set against this style, this “Victorian Homer of noble aspect”, Joyce juxtaposed the vulgar and xenophobic outbursts of the ‘citizen’, a Fenian nationalist whose tone had to reflect, he thought, a “colossal vituperativeness” in keeping with the militant rhetoric of

Sinn Fein politics.295 Explaining the stylistic balance he was attempting, Joyce told Frank

Budgen that the citizen “unburden[s] his soul about the Saxo-Angles in the best Fenian style” but the epic narrator, he continued, “proceeds explanatorily ‘He spoke of the

English, a noble race, rulers of the waves, who sit on thrones of alabaster, silent as the deathless gods’.296 Stylistically, the outsized pitch of contemporary Anglophobia could only be matched by parallel with the manufactured grandeur of “Wardour-Street

English”, an idiom whose linguistic exaggeration Joyce knew all too well. For without

293 Hugh Kenner, “Homer’s Sticks and Stones”. James Joyce Quarterly (Summer 1969) Vol. 6, No. 4, 285– 98; see also Hugh Kenner, Joyce’s Voices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) 110–112. 294 James Joyce, Ulysses. Hans Walter Gabler, ed. (New York: Random House, 1986) 245. 295 James Joyce, “To Frank Budgen” (19 June 1919). Letters of James Joyce. Stuart Gilbert, ed. (New York: Viking Press, 1957) Vol. 1, 125–6; as well as Kenner, 109. Citing Ron Bush, Kenner has further suggested that the balance of styles in the ‘Cyclops’—set between the “Victorian Homer of noble aspect” and crude demotic of Barney Kiernan’s drinkers—was written in response to the emergence of a new primitivism in Homeric studies, an anthropological Homer, not just the “archaeological Homer who emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century”. Espoused by the Cambridge Ritualists, this view “gave a new meaning to the idea that the base of the Iliad and the Odyssey is not history but myth. ‘Myth’ as they presented it no longer meant a pleasant story or an effort to explain why the seasons vary; it meant autochthonous religious rite, propitiatory, bloody.” See Ronald Bush, The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976) 125–8. 296 Joyce, “To Frank Budgen” (19 June 1919), 125–6. 89 enough Greek to read Homer in the original, he had relied instead on a number of recent

English versions of the Odyssey—many of which had tried to anglicize the

“perfect…lovely grandeur” Matthew Arnold had attributed to Homer’s high style.297

But the satire of the ‘Cyclops’ was not directed simply at the ‘Wardour-Street’ vision of Homer alone. It was aimed rather at that “Greek kinship of Irish legend”, the kinship which lay at the heart of revivalist rhetoric concerning a national literature. For that reason, in the earliest known drafts of the ‘Cyclops’, Joyce began not by mimicking

Homer but by imitating English versions of Gaelic legend, specifically one poem translated by James Clarence Mangan (1803–1849), a poet whom he had once eulogized as Ireland’s “herald manqué, the prototype of a nation manqué.”298 And yet now in

Mangan’s “Prince Alfrid's Itinerary Through Ireland”, Joyce found a way into the

297 Matthew Arnold, “On Translating Homer” (1860–1861). The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold. Volume I: On the Classical Tradition. R. H. Super, ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961) 97–216: 168. It is unclear how many translations of the Odyssey Joyce consulted when writing Ulysses. For this reason, no single English translation can be privileged based purely on stylistic and thematic evidence from the novel. Hugh Kenner’s assertion that much of the ‘Cyclops’ imitative style is derived from allusion to Samuel Butcher and Andrew Lang’s 1879 prose version has some merit and is, in part, supported by the recollection of Joyce’s friend, Frank Budgen. But there is no hard evidence to suggest that Butcher and Lang’s work was the sole source for the parodies of ‘Wardour-Street’ translationese Joyce composed in 1919. Besides Butcher and Lang, his brother, Stanislaus, later recalled that Joyce also knew Charles Lamb’s The Adventures of Ulysses (1808) very well, and had used both William Cowper’s 1791 translation as well a more recent version produced by Samuel Butler (1898). Rather than simply lampoon the practice of one single translator, Joyce developed the ‘Cyclops’ in imitation of a common stylistic ethos, an ethos whose irritating archaisms and affectation he found prevalent among many English versions of the Odyssey. On Joyce’s exposure to multiple translations of the Odyssey, see Keri Elizabeth Ames, “Joyce’s Aesthetic of the Double Negative and His Encounters with Homer’s Odyssey”. Beckett, Joyce and the Art of the Negative. Colleen Jaurretche, ed. European Joyce Studies. (Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 2005) Vol. 16, 15–48: 17–18, 30. On Joyce’s use of Butcher and Lang, see Budgen, “Further Recollections of James Joyce”, 359; as well as Schork, Greek and Hellenic Culture in Joyce, 118–23. On the specific school edition of Charles Lamb’s version which Joyce read at Belvedere, see Alistair McCleery, “The Gathered Lambs”. James Joyce Quarterly (1994) Vol. 31, 557–63; as well as Alistair McCleery, “The One Lost Lamb”. James Joyce Quarterly (1990) Vol. 27, 635–9. 298 James Joyce, “James Clarence Mangan” (1907). The Critical Writings of James Joyce. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann, eds. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989) 175–86: 186. 90

‘Cyclops’, seeing in it what one scholar has called the same “verbal paraphernalia” which he had encountered in various Victorian versions of the Odyssey.299 Amplifying the poem’s stylistic tics, Joyce expanded Mangan’s poem with a mock epic voice, thus beginning the ‘Cyclops’:

In green Erin of the west, {*Inisfail the fair} there lies a land, the land of holy Michan. There rises a watchtower beheld of men afar. There sleep the mighty dead as in life they slept in life in life slept, warriors and princes of high renown. There wave the lofty trees of sycamore; the eucalyptus, giver of good shade, is not absent: and in their shadow sit the maidens of that land, the daughters of princes. They {sing and} sport with silvery fishes, caught in silken nets; their fair white fingers toss the gems of the {fishful} sea, ruby and purple of Tyre. And men come from afar, heroes, the sons of kings, to woo them for they are beautiful and all of noble stem.300

In recalling Mangan’s version, Joyce maintained no pretense about keeping to the formal

299 Schork, 122. Mangan based his version of the poem on John O’Donovan’s unrhymed translation of a seventh-century Irish Gaelic ballad, first published in the Dublin Penny Journal (September 1832). According to Douglas Hyde, Mangan’s rendition had achieved something unusual and uncharacteristic with this poem: he conveyed the force of the original Gaelic “more closely than was his wont”. Hyde, as quoted in Justin McCarthy, ed., Irish Literature (Philadelphia: John D. Morris and Co., 1904) Vol. 6, 2375–6. See Melissa Fegan, Literature and the Irish Famine, 1845–1919 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 194. 300 Phillip F. Herring, “Ulysses Item V.A.8, Early Draft of ‘Cyclops’”. Joyce’s Notes and Early Drafts for Ulysses: Selections from the Buffalo Collection (Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1977) 152–77: 152. The corresponding passage in Mangan’s version: I found in Innisfail the fair, In Ireland, while in exile there, Women of worth, both grave and gay men, Many clerics and many laymen. I traveled its fruitful provinces round, And in every one of the five I found, Alike in church and palace hall, Abundant apparel, and food for all. Gold and silver I found in money; Plenty of wheat and plenty of honey; I found God’s people rich in pity, Found many a feast, and many a city. James Clarence Mangan, “Prince Alfrid's Itinerary Through Ireland”. Poems of James Clarence Mangan (many hitherto uncollected). D. J. O’Donoghue, ed. (Dublin, 1903) 38–41: 38–9. 91 conventions or original sense of the Gaelic ballad. Rather than simply allude to the

“fruitful provinces round” of Mangan’s translation, he expanded the description, compiling a rambling prose account of “Inisfail the fair”, an account whose verbal excess ironically exposed the ancient Irish paradise through hyperbole.301 Exaggerating its idyllic character, Joyce embellished the Gaelic past with a great largesse of food, money and “abundant apparel”. In the first published version of the episode, issued in The Little

Review, the narrator pushes this further, enumerating an almost Homeric catalogue of the

“{*fishful} sea” and those “ornaments of the arboreal world”.

A pleasant land it is in sooth of murmuring waters, fishful streams where sport the gunnard, the plaice, the halibut, the flounder and other denizons of the acqueous kingdom too numerous to be enumerated. In the mild breezes of the west and of the east the lofty trees wave in different directions their first class foliage, the sycamore, the Lebanonian cedar, the exalted planetree, the eucalyptus and other ornaments of the arboreal world with which that region is thoroughly well supplied.302

In so doing, Joyce remapped the terrain of Mangan’s original, positioning a pastoral scene of great nobility and wealth not in the rural landscape of ancient Ireland but in the dirty byways of urban Dublin—in the North City Fish and Vegetable Market he knew well. And yet, by reworking Mangan’s verse in a language reminiscent of a ‘Wardour-

Street’ translation, Joyce was not simply lampooning Ireland’s failure to find a distinctive

301 The shift to ‘Wardour-Street’ narration marked a radical departure from the style of previous eleven episodes in Ulysses. As one scholar notes, “[v]ery early in his work on ‘Cyclops,’ Joyce apparently decided to drop the monologue technique, which he had already distorted practically beyond recognition in ‘Sirens.’ He lacked a clear idea of the technique that would replace it, but, contrary to what we might expect, his initial impulse was in the direction of parody passages rather than in that of the first-person naturalistic narrator.” Michael Groden, Ulysses in Progress (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1977) 118. 302 First published by Joyce as “Ulysses (Episode XII)”. The Little Review (November 1919) Vol. 6, No. 7, 38–54: 40. The subsequent sections of the ‘Cyclops’ were serialized in the following three issues of The Little Review (December 1919–March 1920). The catalogue was further extended in later editions of the novel to include: “the roach, the halibut, the gibbed haddock, the grilse, the dab, the brill…the pollock, the mixed coarse fish generally” (12.72–3). See Joyce, Ulysses, 241. 92 national vernacular in English. He was, more importantly, beginning to organize the structure of the ‘Cyclops’ around the critique of nationality and Hellenism he had first offered in Trieste in 1907. For at the beginning of his lecture, “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages”, Joyce translated for his Italian audience the opening quatrain of the Mangan poem he later used in first drafting the ‘Cyclops’.

Trovai, quando fui esule In Irlanda la bella Donne molte, una folla seria Laici e preti in abbondanza.303

Now, by merging a classical translationese with the idiom of Mangan, Joyce set out to discredit the conscription of Homeric antiquity exploited by Yeats, Synge and Lady

Gregory. And using the struggle between Odysseus and Polyphemus, he began to dramatize the skepticism he felt towards the widespread abuse of ancient literature in the nationalist rhetoric of the Literary Revival.

Central in the composition of the ‘Cyclops’ is the transformation or translation of

Leopold Bloom into the Odyssean oὖτις, the “Noman” of Ulysses. In his Zürich copybooks—aside from the short passage taken down from Book 2—Joyce noted two further verses from Book 9 of the Odyssey, well-known lines which come when

Polyphemus has grown drowsy, after dining on wine and human flesh. Sensing that the right time for his escape has come, Odysseus dupes his one-eyed captor falsely identifying himself with these words—words which Joyce copied down in deliberate script:

303 James Joyce, “L’Irlanda: Isola dei Santi e dei Savi—Manuscript (Yale)”. Notes, Criticism, Translations and Miscellaneous Writings: A Facsimile of Manuscripts and Typescripts. Prefaced and Arranged by Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Garland Publishing, 1979) Vol. 1, 85–130: 96. See also Joyce, “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages”, 159. 93

Οὔτις ἐμοί γ᾽ ὄνομα. Οὔτιν δέ με κικλήσκουσιν μήτηρ ἠδέ πατὴρ ἠδ᾽ ἄλλοι πάντες ἑταῖροι. (9.366–7)304

Noman is my name, and Noman they call me, my father and my mother, and all my fellows.305

From as early as 1917, Joyce expressed a deep fascination for this false name of

Odysseus. “The most beautiful, most human traits”, he declared that autumn, “are contained in the Odyssey”, with one of its most stirring moments coming in what he called “the delicious humor of Polyphemus. ‘Olus’ [sic—tr.] is my name.’”306 Writing in his copybook, Joyce played suggestively with the phonetic character of oὖτις, trying to connect it, through false etymology, with the name of Ὀδυσσεύς, using the related word, οὐδείς.307

But for Joyce the appeal of oὖτις was much more than a trifling exercise in

Greek onomastics. By late 1918, it ran much deeper, for at that time chaos had begun to engulf Irish society. The consequences of nationalist unrest were increasingly violent, and they soon bubbled over with the outbreak of the Anglo-Irish War. But through the

Homeric figure of oὖτις, Joyce began to see a way of registering the misgivings he had towards the growing political rancor brewing in Dublin. While composing the ‘Cyclops’ later in the summer of 1919, he turned again to the example of ancient Greek civilization:

304 Joyce, “Greek (Buffalo VIII.A.6.a–j, 4, 2, 1)”, 331. The incorrect, acute accentuation in this passage of oὖτις and oὖτιν are of Joyce’s own hand. 305 As translated by S. H. Butcher and A. Lang, “Book IX”. The Odyssey, Done into English Prose (London: Macmillan and Co., 1879) 134–52: 145. 306 Georges Borach, “Conversations with James Joyce”. Joseph Prescott, trans. College English (March 1954) Vol. 15, No. 6, 325–7: 326. 307 Separating the name Odysseus, into two parts, Joyce set it amongst “outis and oudeis (nobody, no one); directly opposite this pair of synonyms he added, also in Greek, the name Zeus. Immediately preceding this entry Joyce provided a translation /interpretation of his exercise in etymology: NO/GOD, Odys/seus.” See James Joyce, “Greek (Buffalo VIII.A.6.a–j, 4, 2, 1)”, 332. See also Schork, 87. 94

“As an artist,” he told his friend, Georges Borach, “I attach no importance to political conformity”, for “[m]aterial victory is”, he asserted,

the death of spiritual predominance. Today we see in the Greeks of antiquity the most cultured nation. Had the Greek state not perished, what would have become of the Greeks? Colonizers and merchants. As an artist I am against every state. Of course, I must recognize it…[but] the state is concentric, man is eccentric. Thence arises an eternal struggle.308

Seeing only a “material victory” in the growing success of Sinn Fein nationalism, Joyce refused to pay allegiance to the strident “political conformity” he saw being bartered in

Dublin. Rather than accept this, he chose instead to build a new episode in Ulysses poised on that “eternal struggle” between the concentric demands of race and nationality in

Ireland and the sheer cultural eccentricity of Leopold Bloom. As a Protestant, a

Hungarian, a Jew and yet an Irish eccentric, Bloom emerges as the Odyssean oὖτις of the ‘Cyclops’, a multiethnic ‘Noman’ born of dubious stock, of the “vast fabric” of cultural and linguistic complexities which Joyce defended in 1907.

As Bloom steps out from Barney Kiernan’s Pub to search for his friend, Martin

Cunningham, a heated debate over his surname, his national origin and his religious persuasion begins to erupt among the patrons at the pub. Bloom’s backpedaling definition of a nation as “the same people living in the same place…Or also living in different places” has enraged the citizen whose Anglophobic taunts against those “bloody brutal

Sassenachs” demands vocal, not tacit, assent from all.309

To hell with them! The curse of goodfornothing God light sideways on the bloody thicklugged sons of whores’ gets! No music and no art and no literature worthy of the name. Any civilisation they have they stole from us. Tonguetied sons of bastards’ ghosts…They’re not European, says the

308 Borach, “Conversations with James Joyce”, 326. 309 Joyce, Ulysses (12.1422–3; 12.1190–1), 272, 266. 95

citizen. I was in Europe with Kevin Egan of Paris. You wouldn’t see a trace of them or their language anywhere in Europe except in a cabinet d’aisance. (12.1197–1205)310

Bloom’s own tongue-tied speech—his inability to give the straight answers the citizen desires on all questions of national significance—turns that xenophobic savagery on to

Bloom himself. Bloom soon becomes a “rank outsider” at the pub, a figure whose name and identity grows more and more opaque as the episode progresses.311 On first entering

Barney Kiernan’s, Bloom is hailed in Wardour-Street clichés which dress him with timeless garb and an unmistakably Celtic lineage: “Who comes through Michan’s Land,”

Joyce writes, “bedight in sable armour? O’Bloom, the son of Rory: it is he. Impervious to fear is Rory’s son: he of the prudent soul”.312 His identity is not in doubt. But well past the episode’s midpoint, that O’Bloomian visage has altered, and no longer does Leopold radiate like some hero out of Gaelic folklore. He appears instead with a

“dunducketymudcoloured mug on him and his old plumeyes rolling about.”313 This leads the others at the bar to wonder aloud whether he is in fact

…a jew or a gentile or a holy Roman or a swaddler or what the hell is he? says Ned. Or who is he? No offence, Crofton. —Who is Junius? says J. J. —We don’t want him, says Crofter the Orangeman or presbyterian. —He’s a perverted jew, says Martin, from a place in Hungary and it was he drew up all the plans according to the Hungarian system. We know that in the castle. —Isn’t he a cousin of Bloom the dentist? says Jack Power. —Not at all, says Martin. Only namesakes. His name was Virag, the father’s name that poisoned himself. He changed it by deedpoll, the father did. —That’s the new Messiah for Ireland! says the citizen. Island of saints and

310 Ibid. 266–7. 311 Ibid. (12.1219), 267. 312 Ibid. (12.215–17), 244–5. 313 Ibid. (12.1415–16), 271. 96

sages!’ (12.1631–43)314

The problem presented by this shapeshifter—by Bloom’s character and dubious origin— is one which Joyce himself had first attempted to resolve in 1907. As the citizen sees it, it is the plague of foreigners in Ireland, of those who would merely swindle “the peasants…and the poor of Ireland. We want no more strangers in our house.”315 Alluding to the scene in which a wooden stake was driven into the eye of Polyphemus, Bloom attempts to resolve the debate not by “force against force” but through rhetorical guile, as

Odysseus once outwitted the Cyclops with δόλος not βία.316 Bloom does not attack the citizen but attempts to disarm him through language, by paraphrasing the Gospel admonition that some men can see only the mote in another’s eye, but “considerest not the beam” stuck in their own.317 The deeply enmeshed cultural fabric of modern civilization in Ireland bleeds over into the lineage of all men, even the most ardent and ideologically strident of Irish nativists.

But like Polyphemus the citizen can only cry out in outrage against such claims, against oὖτις and against the firehardened beam, the πυριήκεα μοχλὸν, now figuratively stuck in his eye.318 He grunts through a tautological retort to Bloom,

314 Ibid., 276–7. 315 Ibid. (12.1150–1), 265. 316 Ibid. (12.1364), 270. See also Odyssey, Book 9.407–8: “τοὺς δ᾽ αὖτ᾽ ἐξ ἄντρου προσέφη κρατερὸς Πολύφημος: ‘ὦ φίλοι, Οὖτίς με κτείνει δόλῳ οὐδὲ βίηφιν.’” “And the strong Polyphemus spake to them again from out the cave: ‘My friends, Noman is slaying me by guile nor at all by force’”. Butcher and Lang, 147. On Joyce’s view that “all subjugation by force…is only so far successful in breaking men’s spirits and aspirations”, see the essay, James Joyce, “[Force] (1898)”. The Critical Writings of James Joyce. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann, eds. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989) 17–24: 17. 317 Matthew 7:3–4, KJV. 318 Odyssey, Book 9.387. 97

“—Raimeis, says the citizen. There’s no-one as blind as the fellow that won’t see, if you know what that means.”319 What Bloom does not see and cannot realize, he insists, is the purity and greatness of Ireland’s Gaelic past, a past in which the Irish people far surpassed other nations with their “potteries and textiles”.320 The ancient land was unique, he insists, for it maintained an intimate link with the most accomplished national cultures of classical antiquity, even with those

Greek merchants that came through the pillars of Hercules, the Gibraltar now grabbed by the foe of mankind, with gold and Tyrian purple to sell in Wexford at the fair of Carmen[.] Read Tacitus and Ptolemy, even Giraldus Cambrensis. (12.248–51)321

By comparing ancient Ireland with her peers in classical antiquity, the citizen calls to mind the arguments of those “bitter invectives” and “empty boasts” against the “English despoiler” which Joyce first dismissed throughout his lecture in Trieste.322 No assertions about the old Irish “art of miniature”—nor even the countries clear ties of pure blood and common language—were simple or strong enough, Joyce thought, to bind the nation

319 Joyce, Ulysses (12.1239–40), 267. 320 Ibid. (12.1241–2), 267. 321 Ibid. (12.1248–51), 268. 322 Joyce, “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages”, 173. The person on whom Joyce based the identity of the citizen, Michael Cusack (1847–1906)—founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association and editor of the newspaper, The Celtic Times—was well known for drawing broad analogies and cultural comparisons between Ireland and Greek antiquity. “Ancient Ireland, like ancient Greece,” he once wrote in 1887, “was universally known as a home of athletics. Hurling—pre-eminently the national game—was indulged in too an extraordinary extent, and we read that at one time a war was caused by a disputed hurling contest between two provinces, so great was the interest taken in that manly game by the highest as well as the humblest in the land. The name of Ireland, like that of Greece, then, and indeed through succeeding ages, was synonymous with bravery.” [Michael Cusack], “The G.A.A. and the Future of the Irish Race”. The Celtic Times (19 February 1887) 4. Joyce later alludes to Cusack’s arguments about reviving ancient Irish sport when the narrator of the ‘Cyclops’ notes: “A most interesting discussion took place in the ancient hall of Brian O’Ciarnain’s in Sraid na Bretaine Bheag, under the auspices of Sluagh na h-Eireann, on the revival of ancient Gaelic sports and the importance of physical culture, as understood in ancient Greece and ancient Rome and ancient Ireland, for the development of the race.” Joyce, Ulysses (12.897–901), 260. 98 together as a whole.323 The complex history of Ireland had shown instead that “national temperament” emerged, not from pure sources in antiquity, but amidst the continuing flow of foreign pressures “renewing the ancient body” of Irish civilization.324 The citizen, however, is blind to this vision of nationality. And though Bloom protests to the contrary—“Ireland”, he says, “I was born here. Ireland”—the very narration of the

‘Cyclops’ starts to collude with the citizen: Bloom’s identity is entirely transformed by the end of the episode.325 No longer the rightful “son of Rory”, the pure and undisputed

High King of Gaelic Ireland (1166–1198 AD), Bloom is translated into the oὖτις of the

Odyssey, a dispossessed and wandering foreigner, a “bloody jewman” whose national loyalties and religious persuasion seem far too ambiguous to be called Irish.326 Like

Odysseus hiding beneath the “breasts of [the Cyclops’] thick-fleeced flocks”, his character confounds and is thus obscured, a “wolf in sheep’s clothing, says the citizen.

That’s what he is. Virag from Hungary! Ahasuerus I call him. Cursed by God.”327 At once both “entity and nonentity, assumed by any and known to none. Everyman or

323 Joyce, “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages”, 173. 324 Ibid., 161. 325 Joyce, Ulysses (12.1431), 272. 326 Ibid., (12.216, 12.1811), 245, 280. As Myron Schwartzmann has pointed out, the desire to identify Bloom solely through race, language, and nationality is built into the narrative style of the episode. “The successive drafts” of the episode, he notes, “reveal the work of a mature artist who knew almost exactly what he was shaping in the ‘Cyclops’ chapter from beginning to end. Counter to the conventional view of Joyce’s revisions as a process of simple augmentation, the V.A.8 copybook makes it clear that everything extraneous or incidental to Joyce’s conception of the chapter was to be removed or altered by the final version. Fascinating as it would have been to know what Leopold Bloom was thinking during the process of the chapter, Joyce chose to remove every trace of interior monologue so that the reader would be forced to see him from without.” Myron Schwartzman, “The V.A.8 Copybook: An Early Draft of the ‘Cyclops’ Chapter of Ulysses with Notes on its Development.” James Joyce Quarterly (1974) Vol. 12, 64–122: 65. 327 Butcher and Lang, “Book IX”, 148. See also Joyce, Ulysses (12.1666–7), 277. 99

Noman”—Bloom emerges from the Barney Kiernan’s Pub as a “vast fabric in which the most diverse elements are mingled”.328

______

By episode’s end, the inventiveness of the ‘Cyclops’ far outstrips those ironic translations of οῖνοπα πόντον which Buck Mulligan attempted in the ‘Telemachus’.

And yet, Mulligan’s crude compound epithets—“scrotumtightening” and “snotgreen”— foreshadow the deep narrative transformation, the radical translation of Homer Joyce would later execute in the ‘Cyclops’. Through self-conscious vulgarity, Mulligan’s outburst is poised comically against a noble Victorian vision of Homer. With his epithets

Mulligan mocks what one would naturally expect from a common nineteenth-century translation of the Odyssey. His words serve as the crude substitute for a more literal- minded ‘Wardour-Street’ style of translation, a style of English which both Irish revivalists and classical translators often employed. His compounds are, of course, by no means a faithful rendition of the original Greek. But they do translate and they are accurate in so far as they register the profound skepticism which Joyce felt towards the conscription of Homer by contemporary ideologues of Irish nationalism. Like the juxtaposition of mock-epic and barroom brawl drawn up in the ‘Cyclops’, Mulligan’s humor exposes the complex understanding which Joyce had of recent reception history in

Ireland. Often he had seen Homer and the Greek classics manipulated to various ends by key figures of the Celtic Revival. And Joyce knew all too well that each Homeric allusion and every modern appropriation of the classical was not of stock value. The use, appellation, translation or abuse of the ancient world always brought with it new value

328 Joyce, “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages”, 165. 100 and new claims, claims derived from a complex historical nexus of transmission comprising antiquity, modernity and English language literature.

But Joyce was not hostage to this history. He was more a master of it, and he thrust Ulysses into this nexus. Setting out Leopold Bloom as oὖτις, the πολύτροπος hero of the novel, Joyce examined in the ‘Cyclops’ what remained of the bold claims which Hellenism had once made on the Irish nation. “Ah Dedalus, the Greeks!”, Buck

Mulligan had exclaimed, “I must teach you. You must read them in the original.”329 Like

Dedalus, however, Joyce was never able to fluently read Homer in the Greek. But even if he had, that full knowledge of the ancient tongue would not have made the nationalizing impact which Malachi Mulligan had assumed. Instead, Joyce drew on a partial knowledge of Greek and on multiple ‘Wardour-Street’ style translations, building into the

‘Cyclops’ a theatre for the deep-seated skepticism he felt towards the presence of philhellenism in Ireland.330 Through satire the episode confronted this legacy of the

Revival, and with a profound awareness of both the authority and the power of the classical in contemporary Irish culture, Joyce sought a deeper imaginative parallel with

Greek antiquity, a parallel which could encompass, contest and yet comically surmount the nationalist shackles Yeats and his contemporaries had foisted on the Homeric past.

329 Joyce, Ulysses (1.79–80), 4–5. 330 Fritz Senn has suggested that the “semantic sweep” of this Odyssean epithet, πολύτροπος, provided Joyce with “manifold leverage” to manipulate and enlarge the range of Homeric correspondence in Ulysses. “The epithet, including in its semantic sweep the notions of much-traveled, much-wandering, turning many ways, versatile, shifty, wily, etc., seems to provide manifold leverage…Ulysses does not depend on particular echoes; it prefers to perform multifariously and to speak in many ways.” Fritz Senn, “In Classical Idiom: Anthologia Intertextualis”. James Joyce Quarterly (1987) Vol. 25, 31–48: 34. See also Senn, “Book of Many Turns”. Joyce’s Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation. John Paul Riquelme, ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984) 121–37.

101

Chapter Three

“Straight talk, straight as the Greek!”: Ireland’s Oedipus and the Making of Modernism

Before boarding the R.M.S. Lusitania, bound for New York, on the 31st of

January 1914, W. B. Yeats wrote Lady Augusta Gregory, telling her that he hoped this voyage at sea would, at last, give him some small measure of peace. “For the last few days I have been longing”, he wrote, “for the quiet of the boat”.331 Yeats had good reason to welcome his journey to America. During the previous month, he had been the object of public ridicule in the English press. In the English Weekly’s January issue, the popular

Irish novelist, George Moore, had published an excerpt from the final volume of his memoir, Hail and Farewell. In it Moore attacked the affectation of Yeats’ public manner, skewering, in particular, a tantrum the poet allegedly threw against the middle classes in

1904, when seeking assistance for the painter and art collector, Hugh Lane. Recounting the event, Moore wrote:

Yeats…with a paunch, a huge stride, and an immense fur overcoat, rose to speak…he began to thunder like Ben Tillett himself against the middle classes, stamping his feet, working himself into a great passion, and all because the middle classes did not dip their hands into their pockets and give Lane the money he wanted for his exhibition. It is impossible to imagine the hatred which came into his voice when he spoke the words

331 W. B. Yeats, “To Lady Gregory” (31 January 1914). The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Intelex Past Masters, Entry no. 2394. 102

“the middle classes”; one would have thought he was speaking against a personal foe; but there are millions in the middle classes!332

Insulted, Yeats claimed that Moore had mistaken facts to suit “mere novel writing.”333

But in spite of this misrepresentation, Yeats did not have reason enough to sue for libel.

“The statements about me”, he admitted, “are too indefinite for any action.”334

When he set sail from Liverpool later that month, Yeats hoped to leave this dispute behind. But the voyage at sea brought him neither pleasure nor peace. Still on board a week later, he wrote Lady Gregory and complained that the conditions had been

“villainous”—“only one calm day yesterday & we are much behind time. I spent three days on my back, not actually sick but sufficiently miserable.”335 Adding to his misery was the fact that he could not dodge further discussion of Moore’s scurrilous attack upon his character. However, some of the passengers with whom he talked were, in fact, more sympathetic to him than he had anticipated. One, he told Lady Gregory, was “a very strange man” who “came up with a low bow & asked me to write something in his diary for his wife as his wife ‘thought me the greatest poet in the world’.”336 Although pleased by such flattery, Yeats soon tired of this man’s garrulous manner. He was, Yeats noted, one of those Americans who must always “display their personalities at once.”337

332 George Moore, “Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Synge”. The English Review (January 1914) Vol. 16: 167– 70: 167. This excerpt was also later published in Vale, volume three of Moore’s memoir, Hail and Farewell (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1914) 170–3: 170. 333 W. B. Yeats, Journal entry no. 245 (January 1914). Memoirs. Denis Donoghue, ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1972) 269–71: 269. 334 Ibid. 335 W. B. Yeats, “To Lady Gregory” (5 February 1914). The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Intelex Past Masters, Entry no. 2396. 336 Ibid. 337 Ibid. 103

The eager American whom he had met was a doctor of midwestern origin named

Fenton Benedict Turck (1857–1932).338 Turck, Yeats learned, had moved from Chicago to New York City in 1913 after being appointed the director of a medical laboratory financed by the Pearson Research Fund. Because the doctor was thought to have attained a “position of eminence and authority” in his profession, Turck was admitted to the practice of medicine in New York without the customary examinations.339 But despite this reputation, the doctor showed almost no interest in discussing his research with

Yeats. Instead, he wanted to talk at length about what the poet derisively called his “one other subject”, the real enthusiasm which occupied his imagination—the civilization and literature of Greek antiquity.340 “When he talks of his science”, Yeats told Lady Gregory,

“he is careful & precise but he has one other subject Greece. On that he is a rhetorician of the wildest kind…the moment the restraint of his science was off him he would break out into phrases such as ‘Oh all conquering power of love’ & ejaculations about ‘moral uplift.’”341 But in spite of the doctor’s enthusiasm—indeed despite his insistence that

“We must become Greek”—he failed to impress Yeats with his understanding of Greek civilization and classical literature. In fact, when discussing the classics, he appeared,

Yeats wrote, to be “incoherent & preposterous”; he “seems to me to mispronounce every

Greek name he uses”.342 Furthermore, the tone of his praise for Greek civilization

338 See the Passenger Manifest for the R.M.S. Lusitania, sailing from Liverpool, 31 January 1914 – arriving 7 February 1914 in New York City, p. 4, line #29. 339 As quoted in Nature’s Alchemy, Special Bulletin of the Turck Foundation for Biological Research. Hamlin Garland, ed. (New York, 1926) 54. 340 Yeats, “To Lady Gregory” (5 February 1914). 341 Ibid. 342 Ibid. 104 epitomized to Yeats a distinctively Victorian enthusiasm for ancient literature.343

Through the doctor’s hurried talk of Greece, Yeats had discerned the coarse idiom of the

American newsman, an idiom betrayed by Turck’s exaggerated praise for the “moral uplift” of classical literature. “He talks American journalese,” Yeats scoffed, “& constantly talks of ‘moral uplift’ & has the gestures of a public speaker. He sees the whole world as a war between all sorts of evil – in which the Church of Rome is the main sort — & the spirit of Greece.”344

Turck’s expression, “moral uplift”, had been widely used in America since the

1890s when it arose often in debates over the curriculum of state-sponsored education.345

In 1911, the American psychologist, Granville Stanley Hall, defined the term in its proper context in his work, Educational Problems. “All English literature studied in the high school”, Hall wrote, should be “chosen primarily with reference to moral values and,

343 Turck’s regard for ancient Greece was influenced by a late Victorian understanding of Hellenism which served, as Frank Turner notes, as “a conservative ideological weapon against commercialism, pluralistic, liberal politics, and subjective morality”. “Hefty prescriptions of traditional English humanist values directed against the perceived social ills of the day” were, he argues, “rather poorly concealed in several surveys of Greek civilization published in the decade before World War I.” One such survey was R. W. Livingstone’s 1912 work, The Greek Genius and Its Meaning to Us, in which it was asserted that the culture of ancient Greece had achieved “a wedding of thought with morality”. Livingstone was keen to align “Greek literary genius with the traditional English humanist quest for the general and the ideal in literature and art, and his view allowed prescriptive patterns for a literature of moral uplift and sanity to be found in the works of Greek writers.” Frank M. Turner, “Varieties of Victorian Humanistic Hellenism”. The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981) 15–76: 33–6. 344 Yeats, “To Lady Gregory” (5 February 1914). 345 For example, at a December 1898 meeting of the New York Schoolmasters’ Association, the president of Vassar College, J. M. Taylor, used the expression to argue that secular state education could instill a sense of civic morality without appealing to religious dogma. “[S]ound education has never been separable from ethical training. By a sketch of the principal periods of Greek and Roman education it was shown that the reform movements in education came in connection with, moral uplift.” J. M. Taylor, “Should the State teach Morals in its Schools?” (10 December 1898). The Schoolmasters' Association of New York and Vicinity 1898–1899 (Newark: Baker Printing Co., 1899) 39–42. 105 ignoring here the dangerous principle of art for art’s sake”.346 For Hall, as for many others at the time, the aesthetic and stylistic aspects of a literary work were subordinate to its intrinsic moral character and the ethical effects that it could produce. Therefore, because the English Bible placed “all stylistic qualities second to ethical values”, it was thought to be with its “masterly Saxon directness, simplicity, and virility…the best pattern on which to fashion style”.347 “Its moral uplift”, Hall continued, “is independent of all supernal elements.”348 Even if not regarded as divine revelation, the English Bible could provide essential lessons for the moral instruction of the young American student.

In addition, Hall encouraged the use of selections excerpted from the “other great ethnic

Bibles” of ancient civilization—“from the literature of Confucianism, Brahminism,

Buddhism, Mohammedism, with illustrations of the Greek and Roman and Scandinavian religions at their best”.349 These could be effective, if when choosing them, particular attention was given to the moral integrity of a passage—not its putative beauty.

Two weeks after the Lusitania docked in New York City in the winter of 1914,

Yeats publicly savaged the moralist approach to literature, exploiting the very term,

“moral uplift”, which he had heard Dr. Fenton Turck energetically repeat when praising

Greek antiquity. “In many ways, in this country,” Yeats declared to a reporter from the

New York Times, “I think you still live in the Victorian epoch so far as literature is concerned. Your very phrase ‘moral uplift’ implies it. I think all that sort of thing is a

346 Granville Stanley Hall, “Moral Education”. Educational Problems (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1911) Vol. 1: 271. 347 Ibid. 348 Ibid. 349 Ibid. 106 misunderstanding of literature.”350 In talking with the doctor, Yeats had come face to face with an American whose regard for literature possessed the stale moralism which he had long associated with the Victorian age. Turck’s unshakeable belief in the fortifying moral power of the Greek classics confirmed Yeats’ own belief that the reading public of the

United States, as well as the critics in its popular newspapers, had been driven into a state of Victorian paralysis. Seized by moralist fervor, they had become, like their Victorian cousins, “obsessed by enthusiasm, by big ideas, and also by abstraction.”351

But for Yeats, the primary aims of literary art had little to do with abstract lessons in moral courage and social virtue. Thus in his interview with the New York Times, he specifically attacked the moralist vision of ancient Greece he associated with Victorian literary tastes. Contrary to Turck’s previous assertions, Yeats insisted that the great poets of Greek antiquity were unencumbered by the lack of imaginative freedom that now afflicted both the reception of classical literature and the very minds of contemporary writers in English. “If you deny expression to any profound or lasting state of consciousness,” he argued,

you make that state of consciousness morbid and exaggerated. The Greeks had no exaggerated morbidity of sex, because they were free to express all. They were the most healthy of all peoples. The man who is sex-mad is hateful to me, but he was created by the moralists.352

According to Yeats, the best of ancient Greek literature did not merely reflect the social customs and fashionable morality of its time. Rather, Greek poets possessed an unmatched freedom of the intellect and imagination. And with such freedom, they had

350 “‘American Literature Still in Victorian Era’ – Yeats” New York Times (22 February 1914), SM10. 351 Ibid. 352 Ibid. 107 been permitted to articulate all aspects of human and divine reality; Greek civilization allowed them the chance to express in literary form what Yeats called “the history of the more intense states of consciousness”.353 Such freedom was, he believed, no less essential to the poets of English and Irish civilization. “It is it is necessary”, he told the newspaper,

“to his very existence as an artist that he should be free to make use of all the circumstances necessary for the expression of any permanent state of consciousness; and not only is this necessary to the artist, but to society itself.”354

Throughout his tour of North America, Yeats reiterated this sentiment, stressing the centrality of intellectual freedom to the development of both good art and good politics. Again and again, he denounced the contemporary “commercial theatre” whose emphasis on “topical interest” had eliminated “human life” from literary expression.355

The literature of such theatre reflected merely popular cliché and what Yeats called that

“damnable system of morals”, which had set “purely topical sentiment” above beauty and artistic accomplishment. In place of this, Yeats urged his contemporaries to foster a

“great realistic art” that could set into form the “complete exposition of a group of circumstances and characters”.356 If achieved, this kind of realism, he believed, would make life represented in literature “so completely expressed that it is put outside the changes of fashion…No fluctuation of time can affect it.”357

353 Ibid. 354 Ibid. 355 W. B. Yeats, “The Theatre and Beauty” (written c. December 1913), transcribed in Robert O’Driscoll, “Two lectures on the Irish theatre by W. B. Yeats”. Theatre and Nationalism in Twentieth-century Ireland. Robert O’Driscoll, ed. (University of Toronto Press, 1971) 66–88: 68–70. 356 Ibid. 357 Ibid. 108

Neither had any fluctuation of time affected Yeats’ feelings towards those who set out to restrict intellectual freedom in the name of moral decency or political opinion. His assault on moralism was not new. For well over a decade, the poet had been battling

Ireland’s press and the Catholic hierarchy in their attempts to ridicule literary work on moral and political grounds. Their desire to judge art and literature on its moral effects or political character foreshadowed, Yeats feared, the onset of a broad suppression of the imagination—possibly even the creation of an official censorship in Ireland. The critics of popular newspapers were unwilling to defend the freedom of Ireland’s artists, choosing instead to echo what Yeats derided as the “voices of the mob”, voices which now were contaminating Irish society with moralism and anti-intellectual fervor.358

Because the newspaper reviews of contemporary literature were so predictably malicious—so “full of rumours and whisperings”—Yeats came to believe that an unofficial censorship was being executed in Ireland through banal journalism.359

Disturbed by this fact, Yeats asserted in 1903 that “[e]xtreme politics in Ireland were once the politics of intellectual freedom”, but by then even Irish nationalists— informed by the moralist criticism of Victorian England—were intent on restricting the imaginative liberty of Ireland’s writers. “Extreme politics seem about to unite themselves to hatred of ideas. The hatred of ideas has come whenever we are not ready to give almost every freedom to the imagination of highly-cultivated men, who have begun that experimental digging in the deep pit of themselves, which can alone produce great

358 W. B. Yeats, “Samhain: 1903 – Moral and Immoral Plays”. The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume VIII: The Irish Dramatic Movement. Mary Fitzgerald and Richard J. Finneran, eds. (New York: Scribner, 2003) 29–31: 29. 359 W. B. Yeats, “To the Editor of the United Irishman, 17 October 1903”. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Volume III: 1901–1904. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) 445–9: 446–7. 109 literature”.360 Because the “experimental digging” essential to literary art was, popularly speaking, under attack, contemporary Irish society had come to demand that theatrical literature echo the moral and political clichés of the time. Thus Yeats believed that “the public imagination is full of personified averages, partisan fictions, rules of life that would drill everybody into the one posture, habits that are the pinafores of charity schoolchildren.”361 Paralyzed by public expectation, Ireland’s writers were fast becoming, Yeats argued, idolaters of dead forms—“kneeling worshippers who have given up life for a posture, whose nerves have dried up in the contemplation of lifeless wood.”362 It was therefore the duty, he proclaimed, of the nation’s dramatic movement to oppose at all cost those expectations decreed by these “enemies of life, the chimeras of the Pulpit and the Press.”363

For Yeats, the rejection of literary experiment in Ireland was no small matter. It proved, he thought, that common English taste still dominated the public imagination of

Irish society. “A Connacht Bishop”, he wrote in 1903, “told his people…that they ‘should never read stories about the degrading passion of love,’ and one can only suppose that, being ignorant of a chief glory of his Church, he has never understood that this new puritanism is but an English cuckoo.”364 The cuckoo had gone west, leaving its eggs in a

360 W. B. Yeats, “To the Editor of the United Irishman, 24 October 1903”. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Volume III: 1901–1904. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) 451–3: 451. 361 Yeats, “To the Editor of the United Irishman, 17 October 1903”, 446. 362 Ibid., 446–7. 363 Ibid., 446. 364 Yeats, “Samhain: 1903 – Moral and Immoral Plays”, 30–1. 110 welcome Irish nest.365 Now peddled from the press and the pulpit was a distinctively

Victorian form of moralist criticism—criticism that was pushing Ireland’s playwrights closer to imitating modern English theatre. Since the passage of the Licensing Act of

1737, theatrical productions throughout England had been subject to the legal approval of the Office of the Lord Chamberlain.366 Any manager of an English theatre who intended to produce a play was obligated by law to submit the script to the Lord Chamberlain.

Even when license for production was granted, the Lord Chamberlain often did so while changing the title, dialogue, or general character of a script. In Yeats’ opinion, England’s practice of censorship had manufactured a lazy theatre, a theatre stained with commercial interest and a “puritanism” whose “pretended hatred of vice” was designed only to placate conventional notions of moral decency.367 In these straits, modern English theatre became saturated with derivative plays— plays whose “bad writing” appealed only to the

“illogical thinking and insincere feeling” of bourgeois morality.368

In Ireland, however, stage production remained free. Irish theatres were outside the jurisdiction of the Lord Chamberlain, and as such, they were not subject to

365 The allusion to the English cuckoo refers to the bird’s well-known nesting pattern. See Edward B. Clark, “Bird By-Ways in July”. World Today (July 1902) Vol. 3, No. 1, 1502–7: 1503. 366 The Licensing Act of 1737 had, in fact, already been superseded. The Theatre Regulation Act, 1843 defined more clearly the Lord Chamberlain’s important role as official censor. He now had power to prohibit a theatrical production “whenever he shall be of opinion that it is fitting for the Preservation of Good Manners, Decorum or of the Public Peace so to do.” As Green and Karolides have observed, the role defined by the 1843 Act established the Lord Chamberlain more firmly, and adapted his authority to contemporary demands: “In 1737 the theater had been made safe for the politicians; in 1843 it was dedicated to the taste of the emergent Victorian bourgeoisie and thus it remained for a century and a quarter more.” Jonathon Green and Nicholas J. Karolides, “Theatre Regulation Act (U. K.) (1843)”. The Encyclopedia of Censorship, New Edition (New York: Facts on File Press, 2005) 568. See also Frank Fowell and Frank Palmer, Censorship in England (London, 1913) 373–4. 367 W. B. Yeats, “Samhain: 1904 – The Dramatic Movement”. The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume VIII: The Irish Dramatic Movement. Mary Fitzgerald and Richard J. Finneran, eds. (New York: Scribner, 2003) 40–51: 45. 368 Yeats, “Samhain: 1903 – Moral and Immoral Plays”, 30. 111 restrictions imposed by England’s official censor. “We are better off”, Yeats insisted in

1904,

so far as the law is concerned than we would be in England. The theatrical law of Ireland was made by the Irish Parliament, and though the patent system, the usual method of time, has outlived its use and come to an end every where but in Ireland, we must be grateful that the ruling caste of free spirits, that being free themselves, they left the theatre in freedom.369

And yet, even though there was no recognized censor in Ireland at the turn of the twentieth century, the persistent attacks in the press and those from the Catholic hierarchy had started, Yeats thought, to unofficially and effectively do the work of the Lord

Chamberlain in Irish theatres. As one scholar has recently noted, prior to the emergence of the Irish Free State in 1922, “the prevailing standards for acceptable stage productions in Ireland drew heavily upon the British model, especially in restricting the representation of living or recently deceased people as stage characters and in prohibiting obscenity and blasphemy. The majority of plays performed in Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century were works licensed by the Lord Chamberlain”.370 Yeats’ trepidation was thus growing, for he feared that the Victorian inclination to bowdlerize poetry and drama would soon spread across the Irish Sea, bringing Dublin’s theatres under the authority of the Lord Chamberlain. Once again, Ireland threatened to imitate the social and artistic conventions enjoyed by the English bourgeoisie.

Because of this, Yeats considered popular assaults on the Irish National Theatre

Society to be attacks upon the very freedom of Ireland itself. If the country were to have a national literature different from that of England, its poets could not be compelled, he

369 Yeats, “Samhain: 1904 – The Dramatic Movement”, 45. 370 Joan Fitzgerald Dean, “Theatrical Censorship and Disorder in Ireland”. Riot and Great Anger: Stage Censorship in Twentieth-century Ireland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004) 11–33: 11. 112 argued, “to make the bounds of drama narrower”.371 They could not focus solely on topics deemed suitable by the press and the pulpit. “If creative minds…alight on a moral that is obviously and directly serviceable to the National cause, so much the better, but we must not force that moral upon them.”372 Yeats demanded that the theatre refuse “any help would limit our freedom from either official or patriotic hands”, for only through the full use of its intellectual freedom could Ireland’s theatre become national—what Yeats envisioned as “a place where the mind goes to be liberated as it was liberated by the theatres of Greece”.373 However, to fulfill this Hellenic ideal in contemporary Ireland would prove difficult. The public had become increasingly less inclined “to care for a play because it is a play, and not because it is serviceable to some cause.”374 To frustrate this inclination, Irish poets would have to “find plays that will make the theatre a place of intellectual excitement.”375 It was not long, however, after writing this that Yeats unexpectedly discovered a play whose performance, he thought, could be of such political controversy that it might provoke a necessary excitement in Ireland’s theatre.

______

Ten years prior to meeting Dr. Fenton Turck aboard the Lusitania, Yeats set sail from England in November 1903 for his first lecture tour in North America. Originally

371 W. B. Yeats, “To the Editor of the United Irishman, 10 October 1903”. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Volume III: 1901–1904. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) 439–41: 440. 372 Ibid. 373 W. B. Yeats, “Samhain: 1903 – The Reform of the Theatre”. The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume VIII: The Irish Dramatic Movement. Mary Fitzgerald and Richard J. Finneran, eds. (New York: Scribner, 2003) 26–8: 26. 374 Yeats, “Samhain: 1903 – Moral and Immoral Plays”, 30. 375 Yeats, “Samhain: 1903 – The Reform of the Theatre”, 26. 113 planned for only six weeks, the tour was such a success that it lasted nearly the entire winter.376 Yeats did not return to Europe until March 1904, but while in America, he gave over sixty lectures at various colleges and literary societies. It was a visit to South Bend,

Indiana which made the greatest impact on the poet. Invited to speak at the University of

Notre Dame, Yeats gave four relatively successful lectures and was happy, he later told a friend, to “go to the literary classes and speak to the boys about poetry”.377 But he came away most impressed by the “general lack of religious prejudice” shown by the priests of the university.378 In the spring of 1899, Yeats learned, the priests had not only encouraged their undergraduates to translate Sophocles’ famous tragedy, the Oedipus

Rex, but they had also permitted them to stage it on college grounds.379 As Yeats knew, production of the Oedipus Rex was still at the time under a strict ban in England, where it was thought that the central controversy of the plot—incest—might tempt English audiences to “gratify unclean and morbid sentiment”.380 Despite the fact that Sophoclean

376 For a detailed account of this lecture tour, as well as that of Yeats’s 1914 visit to America, see Karin Strand, “W. B. Yeats’s American Lecture Tours” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1978), 9–85, 129–70. 377 W. B. Yeats, “To Lady Augusta Gregory [18 January 1904]”. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Volume III: 1901–1904. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) 520–2: 520. 378 Ibid. 379 The performance of their translation was given on May 15th 1899. The University Press at Notre Dame commemorated the production by publishing the Greek text of the Oedipus Rex alongside the English translation used by the students. It is unclear whether Yeats was given a copy of this edition entitled, The Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, Translated and Presented by the Students of Notre Dame University. Introducing the tragedy, the students were compelled to make apology, writing that “a Greek Play is pagan worship…[but] nothing should be farther from our minds than idolatry or superstition. Although we will introduce you, next Monday, into a pagan temple, in the very hour of sacrifice, we beg that our actions and our sayings be not considered, in any way, idolatrous. We do not mean to pray to pagan gods, And if we swear in Greek, the harm is less.” 380 Stanley Buckmaster, Member of the Advisory Board on Stage Plays, Letter to the Lord Chamberlain, Charles Spencer (23 November 1910). Lord Chamberlain’s Plays Correspondence File: Oedipus Rex 114 drama was widely studied in English public schools, and had moreover been praised by

Matthew Arnold as having shown “human nature developed in a number of directions, politically, socially, religiously, morally developed—in its completest and most harmonious development”, the centrality of incest in the Oedipus had deterred the Lord

Chamberlain from licensing any stage production.381 For not only would its performance encourage public immorality, it was argued that it would incite further licentiousness on the part of England’s poets. As one advisor to the Lord Chamberlain remarked, the staging of Sophocles would provoke “a great number of plays…written & submitted to the censor appealing to a vitiated public taste solely in the cause of indecency.”382

For Yeats, the English ban on the Oedipus Rex was further proof that puritanical fervor was now strangling intellectual freedom throughout the British Isles. But the poet was eager for a challenge. He was eager to prove that Ireland’s national theatre was

1910/814, British Library Archive. See Appendix I of this dissertation for a transcription of this letter, p. 263. As Fiona Macintosh has observed, the dispute over the censorship of the Oedipus Rex was closely linked to the “wider public debate concerning consanguineous sexual relations, which culminated in the passing of The Punishment of Incest Act (1908). Prior to 1908––with the exception of the interregnum years, and in marked contrast to Scotland where incest had been a crime since 1567––incest in England and Wales had been dealt with by the ecclesiastical courts, despite numerous attempts to make it a criminal offence. When a Joint Select Committee of the House of Lords and the House of Commons was set up to investigate the state of theatre censorship in Britain, the anxieties concerning incest and the opposition to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office came together in the discussions of Sophocles’ proscribed play.” Fiona Macintosh, “An Oedipus for our Times? Yeats’s Version of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus”. Performance, Iconography, Reception: Studies in Honour of Oliver Taplin. Martin Revermann and Peter Wilson, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) 524–47: 529. 381 The “unrivalled adequacy” of Sophocles had “shed over [his] poetry the charm of that noble serenity which always accompanies true insight.” He was, as Arnold claimed in his sonnet, “To a Friend” (1848), the one “Singer of sweet Colonus” who “saw life steadily, and saw it whole”. Matthew Arnold, “On the Modern Element in Literature” (1857). The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold. Volume I: On the Classical Tradition. R. H. Super, ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961) 18–37: 28. 382 Sir John Hare, Member of the Advisory Board on Stage Plays, Letter to the Lord Chamberlain, Charles Spencer (21 November 1910). Lord Chamberlain’s Plays Correspondence File: Oedipus Rex 1910/814, British Library Archive. Previously cited in Fiona Macintosh, “Tragedy in performance: nineteenth- and twentieth-century productions”. The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. P. E. Easterling, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 284–323. See Appendix I of this dissertation for a transcription of this letter by John Hare, p. 261. 115 above the bourgeois moralism of the English literary establishment. Therefore Yeats set his mind on producing the Oedipus Rex in Dublin, believing that its performance could bring the Irish national theatre closer to that liberated vision of dramatic art which had been best articulated in ancient Greece—a civilization whose greatest theatrical achievement was now officially barred by English authority. If effectively translated, he argued, the production of the Oedipus Rex could permanently distinguish the national literary culture of Ireland from that of England. Therefore on returning from America later that year, he immediately began a campaign to stage the Oedipus Rex in Ireland.

Lecturing before an audience at Clifford’s Inn in London that May, he extolled

“the perfection of Greek drama”—a perfection which, he argued, was realized by the skilful balancing of both “the Dionysic and the Apollonic moods of poetry”.383 Exploiting the distinction that Nietzsche had drawn in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Yeats claimed that these antithetical moods were, in fact, still present and operative in the literature of ancient Ireland. Gaelic folk poetry, he argued, corresponded to the Dionysian mood of

“the Greek chorus”: its “extravagant cry” was, he claimed, “the utterance of the greatest emotions possible, the heartfelt cry of an ancient people’s soul.”384 Ireland’s heroic poetry likewise reflected the Apollonian mood—possessing what Yeats called “the sense of form, the dramatic or epic portion of the work of art, the heroic discipline” that had been clearly articulated in the highest forms of Attic tragedy.385 Neither mood of Greek

383 As noted in the account of P. G. W. “Daily Chronicle Office, Wednesday Morning”, Daily Chronicle (13 May 1903) 7. Previously cited in Ronald Schuchard, The Last Minstrels, 128. 384 Ibid. 385 Although The Birth of Tragedy did not appear in a full English translation until 1909, lectures such as these are evidence of Yeats’ early acquaintance with Nietzsche’s work. The poet first encountered Nietzsche’s thought by reading Thomas Common’s 1901 translation of selected writings, entitled Nietzsche as Critic, Philosopher, Poet and Prophet (London: Grant Richards, 1901). Common, however, 116 drama, Yeats asserted, reflected the bourgeois moralism present in contemporary English theatre; they possessed “no relation to morality as generally understood or to service to the State and mankind.” Because these moods were still living elements in the Irish imagination, Yeats believed that Ireland possessed the correct imaginative and intellectual disposition to stage the Oedipus Rex. Just as “the equally Dionysian and

Apollonian art-work of Attic tragedy” had generated literary achievement in ancient

Greece, these moods could be effectually used to create in the national theatre what one reporter called “the elemental staging of the primitive, unelaborate stage of Aeschylus and Shakespeare.”386

But to refashion the “elemental staging of the primitive” in Ireland, Yeats knew he would need a specific kind of translation—an Oedipus Rex unburdened by the complicated syntax that plagued earlier Victorian versions, which, he later argued, often

387 obscured the straightforward force of ancient Greek poetry with a “Latin mist.” “I think”, he later wrote,

those great scholars of the last century who translated Sophocles into an English full of Latinised constructions and Latinised habits of thought,

translated little from The Birth of Tragedy in his selection—a mere 8 pages of text. But he did briefly summarize the 1872 work in his introduction, dismissively claiming that “the world” in The Birth of Tragedy “is looked upon as justifiable only as an aesthetic phenomenon, and the Greeks are supposed to have required the Apollonian and Dionysian illusions, from which tragedy originated, in order to make the terrible reality of life endurable.” On the extensive annotations Yeats made in his copy of Common’s selection, see Erich Heller, “Yeats and Nietzsche: Reflections on Aestheticism and a Poet’s Marginal Notes”. The Importance of Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) 127–40: 130. On the impact of Nietzsche’s in Yeats’ vision of the modern Irish theatre, see P. Th. M. G. Liebregts, “Friedrich Nietzsche: The Philosopher as Hinge”. Centaurs in the Twilight: W. B. Yeats’s Use of the Classical Tradition (Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 1993) 116–26. 386 Weekly Freeman (23 May 1903) 9. 387 W. B. Yeats, “Plain Man’s Oedipus”. The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume X: Later Articles and Reviews. Colton Johnson, ed. (New York: Scribner Press, 2000) 244–5. Originally published in the New York Times (15 January 1933) X1. 117

were all wrong—and that the schoolmasters are wrong who make us approach Greek through Latin. Nobody ever trembled on a dark road because he was afraid of meeting the nymphs and satyrs of Latin literature, but men have trembled on dark roads in Ireland and in Greece.388

The dulling effect of such Victorian English produced, according to Yeats, an artificial dramatic language—a language so “complicated in its syntax for the stage” that it had sapped the Oedipus Rex of its tragic simplicity. Because of the ineffective English conveyed by scholars, the play’s moral complexity had been submerged, becoming something akin to a contemporary drama about English manners.

From the outset, Yeats’ contempt for previous translations of Sophocles began as part of a polemic against the English theatre—a theatre, he believed, which had willingly tolerated official censorship and capitulated to the demand for clean middle-class enjoyment. As a scholar has recently noted, “Yeats conceived of translation not just as a literary exercise, but as a form of political action as well; and the extraordinarily drawn- out process that finally issued in his 1928 version of King Oedipus began, fittingly enough, with an expressly and perhaps even crudely political desire to stage the play”.389

When attempting his own version of the Oedipus, Yeats was intent on shunning those

Victorian techniques of translation that had diminished the poetic stature of the original

Greek. In adapting Sophocles, English scholars had, he thought, willingly expurgated the moral outrage of the tragedy to appease contemporary notions of decency. Sophoclean

388 W. B. Yeats, “Oedipus the King” (8 September 1931). The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume X: Later Articles and Reviews. Colton Johnson, ed. (New York: Scribner Press, 2000) 219–23: 221–2. This essay was originally read by Yeats on September 8, 1931 as an introduction to the BBC Belfast production of Oedipus the King, first performed on the radio that evening. 389 Steven G. Yao, “‘Uplift Our State’: Yeats, Oedipus, and the Translation of a National Dramatic Form”. Translation and the Languages of Modernism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) 117–52: 126. 118 poetry had been constrained and narrowed by the popular belief that the Greek classics, by necessity, provided “moral uplift” for the common man.

Yeats was, however, bent on disturbing contemporary feelings of social and moral satisfaction. To accomplish this, the poet insisted that his Oedipus would be beautiful and direct, rendered “from the point of view of speech” where the “words should sound natural and fall in their natural order, [so] that every sentence should be a spoken, not a written, sentence.”390 In so doing, Yeats believed that his version of the tragedy could expose through its style the artificial character of dramatic poetry in England. But to create an idiom which could convey the direct force he thought alive in Sophoclean

Greek would prove difficult. From his days as a schoolboy, Yeats had been a notably poor student of ancient Greek.391 His headmaster from the Erasmus Smith School in

Dublin reported in 1883 that: “This boy’s taking up French and German simultaneously with Latin and Greek is ruinous to him.”392 As an adult, Yeats gained little more fluency in either Greek or Latin. He remained, as he later wrote, merely a man who gazed “in useless longing at books that have been, through the poor mechanism of translation, the

390 W. B. Yeats, “To Lady Gregory” (6 January 1912). The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Intelex Past Masters, Entry no. 1794. Yeats, “Plain Man’s Oedipus”, 244. 391 “His father [John Butler Yeats] wanted Yeats to carry on the family tradition of attending Trinity College, Dublin, as three generations of Yeatses before him had; the poet refers to his grandfather, the Co. Down rector, William Butler Yeats (1806–62), as a ‘scholar’ (A 53) and his great-grandfather, John Yeats (1774–1846), the rector of Drumcliffe, won the Bishop Berkeley medal for Greek in Trinity. But Yeats refused to go to Trinity because he felt he would fail the entrance examination: ‘neither my Classics nor my mathematics were good enough for any examination’ (A 79–80). This statement shows clearly that on leaving the High School Yeats had some knowledge of Latin and Greek, but that it was inadequate.” Brian Arkins, Builders of My Soul: Greek and Roman Themes in Yeats (Savage, Maryland: Barnes and Noble Books, 1990) 3–4. 392 As quoted by William M. Murphy in Prodigal Father: The Life of John Butler Yeats (1839–1922) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978) 133. 119 builders of my soul”.393 Consequently, if he were to strip the Oedipus Rex of that “half

Latin, half Victorian dignity” thrust upon it by nineteenth-century translators, Yeats had to seek other means of forging a literary idiom commensurate with the strength and candor present in Sophocles’ Greek.

He first sought the help of various scholars and amateur Hellenists. In January

1905, he wrote the scholar and critic, Gilbert Murray, asking: “Will you translate Edipus

Rex for us? We can offer you nothing for it but a place in heaven, but if you do, it will be great event…There is no censor here to forbid it as it has been forbidden in England. It is much better worth writing for us than for Granville Barker.”394 Murray’s recent translation of Euripides’ Hippolytus had been produced by Granville Barker for the

English theatre, triggering a minor revival of Attic drama in London during the spring of

1904.395 The success of Euripides in London, however, exemplified to Yeats, not the liberated revival of the Hellenic drama which he envisioned for modern Ireland, but rather only the lack of daring he had come to associate with contemporary English theatre. Euripides, he told Murray, could not possibly alienate the audience from popular expectations of dramatic art, nor would the staging of Euripides disturb the common belief in the necessity of moral uplift. Thus Yeats pleaded with Murray to “not ask us to

393 As noted in the preface, Yeats blamed his lack of a classical education on his father who, he wrote, “should have taken me away from school. He would have taught me nothing but Greek and Latin, and I would now be a properly educated man, and would not have to look in useless longing at books that have been, through the poor mechanism of translation, the builders of my soul, nor face authority with the timidity born of evasion and excuse.” W. B. Yeats, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume III: Autobiographies. William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald, eds. (New York: Scribner Press, 1999) 76. 394 W. B. Yeats, “To Gilbert Murray, 24 January [1905]”. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Volume IV: 1905–1907. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005) 22–24: 22–23. 395 On the success of this “watershed in British theatre” and its broad impact on modern theatrical convention, see Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh, “The Shavian Euripides and the Euripidean Shaw: Greek Tragedy and the New Drama”. Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) 488–520: 495–6. 120 play Euripides instead, for Euripides is rapidly becoming a popular English dramatist, and it is upon Sophocles that we have set our imaginations.”396 The staging of

Sophoclean tragedy would, Yeats assured him, make a greater mark on the consciousness of the Irish people than the Hippolytus had managed to exert on the English imagination.

“Nothing has any effect in England,” he told Murray, “but here one never knows when one may affect the mind of a whole generation. The country is in its first plastic state, and takes the mark of every strong finger.”397 Rather than fixate on the incest and moral scandal of the Oedipus, Irish audiences would, he thought, appreciate the moral complexity and beauty of Sophoclean poetry. Its production would help further “persuade

Ireland, which does not understand the game, that she is very liberal, abhors censors delights in the freedom of the arts, is prepared for anything. When we have performed

Edipus the King, and everybody is proud of having done something which is forbidden in

England, even the newspapers will give [up] pretending to be timid.”398

Yeats, however, profoundly underestimated how Murray’s own taste for the classics had been shaped by those popular Victorian expectations of drama which he had been bold in dismissing. Sternly, Murray responded only a few days later:

O Man, I will not translate the Oedipus Rex for the Irish Theatre, because it is a play with nothing Irish about it: no religion, not one beautiful action, hardly a stroke of poetry. Even the good things that have to be done in order to make the plot work are through mere loss of temper. The spiritual tragedy is never faced or understood: all the stress is laid on the mere external uncleanness. Sophocles no doubt did many bad things in his life: I

396 Yeats, “To Gilbert Murray, 24 January [1905]”, 23. 397 Ibid. 398 Ibid. 121

would not try to shield him from just blame.399

Without the scholar’s help, Yeats nonetheless remained hopeful of finally producing the

Oedipus for the next seven years. He next sought a translation from Oliver St. John

Gogarty and then from William Magee (more commonly known under the pseudonym,

John Eglinton). But before either man could complete his version, Yeats rejected their methods of translation outright, complaining that both had refused to dispense with stylistic conventions he had found so objectionable in previous Victorian translations of the tragedy. Gogarty recalled Yeats protesting in particular against the deliberate use of archaisms in his version. Yeats, he told his friend George Bell, has “condemned my translations not so much for the metre but for the introduction of thou & thee and the want of locality—this specially in the chorus.” To Yeats, Gogarty had learned: “[a]n archaism was only admissible when one had discovered it for oneself: there was no defence for the continuance of mere metrical conventions: ‘Hast’, ‘shalt’, ‘thou’, ‘thee’,

‘wert’, ‘art’ etc. They were part of a language highly artificial and conscious.”400 On similar grounds, Yeats refused the translation of Magee, claiming that the drafts of his

399 Gilbert Murray, Letter to W. B. Yeats (27 January 1905). Letters to W. B. Yeats. Richard Finneran, George Mills Harper, and William M. Murphy, eds. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977) Vol. 1: 145–6. Murray elaborated on the lukewarm feelings he had towards Sophocles in the 1897 edition of his History of Ancient Greek Literature. When compared with Aeschylus and Euripides, Sophocles seemed to the scholar, as one writer has recently noted, “too ‘pious’ and conventional-minded, too tightly bound by the primitive old heroic stories, suffering from a ‘lack of speculative freedom’ and ‘a certain bluntness of moral imagination’, and ‘limited’ in his intellectual focus: thus incapable of ‘thinking through’ the problems presented by the sagas or of working out new and challenging solutions to them (Murray 1897, 239–40)”. Mark Griffith, “Gilbert Murray on Greek Literature: The Great/Greek Man’s Burden”. Gilbert Murray Reassessed. Christopher Stray, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) 51–80: 62. 400 Oliver St. John Gogarty, Letter to G. K. A. Bell (7 April 1905). Many Lines to Thee – Letters of to G. K. A. Bell. James F. Carens, ed. (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1971) 86–98: 88. 122 version exhibited an “elaborate style [that] may not prove vocal” on the Abbey stage.401

In each instance, Yeats rejected the work of translation on both stylistic and political grounds. He first refused Murray’s idea of producing Euripides, for with the recent revival of his drama in London, a production in Dublin, he feared, would appear imitative and derivative of popular English tastes—tastes that, he thought, the work of

Euripides had done little to disrupt. Yeats’ reason for rejecting the translations of Gogarty and of Magee was more expressly stylistic, but such rationale was no less political. The adherence of Gogarty and Magee to the Wardour-Street conventions of Victorian translation reflected the English expurgation of the Greek classics which, he believed, had unduly modified Sophocles, making his work socially acceptable to the tastes of

England’s theatre-going middle class.402

Even though he had failed to find a suitable translator, the prospect of flouting

England’s censor remained irresistible to him. In August 1909 amid a crisis stirred up by

George Bernard Shaw’s play, The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnett (1909), Yeats once again reaffirmed his desire to produce the Oedipus Rex on Irish soil. When the Under-

Secretary of Dublin Castle threatened to abolish the patent of the Abbey Theatre for its planned staging of Shaw’s play, Yeats responded with his own threat. He insisted that not only would he proceed with the production of Posnett, his theatre would also perform the

Oedipus Rex that year. The staging of Sophocles would illustrate, he declared, the true liberal-mindedness of Ireland—the bold ingenuity of its national theatre: “We will put

401 W. B. Yeats, “To John Millington Synge, 3 October [1906]”. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Volume IV: 1905–1907. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005) 508– 10: 509. 402 On the meaning and origin of the term, “Wardour-Street English”, see footnote #292 in the second chapter of this dissertation, as well as Lawrence Venuti, “Nation”. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. Second edition (New York: Routledge, 2008) 83–124: 117–18. 123

Oedipus the King (also censored in England) on…& allow them to take away our Patent.

We consider ourselves the guardians of the liberty of the Irish National Theatre of the future, of the political freedom for one thing… bound to resist the first bringing of the decisions of the English Censor into Ireland.”403 In this crisis Yeats used the Greek classics to defy the pressure exerted by the Under-Secretary, for he believed that the attention that would come from suppressing a “performance of the greatest masterpiece of Greek drama” would be too much for the Castle to risk.404

The threat of staging Sophocles did indeed weaken the demands of the government in Dublin: Shaw’s play was produced that summer. But no Irish Oedipus Rex appeared on the Abbey stage in 1909. Despite the poet’s assertions to the contrary, the theatre was in fact entirely unprepared to perform Sophocles. Yeats had failed to find a suitable translator for the original Greek text, and by late 1911, he had altogether abandoned the idea of having a scholar and classicist render a complete translation of the tragedy. Instead, with help from the English theatre director, W. N. Monck, Yeats himself set out to adapt Richard Jebb’s 1883 edition of the play entitled Oedipus Tyrannus.405 He did so, however, with little understanding of ancient Greek, possessing what could, at best, be characterized as only a half-read knowledge of the language. When comparing

Jebb’s version with difficult passages in the Greek original, Yeats therefore sought advice

403 W. B. Yeats, “To John Quinn” (15 August 1909). The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Intelex Past Masters, Entry no. 1197. 404 W. B. Yeats, “To A.E.F. Horniman” (15 August 1909). The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Intelex Past Masters, Entry no. 1199. 405 On the origin and style of Jebb’s version, see Christopher Stray, “Jebb’s Sophocles: An Edition and Its Maker”. Classical Books, Scholarship and Publishing in Britain Since 1800 (London: Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, 2007) 75–96. 124 from both the Rev. Rex Rynd, preceptor of Norwich Cathedral, and a young Greek scholar named Charles Power.406

But even with this help, Yeats still struggled. Yet he was resolved, nevertheless, to purge the Oedipus Tyrannus of Jebb’s scholarly literalism and Latinate idiom, for like many translators in the late nineteenth century, Jebb too, Yeats believed, had been too willing to obscure the moral outrage of the Oedipus in the murk of a complicated syntax and Wardour Street diction. Jebb had reason to do so, for he believed, as he once wrote, that “in the province of religion and morals Hellenism is not sufficient. Greek polytheism, even as ennobled by the great poets, was incapable of generating religious conceptions which could satisfy the mind and heart, or of furnishing an adequate rule for the conduct of life.”407 Aware of the moral problems presented by the myth of Oedipus,

Jebb tempered their depiction in order “to cope”, as Christopher Stray has argued, “with the changing temporal contexts of the eternal value of Greece, and at the same time to legitimate his own preferences.”408 It was, moreover, in Jebb’s interest to do so, for if his translation were, in fact, eventually adapted for public performance, it would have to pass before the Lord Chamberlain, whose commission was, in part, to judge whether particular translations lessened or exacerbated those “baser elements of paganism” that might

406 Macintosh, “An Oedipus for our Times? Yeats’s Version of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus”, 530. 407 Richard Jebb, “The Influence of the Greek Mind on Modern Life”. Essays and Addresses (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1907) 560–80: 569. As Christopher Stray notes, Jebb’s view of Hellenism reflected that of Matthew Arnold. Both critics insisted that in modern England “a balance had to be found between Hebraism and Hellenism, the power of moral duty as evidenced in Evangelical religion, and of intellectual clarity exemplified by the ancient Greeks. By the 1880s, the waning of Evangelicalism and the general attenuation of religious faith both reduced the challenging force of Hebraism and focused attention on Greece.” Christopher Stray, “Science and Art: Jebb and the Modulated Assertion of Classical Value”. Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities, and Society in England, 1830–1960 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) 218–20: 218. 408 Ibid., 219. 125 offend the English Christian.409 In cases where licence for the Oedipus Rex was sought, the Lord Chamberlain strove to establish whether the dramatic action was conveyed “in such a manner as not in any way to involve immoral teaching”.410 When a translation composed by Gilbert Murray was examined in 1910, it was approved, but largely because that his “translation modifies rather than accentuates anything in the language which would cause offence.”411 Thus the pressure to diminish the so-called “baser elements” of

Greek tragedy was formidable in England. And Jebb, fearing that these elements might lead some to “confound the accidents with the essence” of ancient Greek literature, felt compelled to ward off any interpretation which might uncover pagan immorality in aspects of the Oedipal myth. “The best Greek work in every kind”, he claimed, “is essentially pure…the accidents have passed away; the essence is imperishable.”412

But to Yeats, it was Jebb who mistook Sophocles for the mere accidents of contemporary Victorian culture. In seeking his own version, Yeats instead hoped to achieve an Irish Oedipus unadulterated by nineteenth-century moralism and the

‘Wardour-Street’ conventions of classical translation, which had deliberately withheld, he believed, both the moral disturbance and the unsettling beauty of Sophoclean tragedy.413

409 Jebb, “The Influence of the Greek Mind on Modern Life”. Essays and Addresses, 569. 410 Sir John Hare, Letter to the Lord Chamberlain, Charles Spencer (21 November 1910). 411 Stanley Buckmaster, Letter to the Lord Chamberlain, Charles Spencer (23 November 1910). One further member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Advisory Board commented that Murray’s manner of conveying the original Greek had toned down the depiction of that “most horrible evil”—incest. “In one or two places he softens the language a little to save susceptibilities.” Walter Raleigh, Member of the Advisory Board on Stage Plays, Letter to the Lord Chamberlain, Charles Spencer (22 November 1910). Lord Chamberlain’s Plays Correspondence File: Oedipus Rex 1910/814, British Library Archive. See Appendix I of this dissertation for a transcription of this letter, p. 262. 412 Jebb, “The Influence of the Greek Mind on Modern Life”, Essays and Addresses, 569. 413 Jebb was attracted to Sophocles largely because he believed that unlike Aeschylus and Euripides, Sophocles’ work had effectively balanced the aesthetic with the moral. Sophoclean tragedy bore witness to what he called “the unity and supremacy of an unwritten but eternal law of purity”, expressing “the 126

With no qualms about offending the public, Yeats was intent on altering Jebb’s translation; he planned to dispel the widespread belief that Sophoclean tragedy—and ancient Greek literature generally—was valuable only insomuch as it reflected what Jebb called the “supremacy of an unwritten but eternal law of purity”—the law through which

Sophocles, in particular, had explored “the higher moral and mental side of the age of

Pericles”.414 For Yeats, the moral complexity and beauty presented by the Oedipus Rex could not be domesticated by the popular values of the English middle class or resolved so easily into the ethical categories of late Victorian Christianity.

Initially, Yeats’ desire to produce an Irish Oedipus was motivated by his belief in the need for a new national literature in Ireland. He was convinced that, if the script were correctly translated, a staging of Sophoclean tragedy in Dublin would show the freedom of the Irish theatre, exposing the small-minded scruples of the contemporary English drama—drama whose literary conventions were chained, he thought, to commercial interest and the sentimental tastes of the middle class. But as the years passed on, and

Yeats encountered one obstacle after another obstructing the staging of the Oedipus Rex in Ireland, the patriotism that motivated his interest in Sophocles became more muted.

Greek sense of beauty in its highest purity.” “The plays of Sophocles have this special interest,” he claimed, “that they interpret, more spiritually than anything else that we have, the higher moral and mental side of the age of Pericles; they have its noble tone of conciliation between sacred tradition and a progressive culture, between authority and reason, between the letter and spirit of religion.” Richard Jebb, Greek Literature (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1889) 88. See also Stray, Classics Transformed, 218–20. 414 Jebb’s belief that Sophocles, above all other Greek poets, possessed a moral purity compatible with the ethical principles of Victorian Christianity was not unusual. As Turner argues, “Sophocles attracted increasing attention as Christian writers looked for evidence of true faith and morals in the Greek dramatists. This viewpoint achieved its most fulsome in Dean E. H. Plumptre’s evaluation of Sophocles. ‘Nowhere, even in the ethics of Christian writers, are there nobler assertions of a morality divine, universal, unchangeable, of laws whose dwelling is on high…[which] written on the hearts of all men, are of prior obligation to all conventional arrangements of society, or the maxims of political expediency.’” Turner, 102. 127

However, though he initially failed, his labor in anglicizing Sophoclean Greek—as evidenced in the many partial drafts of his translation composed in 1912—helped provoke the drastic reforming of style which became central to the emergence of modernism across the British Isles. The syntactic and tonal demands Yeats faced when trying to convey the foreign accent of ancient Greek drove, in part, what James

Longenbach has called the poet’s “general movement away from dreamy languorousness towards concrete vigorousness” of his late work.415 Although Yeats possessed only a half-read knowledge of Greek, his partial understanding of the ancient tongue was productive. When attempting his own Oedipus, Yeats not only exploited the contempt he felt for the Victorian reception of Sophocles—its misplaced belief in the his purity and

‘moral uplift’—but he also used the Greek poet to generate in his own poetry a

“compression and rhythmical invention [that became] so characteristic of Modernist verse”.416 These elements of composition would prove indispensible in creating the distinctive dramatic style, his “passionate syntax for passionate subject matter”, which

Yeats soon saw as central both to his experimental plays and to his later lyric poetry.417

______

In a review printed in Poetry magazine in May 1914, Ezra Pound declared that a dramatic shift in literary style was beginning to overcome modern poetry. Pound had perceived this most notably in Yeats’ recent collection of verse, entitled Responsibilities

415 James Longenbach, “Modern Poetry”. Yeats in Context. David Holdeman and Ben Levitas, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) 320–9: 322. 416 Yao, “‘Uplift Our State’: Yeats, Oedipus, and the Translation of a National Dramatic Form”, 135. 417 W. B. Yeats, “A General Introduction for my Work” (1937). The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume V: Later Essays. William H. O’Donnell, ed. (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1994) 204– 16: 212–13. 128

(1914), where, Pound argued, “a manifestly new note” was being communicated.418

Yeats had reformed the style of his early poetry published during the Celtic Twilight, and now he brought “a new music upon the harp”, a music which, to Pound, had made “his work...gaunter, seeking a greater hardness of outline”.419 There had been no need, he argued, for Yeats to recast his style in this fashion—“to repair each morning of his life to the Piazza dei Signori to turn a new sort of somersault”.420 The early poems of the Irish poet had already made him “assuredly an immortal”, but his most recent verse signaled a new and different way forward for modern poetry.421 Yeats was now writing with greater self-possession, having become, Pound believed, an “author certainly at prise with things as they are and no longer romantically Celtic”.422 His new style had driven out the verbal ornamentation and syntactic inversion that had been hallmarks of Yeats’ early “neo- romantic” poetry.423 His new poems had been composed with what Pound called a “prose directness” and “the quality of hard light” that was “direct enough in all conscience, and free of the ‘glamour’.”424 “I’ve not word against the glamour as it appears in Yeats’ early poems,” Pound admitted, “but we have had so many other pseudo-glamours and

418 Ezra Pound, “The Later Yeats”. Poetry (May 1914) Vol. 4, No. 2, 64–9: 65, later reprinted as “The Later Yeats” in The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (New York, New Directions, 1935) 378–81. 419 Pound, “The Later Yeats”. Poetry (May 1914), 65, 66. 420 Ibid., 65. 421 Ibid. 422 Ibid., 68. 423 The term, “neo-romantic”, was one of the first epithets Yeats used to describe his earliest poetry. At only 22 years old, he expressed enthusiasm to Katherine Tynan over the fact that “we shall have a school of Irish poetry — founded on Irish myth and History — a neo-remantic [sic] movement.” W. B. Yeats, Letter to Katherine Tynan, 27 [April 1887]. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Volume I: 1865–1895. John Kelly and Eric Domville, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986) 10–12: 10–11. 424 Pound, “The Later Yeats”, 66, 67. 129 glamourlets and mists and fogs since the nineties that one is about ready for hard light.”425

Ezra Pound was among the first critics to realize the full extent of the stylistic transformation taking place in Yeats’ poetry, and he was the first to fully recognize how vital the reception of ancient Greek literature had been to Yeats’ transition from what he called the dolce stile to the stile grande.426 In November 1910, Pound wrote to his friend,

Margaret Craven, in Paris, and asserted that it had been the vision of ancient Greece articulated in Yeats’ recent poem, “No Second Troy”, which had first intimated the coming transformation in modern poetry. Citing the poem in its entirety, Pound declared that Yeats was setting out in it “the spirit of the new things as I saw them in London. The note of personal defeat which one finds in [Yeats’] earlier work has gone out of it.”427

Only two years later, Pound likewise praised the “laconic speech of the Imagistes” in similar terms.428 In a letter to Harriet Monroe, he traced the emergence of “objective” and

“direct” verse of the Imagists to an Hellenic source. As in his praise for “No Second

Troy”, Pound insisted that the strength of Imagist writing lay in the fact that it possessed

“no slither…no excessive use of adjectives, no metaphors that won’t permit examination.

425 Ibid., 67. See also Pound’s phrase “hard Sophoclean light” composed in 1913 and published in “Xenia” in Poetry (November 1913) Vol. 3, No. 2, 58–60: 60. 426 Ezra Pound, “23: To Margaret Craven” (27 November 1910). Ezra Pound and Margaret Cravens: A Tragic friendship, 1910–1912. Omar Pound and Robert Spoo, eds. (Duke University Press, 1988) 59–62: 61. 427 Ibid. 428 James Longenbach, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) 81–2. On the relationship Yeats to Imagism and its early adherents, see Ronald Schuchard, “‘As Regarding Rhythm”: Minstrels and Imagists”. The Last Minstrels, Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) 256–83. 130

It’s straight talk,” he declared, “straight as the Greek!”429

Well before meeting Pound in May 1909, Yeats had already begun to reform his early style.430 Since the turn of the twentieth century, he had been striving with great difficulty to articulate in his verse that “hard light” Pound would soon find so worthy of praise. And in his early attempts to move his poetry closer towards the syntax and idiomatic expressions of common speech, Yeats was motivated by the example of ancient

Greeks, whose literature had conveyed, he thought, both candor and a spoken beauty.

Elaborating on this view of the Greeks, Yeats told an Irish reporter in October 1902 that,

‘The greatest of all the arts I hold to be the art of speech; and its secret has been lost for centuries. Greeks understood it; and we are trying to get back to the regulated declamation of the Greeks, when the Greek orator was accompanied by a little boy who blew on a pitch pipe to give him the note. In modern music the words are so overlaid by sound that their beauty is lost. We want to make the words live, and restore the art of impassioned speech.’431

George Moore, so often a bitter opponent of Yeat’s work, noted the poet’s enthusiasm for ancient Greek literature at this time. Moore observed specifically how in 1904 Yeats had grown fond of castigating “the softness, the weakness, the effeminacy of modern literature” while commending the “things” expressed in the literature of the world’s

429 Ezra Pound, “7: To Harriet Monroe” (October 1912). The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941. D. D. Paige, ed. (New York, New Directions, 1971) 11. 430 James Longenbach, Stone Cottage, xii. As Thomas Parkinson has observed, the transformation of Yeats’ style did not “occur at once and thoroughly but emerged gradually and at first incompletely through the 1903 and 1910 volumes of verse.” The poet’s experience with the Abbey Theatre during this time taught him, Parkinson argues, to abjure “rhythm not suited to the needs of the speaking voice; he admitted a diction more true to the to the colloquial idiom.” By 1910, the “quality of personal speech” that Pound found so compelling in the Hellenized ‘straight talk’ of “No Second Troy” was “established firmly as the characteristic style of Yeats’ later poetry.” Thomas Parkinson, “The Dramatic Lyric: 1903–1921”. W. B. Yeats, Self-Critic: A Study of His Early Verse. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951) 79–122: 90, 85, 101. 431 “Speaking to Musical Notes – Interview with Miss Florence Farr”. Freeman’s Journal (31 October 1902) 4. Previously cited in Schuchard, The Last Minstrels, 105. 131 ancient civilizations. “Yeats said”, he wrote,

that the ancient writer wrote about things, and that the softness, the weakness, the effeminacy of modern literature could be attributed to ideas. ‘There are no ideas in ancient literature, only things,’ and in support of this theory, reference was made to the sagas, to the Iliad, to the Odyssey…‘It is through the dialect,’ he continued, ‘that one escapes from abstract words, back to the sensation inspired directly by the thing itself.’432

As Yeats reconsidered the verse he composed during the Celtic Twilight, he began to believe its idiom had been dominated by abstract ideas and an “exageration of sentiment

& sentimental beauty which I have come to think unmanly”.433 “The close of the last century”, he told his friend, George Russell, “was full of a strange desire to get out of form to get to some kind of disembodied beauty”.434 His early poems failed because they offered no resistance to the sentimental “form of decadence” popular in late Victorian

England. So “full of false images of the spirit & the body”, his poems did not come to possess what he called that “energy of the will out of which epic and dramatic poetry comes”.435

However, by the turn of the twentieth century, Yeats sensed that a “contrary impulse has come.”436 The new age demanded a style of poetry antithetical to that which had come before, an innovative style compelled by the urge to express, not disembodied forms and ideas, but rather concrete things—as in the literature of the ancient world.

432 George Moore, Hail and Farewell (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1911) Vol. 1, 362. 433 W. B. Yeats, “To George Russell (AE), [April 1904]”. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Volume III: 1901–1904. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) 576–8: 577. 434 W. B. Yeats, “To George Russell (AE), 14 May 1903”. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Volume III: 1901–1904. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) 369– 70: 369. 435 Yeats, “To George Russell (AE), [April 1904]”, 577. 436 Yeats, “To George Russell (AE), 14 May 1903”, 369. 132

Crudely developing this claim, Yeats grew fond of employing the central distinction drawn by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy. Modern poetic style, Yeats insisted, was now overcome by the “impulse to create form, to carry the realisation of beauty as far as possible. The Greeks said that the Dionysisic enthusiasm preceeded [sic] the Apollonic and that the Dionysisic was sad and desirious, but that the Apollonic was joyful and self sufficient.”437 The Dionysian enthusiasm of the Celtic Twilight had faded, giving way to a greater need for formal structure and Apollonian balance, elements of composition which had been previously perfected, Yeats thought, by the poets of Greek antiquity. And through his own protracted struggle to translate Sophoclean tragedy, Yeats came to realize that he too could escape “from [the] abstract words” of late nineteenth- century verse, and once again rekindle in modern poetry the ancient Greek and

Apollonian impulse to create form.438 In his efforts to adapt Jebb’s Oedipus Rex, Yeats was motivated by a belief that the achievement of Greek poetry lay in perfected speech.

In light of this view, he was driven to model his literary style on an honest and direct oral expression of “things as they are” in English—things immersed in the “straight talk” and

“hard light” which had once illuminated the literature of Hellenic civilization.439

Even though this stylistic transformation was not determined by Pound’s influence on Yeats’ thought, it was through their intensive collaboration that the Irish poet began to write out clear principles for the Apollonian impulse now at the heart of his literary work. During the years of their work together, in London and at Stone Cottage in

West Sussex (1911–1916), both agreed that if modern verse were to be revitalized, the

437 Ibid. 438 Moore, Hail and Farewell, Vol. 1, 362. 439 Pound, “The Later Yeats”, 68. 133 force of ancient Greek—“that mysterious lost language”—had to be rediscovered and articulated once again in English by poets of the new age. Pound made clear as much in

December 1912, when he declared that:

We feel here in London, I think, much as the people of Petrarch’s time must have felt about that mysterious lost language, the Greek that was just being restored to Europe after centuries of deprivation. That Greek was the lamp of our renaissance and its perfections have been the goal of our endeavour ever since.440

The “perfections” of Greek remained the ideal of their shared literary endeavors. For both poets, the reputed fidelity espoused by Victorian translators of the Greek classics had fallen miserably short. In the effort to reproduce Greek in English, the beauty of the original language had been lost in the Wardour Street writing of the scholar. Both Yeats and Pound were persuaded that if the “perfections” of ancient Greek were to be remade in

English, modern writers had to refuse the imitative literalism of the previous century.

They had to summon instead the linguistic strength of the native tongue in an idiom that would express the alien character of ancient Greek.

To achieve this effect, both Yeats and Pound believed a return to the spoken clarity of English prose was necessary in contemporary verse: “Poetry must be”, Pound argued, “as well written as prose”, having “no hindside-beforeness, no straddled adjectives (as ‘addled mosses dank’), no Tennysonianness of speech; nothing – nothing that you couldn’t in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say’”.441

Yeats too insisted during this period that only a return to dialect and “the most natural order possible” would drive modern verse away from the clichéd poeticisms of the recent

440 Ezra Pound, “Tagore’s Poems”. Poetry (December 1912) Vol. 1, No. 3, 92–4: 93. 441 Ezra Pound, “60: To Harriet Monroe” (January 1915). The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941. D. D. Paige, ed. (New York, New Directions, 1971) 48–50: 48–9. 134 past back to the verbal stresses of spoken language.442 In a diary entry, dated December

1912, Yeats elaborated on his belief, sketching out the “First Principles” that would further guide the restoration of spoken expression and Apollonian form both he and

Pound had envisioned for modern verse:

Not to find ones art by the analysis of language or amid the circumstances of dreams but to live a passionate life, & to express the emotions that find one thus in simple rhythmical language which never shows the obviously studied vocabulary. The words should be the swift natural words that suggest the circumstances out of which they rose of real life. One must be both dramatist and actor & yet be in great earnest.443

Just prior to formulating these principles of his new style, Yeats was again hard at work, adapting Richard Jebb’s prose translation of the Oedipus. “I am making my own version of Oedipus,” he told Lady Gregory earlier that year, “I take Jebb and turn him into simple speakable English dictating the result...The choruses I am putting into rough unrhymed verse. I am of course making it very simple”.444 By ridding Jebb’s version of its studied but unnatural literalism, Yeats hoped to pattern his rendition of Sophocles after a dialect dictated “from the point of view of speech”.445 In this way, the Oedipus Rex would be not only artistically modernized, he thought, but also the impassioned energy of the source language would be salvaged from the turgid archaisms of the scholar. Composed in a less

442 W. B. Yeats, “Letter to Gordon Bottomley” (8 January 1910). The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Intelex Past Masters, Entry no. 1263. 443 W. B. Yeats, “First Principles”, Maud Gonne Xmas Notebook, 1912 (NLI 30, 358). Yeats Archive, Box 88.2 at SUNY Stony Brook. 444 W. B. Yeats, “To Lady Gregory” (7 January 1912). The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Intelex Past Masters, Entry no. 1796. 445 W. B. Yeats, “To Lady Gregory” (6 January 1912). The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Intelex Past Masters, Entry no. 1794. 135 literal idiom, his version aimed to evoke the spoken pitch of ancient Greek, bringing poetic English back to “the sensation inspired directly by the thing itself”.446

Yeats’ efforts to seize the Sophoclean moment in the early twentieth-century literature had a broad stylistic impact on English poetry. As he worked at translating and adapting Jebb’s version of the Oedipus, Yeats was formulating the principles for the modernist transformation of English poetry which both he and Pound had already begun to instigate in their own lyric poetry. In this way, Yeats’ reception of Greek antiquity—in particular, his desire to distinguish modern Ireland’s understanding of Sophocles from how the Greek poet had been presented during the Victorian era in England—had a critical effect on the early development of modernist syntax and diction. His refashioning of Jebb helped steer, in part, the rise of that “manifestly new note” which Pound soon found admirably set forth in the collection, Responsibilities. Despite the fact that the Irish poet possessed only a meager knowledge of Greek, his struggle to find a Sophoclean pitch in contemporary English—to speak the native tongue as if with the tragedian’s ancient Greek “jawse”—became a pivotal force in the literary style which accompanied the rise of Anglo-American modernism.447

Although the literary idiom of Richard Jebb’s translation became a target of

Yeats’ scorn, the scholar had not intended to make his version appear as though it were built upon the pattern of spoken English. Jebb hoped, rather, that his language could provide a formal equivalence for the original Greek—a dignified crib that maintained, as

446 Moore, Hail and Farewell, Vol. 1, 362. 447 In using the phrase “Greek ‘jawse’”, I here paraphrase D. S. Carne-Ross’ analysis of a remark made in the epilogue to George Turberville’s 1567 translation of Ovid’s Heroides: “it is a worke of prayse” Turberville wrote of Ovid’s work, “to cause | A Romaine borne to speak with English jawse.” See D. S. Carne-Ross, “Jocasta’s Divine Head: English with a Foreign Accent”. Classics and Translation. Kenneth Haynes, ed. (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2010) 19–48. 136 he saw it, a suitably literary tone while mimicking the structure and literal sense of the original. Jebb knew it would be impossible to realize a pure English correspondence for all aspects of diction and syntax present in Sophoclean Greek. Because of this fact, he wrote an extensive commentary that accompanied his translation of the tragedy, and he believed that by using both, the English student could approximate the exact character of the original language with a great degree of fidelity.448 In the minds of certain of his contemporaries, Jebb succeeded. He “never fails”, one critic noted in 1884, “to take off in his version every minutest feature in the Greek structure, every nuance of meaning which the expression conveys to his practised ear.”449 Furthermore, for its time, his translation was regarded as literary even with its “manly…clear, racy, [and] idiomatic English” possessing what one writer called, “the stately march of the prose speeches in

Shakspeare’s tragedies.”450 But far from being ‘stately’, ‘racy’ or even ‘idiomatic’, Jebb’s

English was conspicuously cumbersome and consciously antique, having much more in common with the idiom used by the translators, Samuel Butcher and Andrew Lang.451

When translating the Odyssey, Butcher and Lang had professed their preference for “a

448 On the design of the 1883 edition and Jebb’s preference for an English rather than Latin commentary, see Stray, “Jebb’s Sophocles: An Edition and Its Maker”, 82–95. 449 Anonymous review of Sophocles, the Plays and Fragments. Part I. Oedipus Tyrannus, R. C. Jebb, ed. (Cambridge 1883) in the Journal of Education (1 May 1884) 180–1. 450 Ibid. Review of “Sophocles: the Plays and Fragments”. The Athenaeum, No. 3056 (22 May 1886) 674– 5: 674. At the time, this opinion was not unusual. As Stray has observed, Jebb’s Sophocles was considered “different from the cumbrous translationese which was then so common” in English versions of the classics. But this effect soon became obsolete, and by the twentieth century, Yeats numbered Jebb among those great but wrongheaded “scholars of the last century who translated Sophocles into an English full of Latinised constructions and Latinised habits of thought”. Stray, “Jebb’s Sophocles: An Edition and Its Maker”, 79. 451 Pat Easterling, “‘The Speaking Page’: Reading Sophocles with Jebb”. The Owl of Minerva: the Cambridge Praelections of 1906 – Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, Christopher Stray, ed. (2005) Volume 28, 25–46: 31. 137 somewhat antiquated prose” as “used by the Translators of the Bible”.452 With their objectives in mind, Jebb began the 1883 edition of his own Oedipus Tyrannus in this fashion, writing:

My children, latest born to Cadmus who was of old, why do you set before me thus with wreathed branches of suppliants, while the city reeks with incense, rings with prayers for health and cries of woe? I deemed it unmeet, my children, to hear these things at the mouth of others, and have come hither myself, I, Oedipus renowned by all.453

Yeats disliked Jebb’s approach to translation. He thought that by trying to strictly imitate the structure of Sophoclean grammar, Jebb had swamped the Oedipus in a mire of subordinating clauses. These clauses only muddied the candor which was vital, Yeats claimed, to the spoken power and original rhythm of the Greek. Jebb’s version had created, instead, dramatic verse that was fundamentally unspeakable. His words did not

“sound natural and fall in natural order”, and he had failed to convey Sophocles with an idiom best suited to expressing the free “impassioned speech” of ancient Greek tragedy.454 As Yeats envisioned them, the Greeks had no kind of censorship; they were, as he told the New York Times in early 1914, “free to express all”.455 But Jebb’s English was not free. It had withheld the bluntness of the Sophoclean original, complicating the

“straight talk” of the ancient tongue with an English that claimed fidelity to “the minutest niceties of Attic syntax and idiom”.456

Jebb’s failure exposed a central difficulty facing writers and modern scholars

452 S. H. Butcher and A. Lang, trans., The Odyssey of Homer, Done into English Prose. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1879) xi. 453 Sophocles, The Plays and Fragments, Part I: The Oedipus Tyrannus. Third Edition. R. C. Jebb, ed. and trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1893) 11. 454 Yeats, “Plain Man’s Oedipus”, 244. 455 “‘American Literature Still in Victorian Era’ – Yeats”. New York Times (22 February 1914), SM10. 456 Review in the Journal of Education (1 May 1884) 180. 138 intent on providing a literal imitation of Sophocles. As a reviewer of Yeats’ translation would later suggest, to achieve “a greater sense of the tragedy pure and unmitigated”, one could not simply “diversify” English “by adhering more closely” to the exact manner of the source language.457 In the ancient world, the rich “elaborated diction” and syntax of

Sophoclean Greek had not clouded or compromised the simple beauty of the play’s poetry. Even with its grammatical and syntactic intricacy, the verse of the Greek poet had produced a tragic simplicity with what Yeats called its “exposition of one idea”.458

However, if formal equivalence for Sophocles were sought in English, one risked squandering the spoken beauty of the original Greek. Yeats, having understood this, insisted that even though Sophocles’ “subject matter might be strange or difficult…no word [in English] might be strange or difficult, nor must I tire the ear by putting those words in some unnatural order.”459 And in the winter of 1912, he set out to unburden the

Oedipus Tyrannus of the unnatural order and unspeakable literalism laid upon it by Jebb.

By sacrificing literal fidelity to the original Greek, Yeats was convinced that his own rendition would better articulate the “regulated declamation of the Greeks” at work in Attic tragedy.460 The manuscript known as ‘Rex 2’ documents the earliest efforts he undertook to revise Jebb’s Oedipus in the winter of 1912.461 In place of the scholar’s largely hypotactic syntax, Yeats used shorter phrases that broke down Jebb’s English,

457 Unsigned review, “The Simplicity and Gravity of Yeats’s Version of ‘Oedipus Tyrannus’”. Times Literary Supplement (22 November 1928). W. B. Yeats: The Critical Heritage. A. Norman Jeffares, ed. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977) 290–1. 458 Yeats, “Oedipus the King”, 221. 459 Ibid., 219. 460 “Speaking to Musical Notes – Interview with Miss Florence Farr”. Freeman’s Journal (31 October 1902) 4. 461 See the full transcription of this draft in W. B. Yeats, The Writing of Sophocles’ King Oedipus. David R. Clark and James B. McGuire, eds. (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1989) 182–251. 139 fostering what one critic has called an “idiomatic fragmentation…modeled on normal patterns of English speech”.462 In so modeling his language, Yeats often used the techniques of repetition, apposition and asyndeton; he reiterated and joined without conjunction fragments he had lifted and altered from Jebb’s translation, believing that the idiom achieved with these methods better reflected the strong cadence and pace of spoken English. Even in the earliest revision of the play’s prologue, his attempt to splinter and compact Jebb’s translationese is evident:

My children ’} descendants of Cadmus that was of old time, why do you come before me me thus? with With the wreathed branches of suppliants, while the city smokes with incense and murmurs with and cries and prayers of sorrow; with prayers for health. I would not hear learn these from another’s mouth, and therefore I have questioned you myself. Answer me, old man. (lines 1–6)463

In the first line, Yeats labored over Jebb’s cumbersome rendering of the Greek, “ὦ

τέκνα, Κάδμου τοῦ πάλαι νέα τροφή”. The classicist had translated this verse awkwardly, setting the king’s opening invocation to the chorus out as: “My children, latest born to Cadmus who was of old”. Yeats noted the lack of clarity in Jebb’s phrase

“latest born”—initially replacing it with “descendants”—and he had further difficulty with the clumsy relative clause, “who was of old.”

462 William E. Baker, “The Strange and the Familiar”. 18, Perspectives in Criticism, Syntax in English Poetry, 1870–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967) 84–106: 94. Regarding the consciously literary use of hypotaxis still present in the lyric verse Yeats composed after 1910, and its complex relation to the poet’s desire “to make the language of poetry coincide with passionate, normal speech”, see Ralph Harding Earle, “Questions of Syntax, Syntax of Questions: Yeats and the Topology of Passion”. Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988) Vol. 6, 19–48; Thomas Parkinson, “Passionate Syntax”. W. B. Yeats, The Later Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964) 181–231, and Brian Arkins, “Passionate Syntax: Style in the Poetry of Yeats”. Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994) Vol. 12, 3–26. 463 Clark and McGuire, 189. 140

However, as with many of the revisions Yeats attempted in 1912, he came to no solution regarding this verse. But in the final published version of his translation, released at last in 1928, the revisions originally intimated in ‘Rex 2’ helped create a starker and more sober opening for the tragedy.464

Children, descendants of old Cadmus, why do you come before me, why do you carry the branches of suppliants, while the city smokes with incense and murmurs with prayer and lamentation? I would not learn from any mouth but yours, old man, therefore I question you myself. (lines 1– 6)465

Yeats now fully omitted Jebb’s relative clause in the opening line, replacing it with a simpler appositive, “descendants of old Cadmus” which he made parallel to the bare translation of “ὦ τέκνα”. In redacting the phrase “latest born”, he likewise compressed its unclear meaning with the plain epithet, “descendants.” Furthermore, even though Jebb had kept to the verbal configuration of the original language, Yeats refused to strictly mimic the Greek. Where Sophocles had used only the imperative, “θοάζετε”, to form the play’s initial question, Jebb had imitated him, using the roughly equivalent verb in

English, “set”. But Yeats, instead, exploited a vigorous repetition of questions in this passage. Using the verbs, “come” and “carry”, he broke Jebb’s sentence into two shorter—but syntactically similar—interrogatives. In so doing, Yeats hoped that the

464 Following the play’s performance in 1926, Yeats and Lady Gregory further revised the script he had adapted from Jebb. In doing so, they consulted the French translation of Paul Masqueray, Oedipe-Roi (Paris, 1922), and altered “every sentence” of Yeats’ rendition “that might not be intelligible on the Blasket Islands”. Clark and McGuire have shown how Yeats’ better understanding of certain passages in the French edition “freed him to use more idiomatic English” than he had thought allowable when altering Jebb’s version for the tragedy’s first performance. Clark and McGuire, 38–9; See also Arkins, Builders of My Soul, 129. 465 W. B. Yeats, “Sophocles’ King Oedipus, A Version for the Modern Stage”. The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats. Russell K. Alspach, ed. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1966) 809–51: 809. 141 fragmented syntax and asyndeton in the phrase, “why do you…why do you…?”, would better capture the spoken rhythm and urgency of Oedipus’ plea.

For Yeats, Jebb’s desire to formally equate English with the original Greek failed to provide good dramatic poetry in the native tongue. But with the revisions he had made of the scholar’s translation, Yeats believed he was able—even while surrendering literal fidelity to the source language—to provoke the “impassioned speech” alive in

Sophoclean Greek.466 However, when versifying the chorus of the Oedipus, this belief would be tested. For even in the original, the choral odes possessed great metrical variation as well as syntactic complexity. To create a dynamic equivalence in the spoken idiom of modern English presented a unique challenge. Indeed, from as early as 1904,

Yeats acknowledged that the translation and staging of the choral odes was the most significant difficulty presented in Attic tragedy. As a writer from London’s Evening Mail reported that year, Yeats saw “his greatest difficulty in the management of the chorus, but if the [Irish National Theatre] Society definitely decides on the production Mr. Yeats believes that this little obstacle will be overcome.”467 The management of the chorus was not, however, so easily overcome, and what once seemed a “little obstacle” to the poet proved much more intractable.

As he had done with dialogue, Yeats was intent on reducing the complexity of both the choral diction and syntax, formally setting the odes in what was, he told the

466 For further comparison of passages from Yeats’ and Jebb’s translations, see the extensive formal analysis of Steven Yao in “‘Uplift Our State’: Yeats, Oedipus, and the Translation of a National Dramatic Form”, specifically pages 134–46. 467 R. M., “The National Theatre Society, Its Work and Ambitions, A Chat with Mr. W. B. Yeats”. Evening Mail (31 December 1904) 4. Also reprinted as “The National Theatre Society, A Chat with Mr. W. B. Yeats” in Daily Express (2 January 1905) 6. 142 publisher, A. H. Bullen, a “rough, unrhymed verse”.468 With such unadorned form, he hoped, at all costs, to avoid the literalism that had pushed Jebb towards an indiscernible and antiquated poetic idiom—an idiom that had produced passages in the choral odes such as this one, excerpted from the first chorus:

O sweetly-speaking message of Zeus, in what spirit hast thou come from golden Pytho unto glorious Thebes? I am on the rack, terror shakes my soul, O thou Delian healer to whom wild cries rise, in holy fear of thee, what thing thou wilt work for me, perchance unknown before, perchance renewed with the revolving years: tell, thou immortal Voice, born of Golden Hope!469

In strict imitation of the original syntax set out by Sophocles in the Greek, Jebb employed only two questions in his rendition of this passage. But Yeats significantly departed from his translation, composing instead four syntactically similar questions. These questions allowed him to eliminate many of the relative clauses and prepositional phrases found in

Jebb’s version.

What message comes to famous Thebes from the Golden House? What message of disaster from that sweet-throated Zeus? What monstrous thing our fathers saw do the seasons bring? Or what thing no man ever saw, what new monstrous thing? Trembling in every limb I raise my loud importunate cry, And in a sacred terror wait the Delian God’s reply. (lines 107–12)470

The repetitive rhythm articulated in these interrogatives better suggested, Yeats believed, the syntactic cadence of spoken, not written, English.471 Yet while the pace better framed

468 W. B. Yeats, “To A. H. Bullen” (7 January 1912). The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Intelex Past Masters, Entry no. 1795. 469 Sophocles, The Plays and Fragments, Part I: The Oedipus Tyrannus. Third Edition. R. C. Jebb, ed. and trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1893) 31–3. 470 Yeats, “Sophocles’ King Oedipus, A Version for the Modern Stage”, 813. 471 This strategic repetition of interrogatives, modeled on contemporary English dialect, gained greater prominence in better known modernist works of poetry—as in Eliot’s “A Game of Chess” from The Waste Land (1922), where, from lines 111 to 138, domestic ennui descends into an aggressive interrogation of the poem’s emasculated speaker. See T. S. Eliot, The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s 143 the ode for speech on the stage in the Abbey Theatre, Yeats had drastically reduced the size and thematic range of the Sophoclean chorus. Although he had been motivated by a desire to merely lessen the confusion produced by the “Latin mist” of Jebb’s writing,

Yeats’ own adaptation seriously diminished the energy and metrical variation present in the choral passages. In the original Greek, the four odes of the Oedipus Rex had comprised 155 lines of poetry. Jebb had expanded these passages into 213 lines of florid

English prose, but Yeats conveyed the odes in a mere 58 lines of English verse, barely over a quarter of what Jebb had thought enough to hold the literal meaning of these passages. Because of his ignorance of Greek, Yeats shrank from the hermeneutic and metrical difficulties posed by the once “little obstacle” of the Sophoclean chorus. But as he had done with the dialogue of the tragedy, he made the chorus simple and speakable for the Irish stage. However, by diminishing the role Sophocles had given the odes, Yeats failed to provide the dynamic equivalence with the original Greek. The poet’s idiom, modeled on a dialect of contemporary speech, could not register the foreign character and difficulty presented by the original language—a language whose combination of passion and “regulated declamation” he had been able to more effectively anglicize in the dialogue.

Despite Yeats’ failure in the choral odes, the experiments with idiomatic English, which he undertook in the Oedipus and in his dramatic verse throughout the 1910s, had a deep broad impact on what one recent critic has called “the organizing principles that would ultimately distinguish so many modernist long poems, beginning with the early

Contemporary Prose. Second edition. Lawrence Rainey, ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006) 60–1. 144 cantos and The Waste Land.”472 Yeats’ techniques for simplifying and fragmenting his poetic idiom—techniques he specifically refined when trying to adapt the Oedipus— presaged the bricolage and broken syntax that both Pound and T. S. Eliot would later employ to great effect in the 1920s. Yeats’ broad efforts to rediscover what the ancient

Greek poets had formerly perfected—“the art of impassioned speech”—motivated the stylistic philosophy and first principles that became central to the rise of modernist verse.473 The “intense, unnatural labour” he exerted when trying to translate the foreign character of Sophoclean Greek played a central role in cultivating the spoken dialect whose deliberate literary use would soon be hailed as innovative and distinctively modernist throughout the 1920s and 1930s.474 In the lyric poetry Yeats himself composed later in life, he further exploited the techniques of repetition and syntactic fragmentation, which he honed while giving the Oedipus that “bare, hard & natural” vernacular he thought best expressed the Sophoclean idiom of ancient Greek.475

______

The complete translation, entitled Oedipus the King, finally reached the stage of the Abbey Theatre on the 7th of December 1926, almost 15 years after the poet had begun recasting Jebb’s 1883 edition. Yeats’ version had taken so long to produce largely because he had himself lost interest in the play early in the spring of 1912. By that time,

472 James Longenbach, “Modern Poetry”, 325. 473 “Speaking to Musical Notes – Interview with Miss Florence Farr”. Freeman’s Journal (31 October 1902) 4. 474 W. B. Yeats, “Letter to H. J. C. Grierson, 21 February [1926]”. The Letters of W. B. Yeats. Allan Wade, ed. (London: R. Hart-Davis, 1954) 709–11: 710. 475 W. B. Yeats “To Olivia Shakespear” (7 December 1926). The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Intelex Past Masters, Entry no. 4952. 145

England’s Lord Chamberlain had already lifted the ban on the Oedipus Rex. It granted a theatrical license in November 1910 to Max Reinhardt for a production of the play to be later staged in January 1912. Yeats himself saw Reinhardt’s version when on tour it later stopped in Dublin the following spring.476 Thinking it impressive, Yeats soon lost interest in Sophocles, and he abandoned his own rendition of the Oedipus, leaving his drafts incomplete, his translation unfinished.477

But in December 1926, the first performance of Yeats’ finished translation was well received. Its production was hailed as “simply and effectively set and dressed”, while the language too was lauded for being simple, “very clear in meaning and actable.”478 Ireland now had its own Oedipus, but the tragedy did not possess the same political authority or national significance which he had imagined for it in 1904. At that time, Yeats had insisted that an Irish Oedipus could “persuade Ireland…that she is very liberal, abhors censors [and] delights in the freedom of the arts”.479 But decades had passed since he first talked of Sophocles with the priests at Notre Dame, and several years of war—at home in Ireland and abroad in Europe—had changed him and changed, moreover, the spirit and character of national ambition in Ireland. A serious toll had been exacted on the feelings of patriotic enthusiasm that had once gripped both Irish society at large and indeed even Yeats, the young poet. In December 1921, following the end of the

476 On Max Reinhardt’s production of the Oedipus Rex at Covent Garden in January 1912, see Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh, “Greek Tragedy and the Cosmopolitan Ideal”. Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660-1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) 521–54: 538–54; and Macintosh, “Tragedy in performance: nineteenth- and twentieth-century productions”. The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, 297–301; as well as C. B. Purdom, Harley Granville Barker, Man of the Theatre, Dramatist, and Scholar (London: Rockliff Press, 1955) 110–33: 129–31. 477 Macintosh, “An Oedipus for our Times? Yeats’s Version of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus”, 530. 478 Joseph Holloway, Joseph Holloway’s Irish Theatre, Volume One—1926–1931. Robert Hogan and Michael J. O’Neill, eds. (Dixon, California: Proscenium Press, 1968) 20. 479 Yeats, “To Gilbert Murray, 24 January [1905]”, 23. 146

Anglo-Irish War, Ireland secured the right of internal self-rule, becoming a dominion within the British Commonwealth of Nations and taking the first steps along what F. S. L.

Lyons has called “the perilous road of independence, or partial independence”.480 But though freedom from the direct rule of Westminster had been achieved, the mood of the country remained bleak. The new government, the Irish Free State, was especially unstable, and for many years, it faced not only violent dissent from the anti-Treaty

“irregulars” of the Irish Republican Army, but also the impatience of British crown concerned with the strife plaguing the new Free State.

In this darkening atmosphere, Yeats admitted to feeling only a “deep gloom about

Ireland.”481 “I see no hope of escape from bitterness”, he wrote not long before the

Anglo-Irish Treaty was ratified, “…the extreme party may carry the country. When men are very bitter, death & ruin draw them on as a rabbit is supposed to be drawn on by the dancing of foxes.”482 As he saw it, extreme politics in the form of “fixed ideas” and

“nationalist abstractions” were dancing as foxes before the new government, threatening to draw an already fractured Irish society further into ruin.483 What the poet had once feared, years earlier, was now, it seemed, beginning to come true. “If we could create”, he had written in 1909, “a conception of the race as noble as Aeschylus and Sophocles had of Greece, it would be attacked on some trivial grounds and the crowd would

480 F. S. L. Lyons, Culture & Anarchy in Ireland, 1890–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) 111. 481 W. B. Yeats, “To Olivia Shakespear” (22 December 1921). The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Intelex Past Masters, Entry no. 4039. 482 Ibid. 483 Yeats, Autobiographies, 192. 147 follow…some mind which copied the rhetoric of Young Ireland”.484 The establishment of the Free State had assuredly not brought about a “conception of the race as noble as

Aeschylus and Sophocles had”, but even with its imperfections, the Free State, Yeats thought, had achieved a fragile peace. It had brought what Michael Collins, the Chairman of the Provisional Government, called “not the ultimate freedom which all nations hope for and struggle for, but freedom to achieve that end.”485 But this freedom was insufficient for many. Both the new government and the treaty with Britain came under attack, largely because in being declared a dominion, the Irish Free State still officially professed fidelity by oath to “King George V, his heirs and successors by law, in virtue of the common citizenship of Ireland with Great Britain and her adherence to membership of the group of nations forming the British Commonwealth of Nations.”486 Opposition to these words in the oath was intense, and by June 1922, a split in the Irish Republican movement drove the country into further social unrest and civil war. But Yeats called for the rule of law. He backed the new government, accepting an appointment to become a senator in the Dáil later that year. In this public capacity, he supported the strong-arm tactics of the Free State throughout the Civil War, defending in particular the administration of its first President, the conservative W. T. Cosgrave.

However, by early 1925, the Cosgrave government was facing mounting pressure to expand the role of censorship throughout Irish society. When Ireland was declared a

484 W. B. Yeats, Journal entry no. 94 (12 March 1909), Memoirs. Denis Donoghue, ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1972) 183–5: 184. 485 Michael Collins, “Advance and use our liberties”. The Path to Freedom (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1922) 25–33: 29. 486 Official documents regarding “The Anglo-Irish Treaty (December 1920–December 1921)”. Documents on Irish Foreign Policy, Volume I, 1919–1922. Ronan Fanning, Michael Kennedy, Dermot Keogh and Eunan O’Halpin, eds. (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1998) 204–370: 357. 148 dominion within the British Commonwealth, the Free State had effectively accepted and taken “over”, as one historian has argued, “the whole body of British statute law—and the English common law tradition—with a few minor exceptions consequent on the terms of the Treaty”.487 None of these exceptions dealt specifically with the matter of British censorship; indeed, “in regard to the legislation controlling obscene literature the establishment of the Irish Free State brought no change at all”.488 But the desire for stricter censorship was now rising. Various organizations, predominantly Roman

Catholic, aimed to, as the Catholic Truth Society put it, “combat the pernicious influence of infidel and immoral publications by the circulation of good, cheap and popular

Catholic literature”.489 According to the Rev. R. S. Devane, it was time for Ireland to distinguish itself morally from the prevalent decadence of English culture. Stricter censorship might provide the means by which a greater sense of national distinction might be compelled. “The time is now ripe”, Devane declared,

for the introduction of Social Legislation…we are still dominated by old traditions, and by the hitherto prevailing legal standards of public morality. Can these be broken and replaced? This depends on the pressure brought to bear on the Government.490

According to Devane, the nascent government of the Free State could best distinguish the character of the Irish nation by creating a “new legal definition of ‘obscenity’ and

‘indecency’, which would be in harmony with the religious ideals and moral standards of

487 Michael Adams, Censorship: the Irish Experience. (Dublin: Scepter Publishers Ltd., 1968) 13. See also Terence Brown, “An Irish Ireland: Language and Literature”. Ireland: a Social and Cultural History, 1922 to the Present. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985) 37–61. 488 Adams, 13. 489 An extensive description of the Society’s aims were advertised in the entry for the “Catholic Truth Society of Ireland” in The Irish Catholic Directory and Almanac for 1920 (Dublin: James Duffy and Co., Ltd., 1920) 207. 490 Rev. R. S. Devane, S. J., “Indecent Literature: Some Legal Remedies”. Irish Ecclesiastical Record. 5th series, Vol. 25 (February 1925) 182–204: 202. 149 the people”. The clergy, he insisted, had to have a greater role in shaping public opinion and policy within the Free State. An official “Black List of grossly indecent books, [and] magazines” had to be created, but above all, all “advertisements of drugs and appliances which may be reasonably regarded as designed for the procuration of abortion, or the prevention of conception, to be deemed ‘indecent,’ and therefore illegal.”491

In response to demands such as these, the Minister of Justice, Kevin O’Higgins, formed the “Committee of Enquiry on Evil Literature” on the 12th of February 1926.

Composed of three academics and two prominent members from the Catholic Church and the Church of Ireland, the committee was given the task of exploring “whether it is necessary or advisable in the interest of public morality to extend the existing powers of the State to prohibit or restrict the sale and circulation of printed matter”.492 After examining such matters for much of 1926, the committee submitted a final report to the

Free State government on the 28th of December 1926, just three weeks after the premiere of Yeats’ Oedipus. Among its many recommendations, the committee proposed the formation of a Board “with a permanent official as Secretary, to advise the Minister of

Justice as to any books, newspapers or magazines circulated in the Saorstat that, in the opinion of the Board, are demoralising and corrupting”.493 The Minister of Justice, it was further argued, should possess both the “power to prohibit by notice” the circulation of immoral literature, and the authority to punish by fine or imprisonment those “persons exposing for sale or circulating any prohibited book”.494

491 Ibid., 203. 492 Report of the Committee on Evil Literature (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1927) 3. 493 Ibid. 494 Ibid. 150

As a senator, Yeats largely supported the policies of the Cosgrave government, but he would not support any renewed call for greater censorship in Ireland.495 Indeed, he abhorred even the notion that an independent Irish nation would entertain the possibility of enforcing a stricter form of regulation than had been threatened under British rule. The poet publicly railed against proposals for censorship, later attacking the Censorship of

Publications Bill in the Irish press with a savagery greater than he ever aimed at

England’s Lord Chamberlain. “This Bill, if it becomes law,” he declared,

will give one man, the Minister of Justice, control over the substance of our thought, for its definition of ‘indecency’ and such vague phrases as ‘subversive of public morality,’ permit him to exclude The Origin of Species, Karl Marx’s Capital, the novels of Flaubert, Balzac, Proust, all of which have been objected to somewhere on moral grounds, half the Greek and Roman Classics, Anatole France and everybody else on the Roman index, and all great love poetry…no Government has the right, whether to flatter fanatics or in mere vagueness of mind to forge an instrument of tyranny and say that it will never be used.496

Decades earlier, Yeats’ attempts to produce the controversial Oedipus Rex in Dublin had been driven by a desire to show that there existed in modern Ireland the freedom of imagination once perfected by the Greek tragedians. But now the idea of engendering in the Free State a “conception of the race as noble as Aeschylus and Sophocles” seemed futile.497 For as soon as Ireland had cast off the yoke of British rule, it had begun to contemplate imposing stricter laws to govern the minds of its artists, intellectuals and

495 “The censorship dispute marks a real diminution of Yeats’s respect for the Cosgrave Government. It had betrayed its trust by bowing to mob fanaticism. ‘No Government has the right,’ he said, ‘whether to flatter fanatics or in mere vagueness of mind to forge an instrument of tyranny and say that it will never be used.’ He left the Senate, then, a disillusioned man. During his term of office he had advocated order, unity, and liberty: the Government had supplied order but had infringed liberty and thus jeopardized unity.” Elizabeth Cullingford, “The Senate”. Yeats, Ireland and Fascism (New York: New York University Press, 1981) 165–96: 193. 496 W. B. Yeats, “The Irish Censorship” (29 September 1928). The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume X: Later Articles and Reviews. Colton Johnson, ed. (New York: Scribner Press, 2000) 214–18: 215–16. 497 Yeats, Journal entry no. 94 (12 March 1909), 184. 151 common citizens. These laws would soon, Yeats insisted, “bring the stage under a mob censorship acting through ‘recognized associations’.”498 Thus the national vision was frustrated by an assault on intellectual and artistic freedom by the nation itself. Because of this, Yeats’ became embittered and distressed by the growing influence of Catholic moralism in the policies of Cosgrave’s Free State.

In February 1926, under these conditions, Yeats turned once again to his unfinished drafts of the Oedipus. Just as the Committee on Evil Literature was convening its protracted examination of ‘public morality’ and censorship, he returned with renewed vigor to the translation of Sophocles he left incomplete in 1912.499 With the Free State on the cusp of approving greater censorship, the Oedipus once again seemed to possess polemical strength and national significance. Although the nation was now being tempted by fractious elements, republican extremism and a crude Catholic moralism, Yeats believed he could still use Sophoclean tragedy to insist upon what he called a “vision of the new Ireland.” The political failures of the Free State were many, but a remnant of the freedom, which had motivated the perfection of Attic tragedy, still remained alive in the

Irish imagination. Thus with his own version of the Oedipus, Yeats was intent on showing that Ireland and its artists still possessed the freedom “to express all” as the

Greek poets once had.500

However, because the nationalism which Yeats had once advanced in his poetry no longer seemed possible, satire and self-criticism were now fundamental components in

498 Yeats, “The Irish Censorship”, 216. 499 Clark and McGuire, 33–40. 500 “‘American Literature Still in Victorian Era’ – Yeats” New York Times (22 February 1914), SM10. 152 the “new Ireland” he hoped to achieve with the 1926 staging of Oedipus the King.501

Fiona Macintosh has written that, “[d]espite Yeats’s growing disillusionment with Ireland following independence, he continues to speak optimistically of Ireland’s future as being allied to the pattern of the Greeks.”502 Yet, Yeats was, by the end of his service in the

Irish Senate, hardly optimistic for Ireland’s future.503 Although he persistently drew parallels with ancient Greek art and literature, he did so convinced that the “monuments of unageing intellect” once realized in Hellas stood in stark contrast to the failures of modern Irish society.504 James Joyce manipulated Homeric epic and parodied the Greek language to lampoon the forced union of Hellenism and revivalist nationalism, but Yeats used his austere rendition of Sophoclean tragedy to expose the moralism and poor artistic conditions of the Irish Free State. In doing so, he hoped to rediscover strong satire in Irish writing—political criticism like that of his eighteenth-century countryman, Jonathan

Swift. Although the Oedipus was itself a tragedy, its production in Dublin was proof, he told a BBC radio audience in 1933, of a new genre rising in Ireland, a “new satirical comedy” whose saeva indignatio exposed a different Ireland—an embittered nation now

501 Yeats, “Oedipus the King”, 223. 502 Fiona Macintosh, “Introduction: The Irish Literary Revival and the Classical Tradition” Dying Acts: Death in Ancient Greek and Modern Irish Tragic Drama (Cork: Cork University Press, 1994) 1–18: 15. 503 “He considered that he had failed in Senate, and his advice to Pound, ‘Do not be elected to the Senate of your country’, reflects his feeling of inadequacy. Yet his despondency was the product as much of events in Ireland as of any personal failure. His high hopes for the Free State were never fulfilled, and when he relinquished his Senate seat he foresaw only further bitterness for his country.” Cullingford, “The Senate”, 165. 504 W. B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”. The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats. Macmillan Hudson River Edition. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach, eds. (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1987) 407–8: 407. 153 hardened by strife but still, he insisted, “so full of curiosity, so full of self- criticism…sometimes so tolerant, sometimes so bitter in its merriment.”505

By seeking an Oedipus in modern English—by trying to speak the native tongue with Sophoclean “jawse”—Yeats had begun to transform the style of his lyric and dramatic verse. He pushed his own literary expression towards what he called “the syntax and vocabulary of common personal speech” all the while propelling key elements in principles that later would motivate modernist experiments in English poetic form.506

Moreover, he had employed his ‘half-read’ knowledge of the Greek classics to refuse both the ‘uplift’ of English moralism and also the infringement of intellectual freedom brought on by the fledgling Irish Free State. In so doing, Yeats showed that his translation of Sophocles, like the composition of his lyric verse, was rooted, as Ron Bush has argued, “not in totalitarian poetics but in structures enacting a competition of value.”507 This “competition of value” can be plainly seen not only when considering the complex use of allusions Greek antiquity which emerged in his late poems, but also, more specifically, by examining Yeats’ history with Sophocles—the long march he took to finally complete his rendition of the tragedy, Oedipus the King. By the time his version premiered in Dublin, much of the original passion which had driven him to Sophocles was in competition with a new polemical impulse. Yeats no longer hoped to reveal modern Ireland’s difference from contemporary England by proclaiming the nation’s likeness to the civilization of fifth-century Athens. Rather, by late 1926, he was intent on

505 Yeats, “Oedipus the King”, 223. 506 Yeats, Letter to H. J. C. Grierson (21 February [1926]), 710. 507 Ronald Bush, “The Modernist under Siege”. Yeats’s Political Identities, Selected Essays. Jonathan Allison, ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996) 325–33: 331. 154 exploiting the “perfections” of Sophoclean Greek to interrogate the political conditions of contemporary Ireland itself.508 The nationalist cause to which he had first attached

Sophoclean tragedy was now under scrutiny, and with his Oedipus, Yeats subjected the failures of the Free State to a radical and sweeping skepticism. But through such skepticism, he believed, a more robust sense of Irish patriotism could in fact be generated, a “vision of the new Ireland”, a nation made strong by self-criticism and the

“satirical comedy” he had set out in his new Irish Oedipus.509

508 Pound, “Tagore’s Poems”, 93. 509 Yeats, “Oedipus the King”, 223. 155

Chapter Four

“Heirs of Romanity”: Welsh Nationalism & the Multilingual Idiom of David Jones

Standing before a judge and jury in the Welsh town of Caernarfon in late 1936,

Saunders Lewis, playwright and leader of the Plaid Cymru, defended the right of conscience. The offense for which he and his friends, Lewis Valentine and D. J.

Williams, stood accused, he told the court,

is not in dispute. We ourselves were the first to give the authorities warning of the fire, and we proclaimed to them our responsibility. Yet we hold the conviction that our action was in no wise criminal, and that it was an act forced upon us that it was done in obedience to conscience and to the moral law, and that the responsibility for any loss due to our act is the responsibility of the English government.510

The men were under indictment for arson to his Majesty’s property, a deed which

“feloniously” violated sections 5 and 51 of the 1861 Malicious Damage Act.511 Before dawn on September 8th 1936, the three men had crept on to the grounds of a Royal Air

Force Armament Training Camp on the Llŷn Peninsula. There they allegedly thrashed a one-armed night watchman, and set fire to the aerodrome and military buildings. “It was

510 Saunders Lewis, “The Caernarfon Court Speech (13th October 1936)”. Presenting Saunders Lewis. Alun R. Jones and Gwyn Thomas, eds. (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1973) 115–26: 115. A digital copy of the manuscript of this speech may be read at the National Library of Wales website: http://canmlwyddiant.llgc.org.uk/en/XCM1927/book/2/4/1.html. 511 The Act may be read at the National Archives website: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/24- 25/97/contents/enacted 156 an [sic] glorious fire”, Lewis later remarked, having been kindled simply “with petrol and a syringe”.512 Later that morning, the conspirators turned themselves in at a police station in nearby Pwllheli. But before doing so, Lewis handed over a letter to the inspector on duty. Written in Welsh and signed by each man, it declared the political intent he and his accomplices had in mind.

Ever since the intention to build a Lleyn bombing camp was first announced, we, and many of the leaders of the public life of Wales, did everything we could to get the English Government to refrain from placing in Lleyn an institution which would endanger all the culture and traditions of one of the most Welsh regions in Wales. But in spite of our pleading, in spite of the letters and protests forwarded from hundreds of religious and lay societies throughout the whole of Wales, and although thousands of the electors of Lleyn itself signed a petition imploring prevention of this atrocity, yet the English Government refused even to receive a deputation from Wales to talk over the matter. Lawful and peaceful methods failed to secure for Wales even common courtesy at the hands of the Government of England. Therefore, in order to compel attention to this immoral violation of the sure and natural rights of the Welsh nation, we have taken this method, the only method left to us by a Government which insults the Welsh nation.513

In court, a little over a month later, Lewis pressed on with this defense of the “culture and traditions of one of the most Welsh regions in Wales”. Before the trial commenced, he demanded that all jurors be competent in the Welsh language. The judge, Sir Wilfred

Lewis, however, deemed his request a “farce”, and insisted that the three defendants address the court only in English.514 Yet, when Lewis was called to enter a plea, he refused to speak anything but Welsh. Incensed, the judge berated him with what one

512 Dafydd Jenkins, A Nation on Trial, Penyberth 1936. Ann Corkett, trans. (Cardiff: Welsh Academic Press, 1998) 39, 41. The Welsh language edition was first published in 1937. 513 Saunders Lewis, Lewis Valentine, and D. J. Williams, A letter addressed “To the Chief Constable of Caernarfon”, translated and printed in “Fire at R.A.F. Camp, Malicious Damage Charge, Welsh Nationalists sent for Trial”. The Times (17 September 1936) 9. 514 As noted on the back of a trial ticket, Caernarvon Winter Assize, Winter, 1936 – County No. 5, by “Mr. J. F. Williams, Welsh Board of Health, Market Street”. National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. See Jenkins, 60. 157 observer called “the emphasis of a barrister cross-examining”.515 He asked Lewis repeatedly—five times in all—whether he could “understand or speak English”. “I respectfully ask your Lordship”, Lewis replied in his own language, “to allow me to answer in Welsh, since that is my mother tongue. I ask that the interpreter translate this.”516 The reply was not immediately translated, and Lewis, after being further reprimanded by the bench, at last entered an English plea of not guilty.

By initially insisting on making a plea in Welsh, Lewis was not simply flouting the authority of the judge before him. He was rather attacking the official proscription of his mother tongue in the British courts. For centuries, the English government had outlawed the use of Welsh in official legal matters. Between 1535 and 1542, the

Parliament of Henry VIIIth had passed the Laws in Wales Acts, legislation that dismantled the Cyfraith Hywel, the legal system of ancient Wales. In so doing, the Tudor government banned Britain’s oldest language from official use, claiming that Welsh law and Welsh itself had too long provoked “some rude and ignorant people” to make

“distinccion and diversitie betwene the Kinges Subiectes of this Realme and hys subiectes of the said dominion and Principalitie of Wales.”517 Therefore “frome hensforth”, Parliament declared that:

no personne or personnes that use the Welsshe speche or langage shall have or enjoy any maner office or fees within the Realme of Englonde Wales, or other the Kinges dominions upon peyn of forfaiting the same

515 Jenkins, 57. 516 Ibid., 57–8. 517 “The Act of Union of England and Wales, 1536” as transcribed in William Rees, “The Union of England and Wales, with a transcript of the Act of Union”. Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, Session 1937 (London, 1938) 27–100: 81. 158

offices or fees onles he or they use and exercise the speche or langage of Englisshe.518

Because of the “dyvysion murmur and sedicion” caused by Welsh, the Crown established

“like Fourme” for the government of Wales. “[S]inister usages and customes” that differed from those of England were to be eliminated, and now without exception, “all othes of officers iuries and enquestes and all other affidavithes verdictes and Wagers of lawe” were “to be geven and done in the Englisshe tonge”.519

Saunders Lewis was fully aware that a deliberate use of Welsh in court would do much more than offend common custom.520 He knew it would violate these established laws and draw public attention to the illegal standing of his language. Though he was, at last, compelled to speak English, Lewis’ protest did not stop. Later in the trial, he again attempted to testify and give evidence in Welsh. Before long his efforts wore down the judge who was forced to provide him with a translator. But the translator was so inept that Lewis felt forced to make his closing statement in English. The burning of that

“monstrous bombing range in Lleyn”, he told the jury, was done in “defence of Welsh civilization, for the defence of Christian principles, for the maintenance of the Law of

518 Ibid., 96. 519 Ibid., 81, 95–6. On the sweeping change the Tudors brought to Welsh law, language and religion, see Glanmor Williams, “The Assimilation of England and Wales”. Renewal and Reformation: Wales c.1415–1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) 253–78: 273; and also R. Brimley Jones, “The Dilemma of the Vernacular”. The Old British Tongue: The Vernacular in Wales, 1540–1640 (Cardiff: Avalon Press, 1970) 33–54. cf. Paula Blank, “Language, Laws and Blood”. Broken English: Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings (London: Routledge, 1996) 126–68: 131–4. 520 Earlier that year, Lewis condemned the Laws in Wales Acts in an article for The Listener entitled, “The Case for Welsh Nationalism”. Despite its attempt “to exterminate the Welsh nation”, the Act was a legal failure, he argued, for the Report of the Royal Commission on the Dispatch of Business at Common Law had recently recommended “the creation of a separate Welsh circuit”. Saunders Lewis, “The Case for Welsh Nationalism” The Listener (13 May 1936) 915–16: 915. 159

God in Wales.”521 He and his accomplices were without guilt, he asserted, for the

“universal Christian tradition” had pushed them “to preserve the life of a nation…to defend it from any mortal blow, by all means necessary short of taking human life unjustly, or breaking the moral law.”522 Because their intent had been pure, they now refused to bow to “the absolute power” of a government whose sole aim was “to shatter the spiritual basis” of the Welsh nation. If the Llŷn aerodrome had simply been ignored, further harm would have come to Wales’ native language and literature—a literature that remained, Lewis declared, “the direct heir in the British Isles of the literary discipline of classical Greece and Rome…it is a living, growing literature, and draws its sustenance from a living language and a traditional social life.”523 According to Lewis, this inheritance with its unbroken link to antiquity had been passed down to the Welsh people through their native language. It was a well-known fact, he argued, that “the Latin relations of Welsh are more important than the Celtic. Our language is partly Celtic; but our literature and culture and a great part of our speech is Latin.”524 Unlike England,

Wales was the only nation in Britain to have been part of the Roman Empire, to have

521 Lewis, “The Caernarfon Court Speech”, 126. See also T. Robin Chapman, “Theism’ Last Hurrah: Saunders Lewis’s Caernarfon Court Speech of 1936”. Idiom of Dissent. T. Robin Chapman, ed. (Llandysul, Ceredigion: Gomer Press, 2006) 24–42. 522 Lewis, “The Caernarfon Court Speech”, 123. 523 Ibid., 115. 524 Saunders Lewis, (10 September 1925) Thomas Jones Papers, CH, H1/7, as quoted in T. Robin Chapman, Un Bywyd O Blith Nifer: Cofiant Saunders Lewis (Llandysul: Wasg Gomer, 2006) 106. Lewis’ Welsh poetry is rich in allusion to Roman antiquity, especially to Virgil. See Ceri Davies, “The University Movement and its Impact: The Classical Heritage since the Mid-Nineteenth Century”. Welsh Literature and the Classical Tradition. (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995) 115–55: 132–42. 160 been “weaned on the milk of the West”.525 This “fact remains and obtrudes like a rock through the centuries”, he explained,

—this nation of Wales today stands on the very territory it occupied—the only territory it occupied when Wales was part of the Roman Empire. You English call us Welsh, and the name Welsh means Romans. Please do not believe the comic old-fashioned idea that the name means foreigners and that your ancestors drove mine out of England into Wales and dubbed us foreigners...There was never any great drive of the Welsh out of England, and your name for us recognizes that we are the only nation in the British Isles who were once part of the Roman Empire.526

For this reason, Lewis believed that the Welsh claim on a classical legacy was not mere political enthusiasm. The hard facts of ancient history in Britain proved that the people of

Wales were indeed “heirs of Rome”, the true inheritors of antiquity with “the blood of the

West in their veins.”527

Throughout his long political and literary career, Lewis supported this claim with an intensive study of Roman Britain (43 AD–410 AD). He found his view bolstered, in particular, by the historical scholarship of R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943), J. N. L.

Myres (1902–1989), Charles Norris Cochrane (1889–1945) as well as that of the nationalist writer, Arthur Wade-Evans (1875–1964). Through their work, the early twentieth century saw a new consensus emerging around Roman Britain and its immediate aftermath. No longer was the relation between the native Welsh Briton and the invading Roman seen in light of what Collingwood called the “traditional English view”—a view that claimed that “between Britons and Romans there was an initial

525 Saunders Lewis, Y Ddraig Goch (November 1927). Dafydd Glyn Jones, trans., as quoted in Dafydd Glyn Jones, “His Politics”. Presenting Saunders Lewis. Alun R. Jones and Gwyn Thomas, eds. (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1973) 23–78: 33. 526 Lewis, “The Case for Welsh Nationalism”, The Listener (13 May 1936) 915. 527 Lewis, (10 September 1925) Thomas Jones Papers, CH, H1/7, as quoted in Chapman, Un Bywyd O Blith Nifer. See also Lewis, Y Ddraig Goch (November 1927) 33. 161 cleavage of race, language and culture which to the last was never really bridged”.528 On the contrary, Collingwood argued that

the two cultures, Roman and British were not absolutely foreign to one another, just as the two physical types were not really distinct. One of the strongest reasons for the success of the Roman Empire is that it included a number of peoples who were so far homogeneous both in race and in civilization that they could blend into a single whole without doing violence to anything in their natures.529

Unlike the imperial governments of modern Europe, the Roman Empire possessed a unique ability to legitimize a broad range of cultural and linguistic differences within its territories. Because of this, Collingwood insisted that the Britons had not sacrificed their natural character under Roman rule.530 Though they had become Romanized, “the Britons did not remain a mere subject race, held down by a Roman army. They became Romans;

Romans in speech, in habits, and in sentiment. But this Romanization did not involve an unnatural warping of the British character.”531 The Brittonic peoples of ancient Wales were thus inheritors of what Wade-Evans and Cochrane would later define as Romanitas,

528 R. G. Collingwood, Roman Britain (London: Oxford University Press, 1924) 12. 529 Ibid., 14–15. 530 Collingwood’s student at Oxford, Charles Norris Cochrane, developed this view in Christianity and Classical Culture (Oxford, 1940). The poet, David Jones, once called this volume a “most illuminating” study of antiquity, for Cochrane had explained the unique power of Romanitas, its ability to transcend “all purely ‘natural’ bonds.” “Amid the wreckage of empires founded on tyranny and exploitation”, he wrote, Rome “stood alone as the project of a world-community united by ties of the spirit…it went beyond race, beyond colour, and, in all but a few exceptional instances, beyond religion”. Even as Rome encouraged its citizens to transcend racial, ethnic and religious differences, the “formal discipline” of Romanitas did not repudiate “the human affections”. It attempted rather “to organize [these] in support of the imperial idea. Under the aegis of Eternal Rome, Greek and Latin, African, Gaul, and Spaniard remained free to lead their own lives and achieve their own destiny.” As pagan civilization slowly merged with Christianity, Romanitas secured “a fresh lease of life under the aegis of the Church”. Even though its organizing principles were no longer grounded in “the imperial idea” of Roma Aeterna, Romanity attached itself to “an utterly novel idea—the project of a Christian commonwealth.” C. N. Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940) 72–3, 114–15, 179–80. See also David Jones, Letter to Rev. Desmond Chute (3 February 1953). Inner Necessities, The Letters of David Jones to Desmond Chute. Thomas Dilworth, ed. (Toronto: Anson Cartwright Editions, 1984) 42– 44: 43. 531 R. G. Collingwood, Roman Britain, 14–15. 162 for they took unto themselves “a full share in the Roman civilization and a flourishing

Romanized life of their own”.532

Lewis likewise did not regard Roman rule in Britain as a repressive regime of colonial occupation. Wales, he wrote, had “inherited the Latin civilisation of Europe, and after the fall of Rome sought to build its life on the basis of that tradition.”533 The

Romans had not subdued the Britons; they excelled rather in creating an “absence of national feeling and national exclusiveness”, successfully advancing what Collingwood called “a society that was nowhere checked by barriers such as separate races or even nations [as] in the world to-day”.534 These barriers were, in fact, even less formidable in

Britannia than elsewhere, for by legend, the Britons possessed a common ancestry with their Roman invaders. According to the account passed down in Nennius’ Historia

Brittonum, both peoples claimed descent from Aeneas of Troy through his son

Ascanius.535 As such, the Britons were kin to the archaic Roman kings at Alba Longa.

Even the Latin epithet first used to describe those of Welsh descent—Britanni—was given, Nennius claimed, to honor Britain’s earliest patriarch, Britto, the grandson of

Aeneas.536 With this shared background, the Welsh possessed what the historian, Arthur

Wade-Evans, called “the same high origin as the Romans, the Britons being, as one

532 Ibid. 533 Saunders Lewis, Egwyddorion Cenedlaetholdeb – Principles of Nationalism. Bruce Griffiths, trans. (Welsh pamphlet first published by the Plaid Cymru, 1926. Reprinted with a facing English translation, 1975) 3. 534 Collingwood, Roman Britain, 15–16. 535 Nennius, The History of the Britons. A. W. Wade-Evans, trans. (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1938) 7, 11. 536 Banished from Italy for accidentally killing his father, Britto “arrived in this island, which took a name from his name, to wit, Britain…he filled it with his own stock, and he dwelt there. From that day Britain has been inhabited even to this day.” Ibid., 39. 163 document puts it, filii Romanorum, sons of the Romans, of the stock of Troy.”537 Because of this, Romanitas took hold easily among the early Welsh, for they were “already

Romans”, Wade-Evans argued, “before they realized that they were Britons.”538

By the beginning of the fifth century, however, as the Western Empire began to deteriorate, and as imperial garrisons were abandoned across Britain, the country’s

Roman settlements faced a new menace. Germanic tribes—among them the Angles, the

Saxons and the Jutes—had begun to invade Britannia along its eastern shores. Gradually, they drove the Britons west and forcing many to forsake Christianity and the Roman tradition for what Wade-Evans called “the cause of Barbaria and paganism”.539 “[T]he mind of Roman Britain”, he argued, was then splintered, diverging “to become a Roman and Christian mind in the West, and non-Roman and non-Christian mind in the East.”540

Beset by factionalism, Britain’s “Roman cities” soon lapsed into “a state of decay”. And yet amid all of this, the Britons, Wade-Evans claimed, remained true to the classical inheritance left by Roman civilization. They alone “adhered still”, he wrote,

to the Roman way of life. They stood for Romanitas, ‘Romanity’, which was the ‘conservatism’ of the time. But they were set in the midst of a barbarized Britanni, who (now that they were free) were beginning to assert themselves, slackening in what attachment they felt towards Roman traditions, including Christianity, the official religion of the empire. In other words, Barbaria was gathering strength throughout the area governed by the Roman cities, and a prolonged tension set in between it and Romanitas.541

537 A. W. Wade-Evans, “Prolegomena to a Study of Early Welsh History”. The Historical Basis of Welsh Nationalism – A Series of Lectures (Cardiff: Plaid Cymru, 1950) 1–41: 1. Originally given as a lecture at the 1946 Plaid Cymru Summer School in Abergavenny, Wales. 538 Ibid. 539 Ibid., 10. 540 Ibid., 11. 541 Ibid., 9. 164

The spread of Barbaria had done little to diminish the loyalty the Britons felt towards

Rome, so much so that “Romanitas triumphed in Wales and Cornwall as against

Barbaria”.542 However, “the opposite occurred in England”, Wade-Evans claimed, for there the natives had succumbed to a newer foreign power brought in from the east: they had become “barbarized”, he insisted, “or as the Romans might say ‘Saxonized’”.543

As civilization faltered in sub-Roman Britain, the Welsh had managed to resist the new pagan pressures brought by the invasions of Germanic tribes. And yet, though they retained much of their Roman character, Arthur Wade-Evans and many in the Plaid

Cymru felt that even now the threat of Barbaria had not receded. Like Saunders Lewis,

Wade-Evans saw in modern industrial capitalism something akin to the “Saxonized” forces which had first destroyed Roman civilization in ancient England. To the Welsh nationalist, the rise of modern industry, particularly in South Wales, was a blight upon the nation’s rural economy and ancient cultural character. Not only had industry devastated traditional farming communities, it also furthered the spread of English, driving Welsh closer and closer to extinction. And despite its promise of economic prosperity, industrial development in Wales had done little to strengthen the country’s fortunes. Throughout the 1920s and much of the 1930s, a precipitous decline in the trade of coal and in steel exports depressed the economy of South Wales, producing what the historian Kenneth Morgan has called “a fundamental decay in the entire fabric of the economic life of the coalfield, and in those communities that depended on it for their

542 Ibid., 9. 543 Ibid., 11. 165 livelihood.”544 For these reasons, Saunders Lewis saw the modern capitalist machine as

“the destroyer of all nationhood”; it was an English import which had ravaged the Welsh economy and set its sight on obliterating the native language, the last organic link in

Britain to the “literary discipline of classical Greece and Rome”.545

For Lewis, the threat to this link was nowhere more apparent than in the diminishing strength of his mother tongue. Consequently, as a playwright and a lecturer at University College, Swansea, he encouraged the absolute eradication of English from the cultural, political and religious life of modern Wales. If a Welsh national literature were to emerge, he thought, it could only do so in the Welsh language, for no English literary idiom could articulate the Romanized essence of Welsh identity. For this reason,

Lewis criticized those among his contemporaries who had tried to write in an “Anglo-

Welsh” dialect. When in 1919 he reviewed the drama of John Oswald Francis (1882–

1956), Lewis belittled the man’s plays, arguing that his English possessed only the “local colour that some Welsh interjections and emphatic repetitions may give”.546 His were merely “tolerable English plays about Welsh life”, for “[t]o read them or see them acted”,

Lewis declared, “would be fit penance for a soul in purgatory”.547 Lewis’ criticism was unrelenting. Francis was at the whim of a pitiful English dialect now spoken across the

544 Kenneth O. Morgan, “Wales’ Locust Years”. Rebirth of a Nation: Wales, 1880–1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981) 210–40: 214. See also John Davies, “1914–39: The Somme, Brynmawr and Penyberth”. A History of Wales. Revised ed. (London: Penguin Books, 2007) 494–579: 514–20. 545 Saunders Lewis, “Is there an Anglo-Welsh Literature?” Being the Annual Lecture delivered to the Branch on December 10th, 1938. (Caerdydd: Swyddfa Gofrestri, Parc Cathays, 1939) 9. See Appendix II of this dissertation for a transcription of this lecture, pp. 268–75. See also Lewis, “The Caernarfon Court Speech”, 115. 546 J. S. Lewis, “Anglo-Welsh Theatre, The Problem of Language”. The Cambria Daily Leader (10 September 1919) 4. See Appendix II of this dissertation for this review, pp. 265–6. See also D. Tecwyn Lloyd, John Saunders Lewis, Y Gyfrol Gyntaf (Dinbych: Gwasg Gee, 1988) 100–14. 547 Lewis, “Anglo-Welsh Theatre, The Problem of Language”, 4. 166 country. His work had had to rely heavily on an Anglo-Welsh that was, Lewis claimed,

“the horrible jargon of men who have lost one tongue without acquiring another.”548

Marred by the impure origins of industry and English journalism, Anglo-Welsh possessed an inherent “awkwardness” that made it ill-suited for literary work.

Welshmen have had to learn English in the worst of schools. Labour leaders of Cockney dialect, an army of unemployed who came from all industrial parts of England to help exploit the mineral wealth of South Wales, railways from Lancashire carrying the vowels and idioms of Manchester to the valleys of Snowdon, these have been our teachers of English. From these and the newspapers we have formed our Anglo- Welsh speech, and no feebler stuff is spoken in these islands.549

Even if Welsh writers were to infuse their English with greater “local colour”, Lewis believed it would do no good. The English literary tradition could not be made to serve the national interests of Wales, and “neither Mr. Francis nor another”, Lewis asserted,

“may hope to give us a good English play about modern Wales until the central difficulty of an Anglo-Welsh theatre is attacked—the problem of language.”550

Despite this criticism of Francis, Lewis himself had been trying to overcome “the problem of language” through Anglo-Welsh. At this time, he was plagued, he later confessed, by a central question: “How…could one find an English diction that would interpret the native speech of the Welsh?”551 In search of an answer, Lewis looked to the dramatic work of Ireland’s National Theatre, and it was through his encounter with

Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory and Pádraic Colum that he first thought he had found a language “close enough to the rhythms and grammatical patterns of Welsh to provide a

548 Ibid. 549 Ibid. 550 Ibid. 551 Saunders Lewis, “By Way of Apology”. Dock Leaves (Winter 1955) 10–13: 12. 167 possible and plausible English for my purpose.”552 Ireland’s poets were unique, he argued, for they had retained the essence of Gaelic while employing a hybrid vernacular, a language based on the “Anglo-Irish” speech of the “southern peasantry”.553

The Irish theatre at its very beginning found a language in daily use among the southern peasantry that was richer in imagery, more beautiful in idiom, sweeter in sound, than any since the flowering time of the Elizabethan stage.554

The success of their vernacular inspired him, and in 1921, Lewis set out to “suggest in

English the rhythms and idioms of Welsh” with his own “Anglo-Celtic” drama, The Eve of Saint John.555 Yet, even before the play was published, Lewis felt the work was an abject failure. “The fault of my own attempt to render that richness [of Welsh]”, he wrote in a foreword to the play,

is that it suggests too often a convention of Anglo-Celtic dramatists, – instead of something fresh and living. But perhaps thus to state the problem will rouse some other to its solution, and that shall be my excuse for publication.556

Though Lewis admired Anglo-Irish, and though Ireland’s modern poets, above all, had made him appreciate the ysbryd cenedl of Wales—its “national spirit”—Welsh writers

552 Ibid. “It was through reading the works of Yeats, Synge, Patrick Colum, the Irish, that I came, for the first time, to understand what patriotism and the soul of a nation were. And soon I began to think that such things, that gripped them in Ireland, were fitting for me to take hold of in Wales.” Aneurin Talfan Davies, “Dylanwadau: Saunders Lewis”. Taliesin (Christmas 1961) Vol. 2, 5–18: 9. As translated and quoted by Bruce Griffiths in Saunders Lewis. Writers in Wales Series (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1979) 4. 553 Lewis, “Anglo-Welsh Theatre, The Problem of Language”, 4. 554 Ibid. 555 J. Saunders Lewis, Foreword to The Eve of Saint John (Newtown: The “Welsh Outlook” Press, 1921) [3]. See Appendix II of this dissertation for a transcription of this foreword, 267. 556 Ibid., [4]. “I spoke of an Anglo-Celtic convention, and it was in that convention that I wrote The Eve of Saint John. This was my first play, and so far my last in English. I couldn’t be satisfied with its diction and I settled the issue by turning and learning to write in Welsh. It was the logical thing to do.” Lewis, “By Way of Apology”, 12–13. 168 could not follow their path.557 The two nations did share a common Celtic heritage, but

Anglo-Welsh would never do for Wales what Anglo-Irish had done in Ireland. If the

Welsh were at last to have their own “rich, expressive, [and] individual” literature, they could not just mimic the mere idiom of Anglo-Celtic drama.558

Nevertheless, by scrutinizing the history of English in Ireland and comparing its reception to that of Wales, Lewis outlined a solution to the Welsh “problem of language”.

In a 1938 lecture, provocatively entitled “Is there an Anglo-Welsh Literature?”, he elaborated on this matter, once again heaping praise on the vernacular used by the Irish theatre. Anglo-Irish was, he proclaimed, “rich in traditional idiom and folklore and folksong”.559 During the eighteenth century, English had come to the Irish people by way of the country’s Protestant gentry, a rural ruling class committed to fostering it among the peasantry. Because Ireland remained “uncommercialised and untouched by industrialism”, its English was greatly enriched by “the creative life of a healthy countryside.”560 For over 150 years, Anglo-Irish flourished in this “insulated environment of a separate and Catholic countryside”.561 Under these conditions, the language soon became a national tongue—a new “English dialect, the English of Ireland”.562 By the turn of the twentieth century, its use as “native speech” far surpassed Irish Gaelic, and the long gestation in the countryside had turned the tongue “into something rhythmically and emotionally and idiomatically separate from all the dialects of progressive and

557 Davies, “Dylanwadau: Saunders Lewis”, 9. 558 Lewis, Foreword to The Eve of Saint John, [2]. 559 Lewis, “Is there an Anglo-Welsh Literature?”, 7. 560 Ibid., 7, 9. 561 Ibid., 7. 562 Ibid. 169 industrialised England.”563 Because of this development, Irish writers possessed “two sources for English and English rhythm”.564 The first, Lewis argued, was the literary tradition of England itself, the tradition of Shakespeare, of Milton, Dryden and

Wordsworth. But the second was the dialect of Ireland’s Catholic peasants, and with this source, Yeats and the other poets of the National Theatre could draw on an “English which had grown into a speech, having its own idioms and rhythms and poetry of the folk.”565 Because it “contained no echoes or rhythms of the English literary tradition”,

Anglo-Irish could be used effectively to write for Ireland’s people—to speak for the nation.566 “[T]rue Anglo-Irish writers were not concerned”, he declared, “with interpreting Ireland for English readers. They were concerned with interpreting Ireland to herself.”567

In Wales, however, the situation was different. English could not do the work of interpreting the nation for the Welsh, for according to Lewis, no satisfactory and distinctive dialect of the language had yet emerged in Wales.

English is to-day penetrating the Welsh countryside as never before, so that one might suggest that it may yet evolve as it evolved in Ireland, that “the best is yet to be.” No. It is penetrating the countryside just at the moment in history when the creation of dialect seems beyond the powers of the countrymen.568

Unlike the peasants of Ireland, the Welsh had not learned their English from a landed nobility, nor had they been able cultivate a separate dialect in a rural, Catholic society

563 Ibid. 564 Ibid. 565 Ibid., 9 566 Ibid., 7. 567 Lewis, “Is there an Anglo-Welsh Literature?”, 7. 568 Ibid., 10. 170 wholly insulated from the influence of England. English in Wales had emerged instead as

“the language of industrialism”.569 And much like the industry it brought, Lewis insisted that its inroads in the country had had a disastrous effect on the culture of Welsh- speaking peoples.

The extension of English has everywhere accompanied the decay of [Welsh] culture, the loss of social traditions and of social unity and the debasement of spiritual values. It has produced no richness of idiom, no folksong, but has battened on the spread of journalese and the mechanised slang of the talkies. There is a Welsh accent on our English,—it is the mark of our foreignness,—but there is no pure dialect.570

For Lewis, the failure of English in Wales made impossible even the notion that “a separate literature, having its peculiar traditions and character” could be considered or

“acknowledged as Anglo-Welsh”.571 Although English was spoken now with a “Welsh accent,” Anglo-Welsh had never become “the speech of an organic community” in the country, for “[w]hatever culture there has been”, Lewis claimed, “…has been the remnant of the social life of the countryside, and has been Welsh in speech.”572 Where Wales remained distinctively Welsh, it was so most through its language. But where the country was becoming more “Saxonized”, more industrialized, an alarming decay of the Welsh tongue had followed hard after the rise of English.573

569 Ibid., 9. On Anglo-Welsh and its distinction from Welsh, see Kenneth O. Morgan, “Welsh and Anglo-Welsh”. Rebirth of a Nation: Wales, 1880–1980, 241–71. 570 Lewis, “Is there an Anglo-Welsh Literature?”, 10. 571 Ibid., 5. 572 Ibid., 10, 12. 573 As farming communities failed in Wales, the Welsh language declined rapidly. In 1911 the British census reported that roughly 43.5 percent of the population in Wales still spoke Welsh. By 1931, this number had dropped dramatically to 36.8 percent. But the 1951 census—the first taken since before the World War II—reported an even greater loss. Just 28.9 percent of the population remained conversant in the language. On the decline of Welsh in the twentieth century, see Marcus Tanner, “South Wales, ‘A rich culture, long departed’”. The Last of the Celts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) 186–218; 171

Every scholar who knows and cherishes the Welsh dialects is aware that in the last 20 years there has been an alarming deterioration in the standard of their purity and richness. Industrialism has invaded the countryside with the motor bus, the radio, the chain stores of the market towns, the schools and the cinemas. There is no longer a self-contained rural community. There is only the outer fringe of industrialism. Farming is now merely ranching. Rural life has lost its independence and its creative powers. And as it grows anaemic it grows Anglicised.574

Because no legitimate vernacular, “no pure dialect” had arisen to take the place of the native tongue, Lewis urged his contemporaries to abandon English entirely.575 “We cannot therefore aim”, he asserted, “at anything less than to annihilate English in

Wales…It is bad and wholly bad that English is spoken in Wales. It must be deleted from the land called Wales: delenda est Carthago.”576 The presence of the language had brought only destruction to the farming communities of Wales, and Welsh poets, he thought, had done little that was imaginative with the Saxonized language of modern capitalism. English was not native speech, and if Wales were to have a national literature, it would not arise in Anglicized form.577

As Lewis saw it, what was needed therefore was not Anglo-Welsh but the Welsh language alone, for only the ancient mother tongue, he believed, could effectively

and also Janet Davies, “Welsh”. Languages in Britain and in Ireland. Glanville Price, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2000) 78–108. 574 Lewis, “Is there an Anglo-Welsh Literature?”, 10. 575 Ibid. 576 Saunders Lewis, excerpted from “Un Iaith i Gymru” (August 1933), translated as “One Language for Wales”, in D. Hywel Davies, “Doctrine”. The Welsh Nationalist Party, 1925–1945: A Call to Nationhood (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983) 71–129: 77–8. Originally printed in Welsh in the nationalist periodical, Y Ddraig Goch. The original Welsh version of this essay can be found in Canlyn Arthur: Ysgrifau Gwleidyddol (Gwasg Gomer, 1985) 61–5. The Latin phrase used by Lewis is the common, abbreviated form of the sententia, Ceterum autem censeo Carthaginem delendam esse. Attributed to the Roman senator, Cato the Elder (see Plutarch’s Cato Major, chapter 27), its modern reception has been examined by Silvia Thürlemann in “‘Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam’”. Gymnasium (1974) Vol. 81: 465–75. 577 “I conclude then that there is not a separate literature that is Anglo-Welsh, and that it is improbable that there ever can be that.” Lewis, “Is there an Anglo-Welsh Literature?”, 13. 172 articulate the historic Roman character and patriotic ambition which now gripped the country.578 Furthermore, a “‘bilingual Wales’”, Lewis declared, is

something to fear and avoid, [the] lessening in number of monoglot Welsh-speakers is a disaster, and…it is only a monoglot Welsh-speaking Wales that is consistent with the aims and philosophies of Welsh nationalism…To believe otherwise is self-deceit and a refusal to face the truth.579

Lewis had no such self-deceit. He made language purism the central dogma of the

Nationalist Party and pledged that if Welsh were successfully revived, “international capitalism”, the scourge of modern English Barbaria, would be driven out.580 If the language were lost, however, the Britto-Romanic sources that had made Welsh literature a “direct heir” to Greece and Rome would be irrevocably lost.581

The loss of Welsh would harm not only Wales but all of contemporary Britain, for the linguistic purity of even “Anglo-English”, Lewis believed, depended on the survival of the Welsh tongue.582 Citing J. W. Mackail’s book, Latin Literature (1895), Lewis explained this fact by likening modern English to the “new Latinity” that had emerged in the latter centuries of the Roman Empire.583 At that time, Mackail claimed, the “influx of

578 On the emergence of language purism as a doctrine of the Plaid Cymru, see D. Hywel Davies, “Doctrine”. The Welsh Nationalist Party, 1925–1945: A Call to Nationhood (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983) 73–9; and Kenneth O. Morgan, “The Post-War Mood”. Rebirth of a Nation: Wales, 1880– 1980 (New York: Oxford University Press) 180–209: 206–9. 579 Saunders Lewis, excerpted from “Un Iaith i Gymru”, translated by Darryl Jones in “‘I Failed Utterly’: Saunders Lewis and the Cultural Politics of Welsh Modernism”. The Irish Review (Spring–Summer, 1996) No. 19, 22–43: 31. 580 “To create a Welsh-speaking Wales is the surest way of building up a country within which the oppression of international capitalism cannot dwell. Of course, our socialist friends are quite unable to grasp this. So enmeshed are they in the coils of nineteenth-century materialism that they do not see that economic oppression will ultimately be defeated by spiritual forces.” As quoted in Dafydd Glyn Jones, “His Politics”. Presenting Saunders Lewis (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1973) 23–78: 32. 581 Lewis, “The Caernarfon Court Speech”, 126. 582 Lewis, “Is there an Anglo-Welsh Literature?”, 14. 583 J. W. Mackail, Latin Literature (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1895) 167. 173 provinces into [Roman] literature” had sullied the purity of Golden Age Latin. Many outside the city of Rome were then convinced “that Latin could be written in another than the Roman manner.”584 The city declined and with it Roman literature and the Latin language too: “with the self-centred urbs”, Mackail declared, “passed away the urbanus sermo, that austere and noble language which was the finest flower of her civilization.”585

By parallel, Lewis believed that the death of Welsh would push a great influx of provincial dialect on to the purer strains of English. Thus the native strength England possessed in its “Anglo-English” would be diluted by Anglo-Welsh and distorted further by the mounting “decay of Welsh national life”.586 Wales could never possess English as native speech, for the country “will wear its English like a shroud”, he declared, a shroud borne amid the “finally disintegrating forces of industrial depression.”587

After pressing these ideas in the Caernarfon courtroom, Lewis awaited the jury’s decision. His fate, however, was not decided then. The trial ended in a hung jury, and though Lewis, like many, expected his case to be retried again in Wales, the English government acted decisively. Believing that public opinion had compromised the initial proceedings, the Crown transferred the case to the Central Criminal Court at London’s

Old Bailey. There, in January 1937, the prosecution once again presented its evidence, and the trial proceeded in much the same way as it had at Caernarfon. This time, however, the London jury found Lewis, Valentine and Williams guilty. After the verdict was pronounced, the judge spared no reproach in sentencing y Tri. “You three men –

584 Ibid., 167–8. 585 Ibid., 168; see also Lewis, “Is there an Anglo-Welsh Literature?”, 14. 586 Lewis, “Is there an Anglo-Welsh Literature?”, 14. 587 Ibid., 10, 12. 174 educated men”, he declared,

have resorted to a most dangerous and wicked method of calling attention to what you believe to be the propriety of your views. It is not for me to express any opinion. All I can say is that this a plain case of arson and malicious damage…588

Each man was to serve nine months in prison, second division. The judge had rejected their defense of conscience, and he dismissed the notion that any political claim or moral qualm should lessen their punishment. Such a stance would be

in ill accord with the legal history of this country if it should be understood for one moment that justice is not administered properly because of some reason put up by an accused person which is not a reason for doing what he did, but merely an opinion which he says is the basis of his offence.589

No matter the opinion, no matter what individual conscience dictated, the fire on Llŷn was an illegal act. Lewis was therefore sent directly to the West London prison at

Wormwood Scrubs. From there, he wrote his wife, Margaret, soon after arriving, and reassured her that his life would be

a little spartan but very like the life of a monk in a hard-working monastery of peasant or working-class celibates. There is no lack of food, there is company of every sort, and the life is most curious, – not at all unlike the life of a private in the army in 1914–15.590

Throughout his incarceration, Lewis encouraged his family and friends to keep faith with the principles of the Nationalist movement. It was their duty, he told them, to keep him abreast of “all the news possible about yourselves, and all about Wales”.591 For upon his

588 As cited in Jenkins, 115. 589 Ibid. 590 Saunders Lewis, Letter to Margaret Gilcriest Lewis (20 January 1937). Saunders Lewis, Letters to Margaret Gilcriest. Mair Saunders Jones, Ned Thomas, and Harri Pritchard Jones, eds. (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1993) 577–8: 578. 591 Ibid. 175 release, he was resolved to redouble his efforts and “make the Nationalist Party a real force in Wales”.592

Though the three Welshmen were found guilty, the trial in London was not a failure for the Plaid Cymru. By drawing greater public attention to the principles of their cause, the trial had, in fact, already made Welsh nationalism a force in British politics. As the historian John Davies notes, the fire and the legal battle “aroused deep feelings in

Wales”, feelings that were largely sympathetic to the stand Lewis and his accomplices had taken.593 Some now even believed that “nationalism [would soon] become a mass movement”.594 Membership in the Plaid Cymru did surge in early 1937, and according to one writer, “the circulation of the Party’s papers rose” as well.595 The harsh treatment

Lewis and his accomplices had received had backfired. Even the British government had taken notice, and Parliament began to review the Tudor-era language statutes governing the courts. Lewis’ use of Welsh had pushed the country towards reform, and five years later, the Welsh Courts Act of 1942 was passed. Welsh was now officially allowed as a legal language, and the Act provided precisely what Lewis was first denied: “the provision and employment of interpreters of the Welsh and English languages for the

592 Saunders Lewis, Letter to Ellen Thomas (19 May 1937). Saunders Lewis, Letters to Margaret Gilcriest, 602–4: 604. 593 John Davies, “1914–39: The Somme, Byrnmawr and Penyberth”, 576. 594 Ibid. “Although the precise figures are sketchy (even prominent supporters were negligent when it came to paying their fees), Nationalist Party membership rose by a few hundred, and the number of branches increased from 72 to 94 between August 1936 and August 1937; but the enthusiasm did not translate itself into electoral success. The party organizer, J. E. Jones, making the best of a bad job, spoke of the late 1930s as a period of ‘consistent strong slow progress.’” Chapman, “Theism’ Last Hurrah: Saunders Lewis’s Caernarfon Court Speech of 1936”, 25. 595 Jenkins, xiv–xv. 176 purposes of proceedings before courts in Wales.”596 Thus though Lewis and his associates were jailed for “malicious damage”, their defense had exposed a weakness in the British legal system—a weakness they exploited to advance the recognition of the

Welsh nation, its language and its Roman character.597

Among those fascinated by the trial was the painter and then little-known poet named David Jones (1895–1974). Inspired by the example Lewis and his friends had set,

Jones believed the fire on Llŷn was an “heroic act”.598 The devotion Lewis had shown the nation and the Welsh language moved him deeply, so much so that only a few months after the trial ended, Jones tried to contact Lewis while he was still incarcerated in West

London. The two men had no prior acquaintance but in June 1937, Jones wrote to Lewis’ wife, thinking that in his own small way, he could help alleviate the “trying circumstances” of her husband’s imprisonment.599 What he had to offer was an important

596 The 1942 law was repealed with the Welsh Language Acts of both 1967 and 1993. The status of Welsh as a legal language, however, was not compromised but bolstered by these later laws. “The Welsh language may be used in any court in Wales by any party or witness who considers that he would otherwise be at any disadvantage by reason of his natural language of communication being Welsh.” The full content of the Welsh Courts Act, 1942 may be read at: www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo6/5- 6/40/contents. 597 On the failure of the Plaid Cymru to build on this surge of support, see John Davies, 576–7 and D. Hywel Davies, 207–19. 598 As in personal letter from Jones’ biographer, Thomas Dilworth, to the author (March 2012). To be discussed in Dilworth’s forthcoming biography of David Jones from Jonathan Cape, Ltd. 599 David Jones, Letter to Margaret Gilcriest Lewis (21 June 1937) MS File #22724E, folio 91. Archive at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. Jones followed the news of Lewis’ fate in the Times and in London’s Catholic Herald. On June 4th 1937, while reporting on Lewis’ dismissal from Swansea University, the Herald noted Lewis’ ill health—he had just “undergone an operation at Wormwood Scrubs.” The report encouraged all “his co-religionists to pray that the recovery may be rapid and complete.” See “Mr. Saunders Lewis, An Appeal And An Explanation”. Catholic Herald (4 June 1937) 2. For a thorough account of the correspondence of Jones and Lewis, see Geraint Evans, “The Correspondence of Saunders Lewis and David Jones.” Thesis, University College of Swansea, 1987. Evans is currently preparing a scholarly edition of these letters for the University of Wales Press. 177 gift, a copy of his first literary work, In Parenthesis, just published that month by Faber and Faber. “Dear Mrs Saunders Lewis”, he wrote,

I wanted to send to your husband a copy of my book, just published called ‘In Parenthesis’…I do not know your husband personally but I very much wish to give him this copy of my book if he will accept it. It deals largely with Wales & might interest him.600

Margaret Lewis thanked Jones, and she forwarded the message on to her husband immediately. Though he was in prison, Saunders Lewis had heard much of In

Parenthesis, and he was anxious to read it, having seen reviews which hailed it a

“masterpiece” of modern literature.601 Yet because of established policy at Wormwood

Scrubs, the book was not sent to him directly. Upon release all inmates were expected to leave behind any books they had received while in prison. Not wanting to lose Jones’ gift, Lewis asked his wife to keep it for him until he returned home later that summer.602

David Jones was “honoured” to hear how “cheered” Lewis had been by even the thought of his gift.603 He sent In Parenthesis on to Margaret Lewis at their home on the

Isle of Anglesey.604 And there, less than two weeks after his release, Saunders Lewis finally sat down to read the book. Before doing so, however, he penned Jones this grateful letter.

600 Jones, Letter to Margaret Gilcriest Lewis (21 June 1937) folio 91. 601 “I’m so glad about David Jones”, Lewis told his wife, “Read the book yourself – it may be (I read) difficult, but the reviews say it’s a masterpiece.” Saunders Lewis, Letter to Margaret Gilcriest Lewis (19 July 1937). Saunders Lewis, Letters to Margaret Gilcriest, 625–7: 626. 602 “Please ask David Jones to send the very good book which he has written to you as Saunders does not want to lose it – he has to leave all his books in prison – not allowed to take any away with him.” Dr. Gwent Jones, Letter to Margaret Gilcriest Lewis, (4 July 1937). Saunders Lewis, Letters to Margaret Gilcriest, 618–20: 619. 603 David Jones, Letter to Margaret Gilcriest Lewis, (9 July 1937) MS File #22724E, folio 92. National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. 604 David Jones, Letter to Margaret Gilcriest Lewis, (13 August 1937) MS File #22724E, folio 93. National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. 178

We had our big show of welcome and speechifying yesterday, and from the moment of coming out of prison I had to be preparing for that. But now that it’s over I propose at once to read “In Parenthesis”. In fact I shall begin after posting this, because the mist and rain are surging towards me over Holyhead mountain, and only a near foreground of shining grass and much protruding grey rock and one grey-rock farm and one whitewashed cottage are visible. It’s to be a soaked afternoon of Autumn.605

With this note, Lewis began not only In Parenthesis but a friendship with David Jones that would last until the poet’s death in October 1974. Throughout their long association,

Jones and Lewis intimately discussed and debated contemporary matters touching on the religion, art and politics of modern Wales. Both men, as converts to Roman Catholicism, shared not only a common creed but many similar artistic and cultural concerns. “We have,” Jones later explained to Lewis,

a mutual involvement and understanding – a sort of cyd cydgyfarfyddiad – (if that’s the right right word) where those three highly complex & usually dissevered ‘things’: the res Walliae, the Catholic religion, culture and ars, are intermuddled. You are the only person among my various good & dear friends to whom I can share without any chance of misunderstanding on 606 those three matters where those three matters conjoin so to say, conjoin.

And yet, though they both were likeminded with regard to these “dissevered ‘things’”,

Jones proved to be much more politically cautious. While he admired those who had set out to save the Welsh language, he regarded the nationalism of the Plaid Cymru as “very

605 Saunders Lewis, Letter to David Jones (12 September 1937) David Jones Papers, CT 1/4, folio 4. National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. 606 David Jones, Letter to Saunders Lewis (3 December 1967) MS File #22724E, folio 50–1. National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. The Welsh term, Cydgyfarfyddiad, denotes a “meeting-together”, a “concurrence” or a “conjoining”. See its entry in Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, A Dictionary of the Welsh Language, Volume 1: A–Ffysur. R. J. Thomas, ed. (Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 1967). See also Hannah Dentinger’s account of Lewis and Jones’ friendship in “‘Cydgyfarfyddiad’ Cymreig”. Y Traethodydd (2004) Vol. 159, 222–34. 179 far from satisfactory”.607 “There’s no real cutting edge”, he once told Lewis.608 The party’s aims while “well meaning” seemed to be, he thought, like all “political things”

“so boring & superficial, in fact, damned silly”.609

Jones’ lack of political enthusiasm was not born out of indifference towards

Wales. On the contrary, from a very young age, he possessed what he described as a

“Welsh affinity”, a devotion which drove him during adolescence to start a concentrated study of the myth, history and literature of Wales.610 Many times, from as early as age 16,

Jones even attempted to teach himself Welsh but fluency always eluded him. As he later explained to Lewis,

I don’t can’t speak or read Welsh & being inordinately stupid with regard to learning languages, find it hard to conquer – I do wish I had known

607 David Jones, Letter to Saunders Lewis (23 December 1961) MS File #22724E, folio 37. National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. 608 Ibid. 609 Ibid. Despite the fact that Jones found politics “damned silly”, his support for Welsh nationalism was often assumed. In November 1963, he was even asked to stand for election as president of the London branch of the Plaid Cymru. Jones told Lewis that though he “felt it an honour”, he was “wholly unsuited for such an office”, for he was not even member of the party. See Jones’ account in a letter to Saunders Lewis (23 November 1961) MS File #22724E, folio 45–6. National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. 610 On his “affinity”, see David Jones, “Some notes on the difficulties of one writer of Welsh affinity whose language is English”, in draft, quoted in “XVII”, letter to Vernon Watkins (11 April 1962). David Jones, Letters to Vernon Watkins. Ruth Pryor, ed. (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1976) 55–65. Later revised and published posthumously in David Jones, The Dying Gaul and Other Writings (London: Faber and Faber, 1978) 30–4. Thomas Dilworth’s forthcoming full-length biography of Jones documents the poet’s early reading on Wales. Dilworth notes that his interest in Welsh history was first “encouraged by his father, who gave him Owen M. Edwards’ Wales in the series called ‘The Story of the Nations’ and, sometime before 1915, John Lloyd’s great two-volume A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest. This book he would value as the best history of Wales in English. He admired it for being ‘civilised and scholarly’, for combining ‘warmth of feeling and accuracy’ and because Lloyd writes with ‘a certain degree of charm & amusement’ and with ‘strong emotion’ that is ‘held totally in check’…For his sixteenth birthday, his father gave him A Pocket Dictionary of Welsh-English and John Rhys and David Brynmor-Jones’s The Welsh People. The latter was David’s first broad grounding in Welsh history and would remain important to him. At nearly 700 pages, it is a full account of the Welsh from pre-Roman, continental beginnings to 1900…By 1911, Jones was reading the Welsh triplets, Charlotte Guest’s translation of The Mabinogion, and Girandus Cambrensis’s Itenerary and Description of Wales and over the years he would acquire different translations.” See also Thomas Dilworth, “Pre-War (1895–1914)”. David Jones in the Great War (London: Enitharmon Press, 2012) 19–34: 25. 180

knew it from when I was young – it’s so awfully hard to learn any language – however much one’s desires impel one to try – when one is middle-aged, at least I find it so. The more memory seems to get so faulty as one gets older.611

Jones failed to learn the language, not because he was “inordinately stupid”, but because he was not taught Welsh as a child. Long before his birth, the language of his father’s people had been stamped out of the family.612 For this reason, he grew up a “Londoner, brought up entirely in an English setting”.613 Yet still the “Muse of History”, he confessed, “…allows me to be accounted one half Welsh, if one half Cockney, with a dash of Italian.”614 This mixed pedigree had made Jones feel Welsh, and as such, he refused to be discouraged by the barrier of language that lay between him and his family’s past.615

[T]hose of us who chance to be in some way ‘Welsh’ cannot…do other than continue to draw upon such fragmentary bits and pieces of our national heritage as may be available to us in an alien tongue.616

611 David Jones, Letter to Saunders Lewis (22 July 1948) MS File #22724E, folio 1–2. National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. 612 This remained a source of bitterness for Jones throughout his life: “It is impossible to explain the sense of frustration,—genuine bitterness, grief is not too strong a word. Of course one can feel the way the language behaves and perceive its felicities and be read in Welsh history and the splendour of its chwedlau and realise the unique character of its complex metric. But that is not to know the language.” David Jones, “Yr Iaith”. Planet (January 1974) Vol. 21, 3–5: 4. 613 Jones, “Some notes on the difficulties of one writer of Welsh affinity whose language is English”, 56. 614 David Jones, “Address to the University of Wales” (July 1960) given in absentia at Bangor, unpublished typescript sent to Saunders Lewis (14 August 1960) MS File #22724E, folio 21–7: 21–2. National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. See the Appendix II to this dissertation for a transcription of this address, pp. 279–82. 615 “My father had come to London in the eighteen-eighties and by the time of my childhood in the first decade of this present century, if his Welsh was greatly eroded, he sang songs in Welsh, and the clear- vowelled Cymraeg and perfect pitch without any sign of effort filled me with wonder, certainly with pride, and a kind of awe. He also told us stories current in the north-eastern corner of the Welsh lands from which he had come. It was that sense of ‘otherness’ that was the heritage of he handed on to me.” David Jones, “A Letter”. Poetry Wales (Winter 1972) Vol. 8, No. 3, 5–9: 8. 616 Jones, “Some notes on the difficulties of one writer of Welsh affinity whose language is English”, 58. 181

Though Jones would stay linguistically cut off all his life, he remained hopeful that somehow he might still show “in English, what, at its subtlest & best and most incantational is locked up in the ancient tongue of Britain.”617

______

By the late 1930s, as the tide of nationalist fervor began to rise across Wales,

David Jones became increasingly preoccupied with unlocking the strength of Welsh in his literary art. He hoped he could expose in verse what he later called the “Welsh strains in the English genius”, for even though Saunders Lewis and the Plaid Cymru had tried to save the Welsh language, Wales was becoming a more secular, less rural and much more

Anglicized society.618 And yet, in spite of this, David Jones was convinced that the essence of Welsh civilization remained rooted in the ancient forces which had first shaped it in late antiquity.619 Like Lewis, Jones believed that the Britons of early Wales had absorbed a great deal of the language and classical culture brought by imperial

Rome. The “three or four centuries of Roman occupation”, he later explained, “quite obviously brought with them the deposits of the Hellenistic-Roman world & these infiltrated the indigenous ‘Celtic’ culture”.620 Rome’s infiltration had been so complete,

Jones thought, that even now the Welsh people still possessed what he defined as a

617 Ibid., 61. 618 Ibid., 59. See John Davies, 565. 619 On Jones’ ‘obsession’ with Wales as an historic site, see Thomas Dilworth, “Antithesis of Place in the Poetry and Life of David Jones”. Locations of Literary Modernism, Region and Nation in British and American Modernist Poetry. Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 66–88. 620 David Jones, Letter to Michael Richey (19–27 April 1965), David Jones Archive at the Burns Library, Boston College. 182

“Brythoneg-Rhufeinig link”, a living connection to the achievements and cultural materia of Greece and Rome.621 “We”, Jones later told Lewis,

emerged from within the Roman imperium & are the only people left in this island who did. In fact our native princes spring sprung from a line of Latin officials, &, in contrast to Gaul, the Brittonic speech continued side by side of Latin throughout the 4 centuries of Roman occupation.—we are the heirs of romanity.’622

And yet, even though Romanity remained alive in Wales, Jones felt its strength was now beginning to wear thin. Despite the small gains which the Welsh nationalists had made in

1937, “an astounding disregard of the historic roots of the Cymry” had emerged across

Britain. As Jones saw it, for over 1500 years the “Brythoneg-Rhufeinig link” had bound

Welsh identity to a central Roman source, but now that link to a classical patrimony was under threat, he believed, from “anglicizers” intent on “vernacularizing” all things into the “like Fourme” of English modernity.623 “Fuit Ilium” had once again been declared

621 “Brythoneg-Rhufeinig” meaning in Welsh: “Brythonic-Roman”. David Jones, Letter to Saunders Lewis (12, [11?] October 1971) MS File #22724E, folio 73. National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. Jones also felt that what remained of ancient Greece could only be grasped through the via Romana, the Roman and Christian world of late antiquity: “I love Greek art better than anything,” he once told a friend, “…but, owing to a vast complex of causes, our direct connection with it comes through Rome. It’s rather like the business of religion. Quite apart from the truth or untruth of it, it seems to me that only by becoming a Catholic can one establish continuity with Antiquity. I’ve put this badly, but you’ll see what I mean. We can’t escape the via Romana – not if we are Western men.” David Jones, “Eighth Letter to Richard Shirley Smith” (13 November 1961). Ten Letters to Two Young Artists Working in Italy. Derek Shiel, ed. (London: Agenda Editions, 1996) 40–42: 40. 622 Jones, Letter to Saunders Lewis (12, [11?] October 1971) MS File #22724E, folio 73. On Romanitas, see also footnote #530 of this chapter. 623 Jones, Letter to Saunders Lewis (12, [11?] October 1971) folio 73. On Jones’ view of “vernacularization”, see David Jones, Letter to Saunders Lewis (4 January 1962) MS File #22724E, folio 38–9; David Jones, Letter to Saunders Lewis (3, 5 October 1963) MS File #22724E, folio 47; David Jones, Letter to Saunders Lewis (3 December 1967) MS File #22724E, folio 50–1; David Jones, Letter to Saunders Lewis (12, [11?] October 1971), folio 73. National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. 183 over Wales, and no amount of political persuasion, it seemed, could save the country’s unique genius.624

Nevertheless, as Jones began composing a new poem he entitled The Anathémata, he devoted himself to studying Wales’ Roman roots and its ancient Celtic character. He closely read Collingwood and Myres’ Roman Britain and the English Settlements (1936), and through it, he came to believe that ancient civilization in Britain comprised a nexus of competing cultural and linguistic forces. Conflicts between these forces—between the native and the foreign, between the Briton, the Roman and the Anglo-Saxon—had slowly merged to form a common synthesis, a unity Jones would later call the “complex heritage” of modern Wales.625 What Jones admired most in Collingwood and Myres was not their belief that the Britons were more than “a mere subject race” under Roman rule.

It was rather the specific account of the era which Myres alone had written in the book’s concluding chapter.626 There he suggested that the collapse of Roman Britain was marked by too many conflicts—conflicts too complex and too local—for the broad analysis of the modern historian. These times, “the darkest centuries in English history”, Myres wrote,

…cannot be portrayed without serious distortion in those broad and rational sequences of cause and effect so beloved by the historian. The conflicts are too complex, issues too obscure, the cross-currents too numerous, the decisions too local, to make possible the appreciation of

624 Jones often used this phrase from Aeneid (Book 2.325) to express a certain cultural pessimism about the fortunes of Wales, both past and present. See David Jones, Letter to Saunders Lewis (11, 22, 25 December 1955) MS File #22724E, folio 11. National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. See also Jones’ 1959 watercolor inscription, Cara Wallia Derelicta. It contains a further allusion to this line in the Aeneid. See Appendix II for a reprint of this inscription, pp. 283–4. On Jones’ interest in Virgil, see also Dilworth, David Jones in the Great War, 94; as well as René and Joan Hague, A Virgilian By-Road From the Anathemata (Shanagarry, 1977). 625 Jones, “Address to the University of Wales” (1960), folio 25. 626 See David Jones, “To T. F. B, 16 May 1942”. Dai Greatcoat, A Self-portrait of David Jones in His Letters. René Hague, ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1980) 118–19. 184

any single formula to their solution; and it is at least reassuring sometimes to remember that, if we found such a formula, we should unquestionably be wrong. Uno itinere non potest perveniri ad tam grande secretum.627

Inadequate evidence hid the ruin of Roman Britain from the eyes of modernity. And nothing, Myres believed, could help clarify “the flotsam and jetsam left by the ebb-tide of

Roman imperialism”.628 The “character of the times” was too obscure and too unyielding.629 Thus if modern readers were, he wrote, “to leave the subject with little more than a blurred impression in our minds we can none the less maintain that that blurred impression represents more faithfully than any clear-cut picture the spirit of the age.”630

With Saunders Lewis, David Jones frequently discussed this “blurred impression” which the Romans had left behind. In their correspondence, the two men debated current research on the matter, considering topics that ranged from geography and languages to the local aspects of Brittonic tribal history. But, above all, Jones felt that this account by

Myres was of great significance. It showed for the first time, he told Lewis, that the once accepted understanding of Roman Britain was at last beginning to change.

Myres’ remarks had injected a needed measure of skepticism into the dominant pattern previously established in Victorian histories of the period. “One used to think”, Jones

627 R. G. Collingwood and J. N. L. Myres, Roman Britain and the English Settlements. Second edition. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937) Book 5: 455–6, partially excerpted by Jones in “To T. F. B, 16 May 1942”, Dai Greatcoat, 119. Myres’ Latin is excerpted from the appeal Quintus Aurelius Symmachus made to Valentinian II in 384 AD. Symmachus wrote the emperor pleading that the pagan Altar of Victory be restored to the Roman Curia. His petition was denied and later rebutted by Ambrose, Bishop of Milan. See section 3.10 of “Symmachi Relatio III” in Der Streit um den Victoriaaltar. Die dritte Relatio des Symmachus und die Briefe 17, 18 und 57 des Mailänder Bischofs Ambrosius. Richard Klein, trans. and ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftlische Buchgesellschaft, 1972) 98–113: 104–6. 628 Collingwood and Myres, Roman Britain and the English Settlements, Book 5: 451. 629 Ibid., 455–6. 630 Ibid. 185 wrote,

the general picture of that period of sub-Roman Britain & the [Germanic] invasions as accepted by the reputable and academic authority more or less established. I mean Robin Hodgkin’s two vol. work on A. S. England up to King Alfred published in the early 1930s did not greatly or hardly at all change the pattern one had from the last century’s historians – Freeman, Green & Co. *[I mean (Hodgkin’s work) enormously developed the details & drew on the new archaeological evidence & is a most scholarly piece of work & beautifully illustrated but the main pattern was mostly unchanged].631

Because of Myres’ work, the main pattern of British history could no longer be seen as a clear “transition…from the Roman culture of the later Empire through sub-Romanism to a Celtic and Christian renaissance”.632 The nineteenth-century historian, E. A. Freeman, had once declared that, “No dream of ingenious men is more groundless than that which would trace the franchises of English cities to a Roman source”.633 But Jones felt that now there was solid ground on which to dream, for in Wales, at least, the end of Roman influence had not come so quickly or so cleanly. Not all aspects of classical antiquity had

631 David Jones, Letter to Saunders Lewis (3, 5 October 1964) MS File #22724E, folio 47. National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. Jones names Edward Augustus Freeman (1823–1892) and John Richard Green (1837–1883), each of whom insisted that the fifth-century “English conquest” of Britain caused the “destruction of all Roman life” on the island. “Britain was”, Green claimed, “almost the only province of the Empire where Rome died into a vague tradition of the past. The whole organization of government and society disappeared with the people who used it. Roman roads indeed still led to desolate cities. Roman camps still crowned hill and down…but Rome was gone…its law, literature, its manners, its faith, went with it.” Freeman wrote likewise that “[t]he arts of Rome perished utterly as the language and the religion of Rome...The laws of Rome perished utterly; they exercised no influence upon our insular jurisprudence…The municipal institutions of the Roman towns in Britain utterly perished”. John Richard Green, History of the English People (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1878–1880) Vol. 1: 32; see also Edward Augustus Freeman, The History of the Norman Conquest of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1867–1876) Vol. 1: 17–18. 632 R. H. Hodgkins, “The End of Roman Britain”. A History of the Anglo-Saxons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935) Vol. 1, 37–73: 72. Jones first read Hodgkins’ work in the summer of 1935. He found it was “too much of the Teutonic school to please me…he is unable to be anything but superior about the Welsh; it comes out in the oddest ways.” David Jones, “To H. J. G. 20 July 1935”. Dai Greatcoat, 75–6: 75. 633 Freeman, The History of the Norman Conquest of England, Vol. 1: 18. 186 been destroyed in the rise of Anglo-Saxon civilization.634 Romanitas remained among the

Welsh Britons, and now, Jones thought, a greater number of historians and linguists were drawing attention to that fact.635 The shift which began “in Myers [sic] contribution to

Roman Britain”, he wrote, introduced

a more definite change in [F. M.] Stenton, & in Peter Hunter Blair’s Cambridge paper-back An Introduction to A.S. [Anglo-Saxon] England [where] some of the fruits of re-questioning show themselves.636

Both Stenton and Blair agreed that obscurity had clouded this era in British history. But that fact alone did not prove what Freeman, Green and even Hodgkins had previously assumed, namely that “Rome was gone” from the religion, law and literature of

Britannia.637 Instead it merely suggested, as Myres observed, that the conflicts of the sub-

Roman age were too local and too complex for the general analysis of modern scholarship. “[W]e shall never now know the truth [about that era]”, Jones told Lewis,

“for instead of more recent specialist research making the ‘pattern’ or ‘lack of pattern’ clearer it makes it much more complex.”638 Contemporary specialists had dispensed with the “pro-‘Anglo-Saxon’” bias of previous research, but, in so doing, they exposed critical flaw in the historical method.639 The “broad and rational sequences of cause and effect so beloved by the historian” could not be relied upon to show the tangle of forces that had

634 Ibid. 635 On the evolving reception of Anglo-Saxon history in the twentieth-century, see Simon Keynes, Introduction, “Changing perceptions of Anglo-Saxon history” in Peter Hunter Blair, An Introduction to Anglo-Saxon England. Third edition. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) xvii–xxxv. 636 Jones refers to F. M. Stenton’s 1943 study, Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford: Clarendon Press), and Peter Hunter Blair’s An Introduction to Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956). Jones, Letter to Saunders Lewis (3, 5 October 1964) MS File #22724E, folio 47. 637 Green, History of the English People, Vol. 1, 32. 638 Jones, Letter to Saunders Lewis (3, 5 October 1964) MS File #22724E, folio 47. 639 Jones, “To H. J. G. 20 July 1935”. Dai Greatcoat, 75. 187 pushed Roman civilization to ruin in Britain.640

Nonetheless, Jones still believed that in that nexus, in “that chaos” of the 5th and

6th centuries, the “complex heritage” of modern Wales was born.641 The Saxons, the

Angles and the Jutes had arrived in Britannia as enemy invaders, but their migration,

Jones argued, did not compromise the primitive “mythos of Wales”.642 On the contrary,

Brittonic civilization remained Roman for some time, having been “intricated (very much so) with our common Western deposit, the mythos of Hellas and of Rome, together with the Aramaean mythos of the Mabinog Iesu”.643 For Jones, it was rather those “blasted

Vikings and the Isamlic [sic] assault of the 7th–8th–9th centuries” that posed a greater threat to “the romanitas of the West”.644 Roman civilization had once adapted itself and merged with the Celtic peoples of Britannia, and Jones believed that the Anglo-Saxon tribes too “could have been assimilated” to the hybrid Romanity of the Welsh Britons.645

As he saw it, civilization in Britain possessed no uncontaminated classical or Celtic source. No native purity—whether racial, ethnic or linguistic—had ever existed on “ynys hon, ‘this island’”, for from antiquity onwards, the country had been shaped by a “subtly meshed” synthesis of Roman, Briton and Anglo-Saxon deposits of language and

640 Collingwood and Myres, Roman Britain and the English Settlements, Book 5: 455. 641 Jones, Letter to Saunders Lewis (3, 5 October 1964) folio 47; Jones, “Address to the University of Wales”, folio 25. 642 Ibid., 24. 643 Ibid. 644 Jones, Letter to Michael Richey (19–27 April 1965). 645 Ibid. On Jones’ view of Anglo-Saxon culture, see Anna Johnson, “Wounded Men and Wounded Trees’: David Jones and the Anglo-Saxon Culture Tangle”. Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination. David Clark and Nicholas Perkins, eds. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010) 89–109. 188 culture.646

Because of this, Jones rejected contemporary Anglophobic claims to Welsh purity for even now “at every possible level”, he told Saunders Lewis, “Englishness, in a thousand small ways, penetrates what remains of ‘Welshness’.”647 Though Jones supported efforts to save the Welsh language from extinction, he felt that the Plaid

Cymru’s call for language purism could not be historically justified. The party, with its bold pledge to restore Welsh and to eradicate English, had offered no practical solution to the problem of language in Wales.648 It ignored the hybrid character of Welsh civilization, disregarding the fact that “the English have been with us for about a millennium and a half, so they can be regarded as naturalized by now.”649 Moreover, for

Jones, the presence of bilingualism in Wales was not a problem. This condition is “in various countries,” he wrote, and is

common enough, and works well enough, so the bilingual thing alone is not insurmountable. But one feels that behind all the real enough and valid enough difficulties and anomalies in Wales, there is still a conscious or unconscious or unadmitted feeling that the survival of Welsh is a matter of

646 Even London itself, he thought, had first arisen as a city of mixed origin: a “Britto-Romanic urbs, Augusta of the Trinobantes – the New Troy of subsequent legend.” See Jones, “Address to the University of Wales”, folio 25. 647 Jones made this remark while discussing Emyr Humphreys’ 1958 novel, A Toy Epic (winner of the Hawthornden Prize that year). He admired this book for its alternating perspectives as well as its realistic account of what it meant to grow up in “the four corners of Wales.” David Jones, Letter to Saunders Lewis (2 June 1959) MS File #22724E, folio 14. National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. See also Emyr Humphreys, A Toy Epic (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1958) 7. 648 Though Jones never became an advocate of the Plaid Cymru, he later supported his friend Valerie Wynne Williams’ bid for parliamentary seat in the constituency of Barry in February 1974. She lost to the Conservative incumbent, Sir Herbert Raymond Gower, by a sizable margin, but Jones wrote a short article to be read during her nomination at the 1974 adoption meeting. But even in this, Jones confessed to knowing “nothing of political affairs, of what policy should or should not be followed, but the only ‘message’ I have is that the Welsh language is what matters. We live in a strange civilization and age. But, as yet, this Brittonic speech still survives. Knowing, as I have said above, the pain of loss, personally experienced, I can but say that for the children the language must be felt as a sacral heritage.” The article was later republished as “Yr Iaith” in Planet (January 1974) Vol. 21, 3–5. 649 Jones, “Address to the University of Wales”, folio 25. 189

indifference, or, in some circles, a positive feeling that the sooner it goes the better.650

What was needed now was not the obliteration of English, but rather a greater knowledge in Wales, and in Britain at large, of “those chancy twists and meanders of history and of quasi-history” which had helped form the country’s hybrid character.651 Common indifference to the “complex heritage” and history of Wales was slowly sapping the country of its unique character, and this, Jones argued, had to be rooted out for “none of us, whoever we are, should neglect to recall those things which have determined what we are.”652

By drawing on the country’s composite heritage, David Jones believed that modern poets could still “under certain circumstances and given a perceptive response, vitalize the things of England.”653 In recent literature, he noted, no lesser invention than the “sprung rhythm” of Gerard Hopkins had been forged from his “study of cynghanedd and his stay in Gwynedd”.654 It was Hopkins’ exposure to Welsh which drove the radical innovation he had achieved in English prosody. Without Welsh poetry, without an understanding of its metrical virtuosity, Hopkins could not have expanded the rhythmic structure of English so drastically. As Jones saw it, he created a “metric of very great felicity, subtlety and strength” not because he chose to cultivate the native strengths of

English, but because he sought out a more ancient, alien tradition found on the “Celtic

650 David Jones, Letter XXII to Aneirin Talfan Davies (10 October 1962). Letters to A Friend. Aneirin Talfan Davies, ed. (Swansea: Christopher Davies, Ltd., 1980) 70–7: 74–5. 651 Jones, “Address to the University of Wales”, folio 25. 652 Ibid., folio 22. 653 Ibid., 26. 654 Ibid. 190 fringe” of British civilization.655 With his verse, Hopkins had proved that modern literary invention could be made from the “hidden things of Wales”, and Jones believed that he too would “vitalize the things of England” by recollecting the “entailed inheritance” of

Welsh civilization.656 However, where Hopkins had used primarily Welsh to increase the range of English meter, Jones was intent on delving deeper into the country’s complex heritage. To depict its hybridized character he felt he needed a new literary idiom for The

Anathémata, a synthetic form of writing that could shape the country’s deep and diverse linguistic history. For Jones, this meant using not only Welsh but also many other ancient and modern languages. Though these languages were now thought foreign to the modern

English ear, they had contributed, as he saw it, to the rise of civilization on the British

Isles. By effectively incorporating their impact in a new idiom, Jones believed The

Anathémata could make better sense of “our tradition”, revealing the “great complex of influences and interactions which have conditioned us all.”657

And yet, Jones was not fluent in any language other than English—not in Welsh, and also not in Greek or Latin, languages whose reception he thought especially critical to the growth of the “Welsh mythos”.658 Unlike some of his contemporaries in Britain, he did not have a public school or a university education.659 He was an art student, and as such, Jones did not read classics at either the Camberwell School of Art (1910–1914) or the Westminster School of Art he attended from 1919 to 1921. By middle age, as he

655 Ibid. 656 Ibid. 657 David Jones, Preface. The Anathémata (London: Faber and Faber, 1952) 9–43: 40. 658 Jones, “Address to the University of Wales”, folio 25. 659 As discussed by John H. Johnston, English Poetry of the First World War: a Study in the Evolution of Lyric and Narrative Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964) 321. 191 began work on The Anathémata, this ignorance of the classics plagued his imagination: “I believe I could be a good writer”, he wrote in 1940, “if I knew all about these root languages but it’s hard otherwise.”660 Much like the Welsh he tried to learn, what Latin and what Greek Jones did retain was entirely unschooled. But still he often wished it were otherwise: “I do wish I knew Latin”, he told a friend in 1945, “I’ve been trying to conjugate the verbs ‘to come’ & ‘to adore’ but it’s all too complicated at 50!”661 Later, when he lamented the cultural amnesia—the “memory-effacing Lethe”—that now afflicted all of British modernity, Jones pointed his finger at himself, and complained bitterly about his inability to read the classics.662 It was, he once told The Guardian, a

“‘terrible ignorance one is trying to make up all the time. I can’t command even one language besides English…If I’d gone to school, at least they’d have taught me Greek and Latin’”663

660 David Jones, Letter to Harman Grisewood (19 March 1940), as cited in Kathleen Staudt, At the Turn of a Civilization: David Jones and Modern Poetics. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994) 130. 661 David Jones, Letter to Louis Bussell (14 March 1945) unpublished manuscript, Burns Library, Boston College. On Jones’ difficulties with Latin, see Jonathan Miles, “Oswald Spengler”. Backgrounds to David Jones: A Study in Sources and Drafts (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1990) 36–64: 45. Jones’ Greek was meager. In 1952 when thanking his friend, the Rev. Desmond Chute, for sending an engraved Greek inscription, he told him: “I can’t read Greek but someone staying in this house translated it for me and I like the sound of it and what it says very much. It’s quite a bit like I tried to say on page 106 of The Ana.” David Jones, Letter to Rev. Desmond Chute (29 December 1952). Inner Necessities, 22–30: 25. 662 Jones, Preface to The Anathémata, 16. 663 David Jones, as quoted by Nesta Roberts, “Sign of the Bear”. The Guardian (17 February 1964) 7. See Appendix II of this dissertation for a transcription of this interview, pp. 276–8. During the 1960s, Jones likened the decline of Latin in the Catholic Church to the loss of Welsh in Britain. He complained specifically about the use of the vernacular at Mass (see Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium – 36.2). “It’s a terrible thought”, he wrote, “that the language of the West, of the Western liturgy, and inevitably the Roman chant, might become virtually extinct...At root, I don’t believe it’s a “religious” matter at all. I believe it’s only part of the Decline of the West. Perhaps I’m talking balls, I don’t know. The kind of arguments used I find highly unsatisfactory, and they have just that same tang that distresses me so over the language of my father’s patria. They prove by statistics that 192

Despite this “terrible ignorance”, Jones remained resolute. And between the years of 1937 and 1952, he slowly completed The Anathémata, putting to work what fragmentary knowledge of Welsh and the classics he had managed to acquire. With phrases drawn from these languages—as well as words he took from French, German and

Anglo-Saxon—Jones created a multilingual version of prosimetrum, a form that evoked what he called the “extraordinary mix-up of the break-up of the phenomenally mixed mess-up of Celtic, Teutonic & Latin elements in the Britain of the early dark ages”.664

His poem was by no means “a history of the Britons nor a history of any sort”, but Jones grounded the work in an epigraph excerpted from Nennius’ Historia Brittonum: coacervavi omne quod inveni, “I have made a heap of all that I could find”.665 Just as

Nennius had composed his history “partly from writings and monuments of the ancient inhabitants of Britain [and] partly from the annals of the Romans and chronicles of the sacred fathers”, Jones stitched his verse together using “mixed data” as well, data he had gathered out of Britain’s deep linguistic history.666 He heaped these fragments up, believing a multilingual form of verse might shed light on the most obscure period in

British history, the era of declining Roman power whose “cross-currents” and local conflicts had earlier eluded the “rational sequences of cause and effect so beloved” by the modern historian.667

the Welsh language is dying and that it has no practical value anyhow. Damn such bloody arguments.” David Jones, Harman Grisewood (6 July 1964). Dai Greatcoat, 205–9: 209. 664 David Jones, Letter to Rev. Desmond Chute (26 January 1953). Inner Necessities, 31–6: 34. 665 Jones, Preface to The Anathémata, 9. 666 Ibid. 667 Collingwood and Myres, Roman Britain and the English Settlements, 456. 193

To achieve clarity—to get at “something of this historic situation”—Jones refused to translate the mixed data he had used into a tidy English vernacular.668 The poem’s idiom had instead to reflect what he called the “halting, broken & complicated and Babel- like” conditions that emerged in the destruction of Roman Britain.669 As such, only

“fractured & fused forms” would best express the confusion and cultural hybridity that dominated the era.670 The age demanded a new experimental idiom, and though Jones was “in no real sense concerned to experiment with words, with forms”, The Anathémata was “determined by the inner necessities of the thing itself.”671 To expose the complex transformation which Romanitas had undergone in Britain, Jones believed that the poem should not sacrifice in translation the foreign “overtones & undertones evoked by the words used.”672 “[N]early all the time”, he told Desmond Chute, “I had to think of how, in certain juxtapositions, this word rather than that would best call up the somewhat complex image required.673 Using the passage below from the work’s third part, “Angle-

Land”, Jones claimed that juxtaposing words from many languages illuminated the hidden pathways of the Roman inheritance.

Past where the ancra-man, deeping his holy rule in the fiendish marsh at the Geisterstunde on Calanngaeaf night heard the bogle-baragouinage. Crowland-diawliaidd Wealisc-man lingo speaking?

668 Jones, Letter to Rev. Desmond Chute (26 January 1953) Inner Necessities, 34. 669 Ibid. 670 Ibid. 671 David Jones, Letter to Rev. Desmond Chute (19 December 1952). Inner Necessities, 22–30: 24. 672 Ibid. 673 Ibid. 194

or Britto-Romani gone diaboli? or Romanity gone Wealis?674

In this excerpt, the poem depicts the waste moors on Crowland, where the “ancra-man”, the hermit, Saint Guthlac, settled among the fens in 699 A.D. There, according to legend,

Guthlac struggled with demons—demons who tormented him by murmuring in Old

Brythonic, the primitive tongue once widely spoken across Roman Britain.675 With the rise of Anglo-Saxon, this language had all but disappeared, but the hermit, however, heard its strange pitch on the marshes, and he thought it, according to the poem, the babble, “the bogle-baragouinage” of devils. What Guthlac had encountered was not the execration of demons, the diawliaidd of primitive Brittania come again, but a living remnant of the Britto-Romani, the once powerful people who had been driven out from

England, where for over four centuries they had absorbed Romanitas and merged the

Celtic with the classical.

By setting Latin, Welsh, Anglo-Saxon, German and French against each other in this passage of the poem, Jones attempted to show how Welsh Romanitas had been translated and communicated even amid the rise of Barbaria in Anglo-Saxon England.676

According to the poem, what remained of the Roman tradition had been driven into exile.

It had now “gone Wealis”, pushed out on to the wastelands of Crowland where Romanity was passed down only amongst Welsh outlaws dwelling on the Celtic fringe of the

674 Jones, “Angle-Land”. The Anathémata (London: Faber and Faber, 1952) 110–15: 112–13. 675 As recounted by Felix in section 34 of the Vita Sancti Guthlaci Auctore Felice. See Felix's Life of Saint Guthlac: Texts, Translation and Notes. Bertram Colgrave, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956) 108–12; see also John Rhys, “Race in Folklore and Myth”. Celtic Folklore, Welsh and Manx, Vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901) 643–88: 676–7; as well as Kenneth Jackson’s analysis in Language and History in Early Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) 235–6. 676 On the multilingualism of this passage, see Paul Robichaud’s chapter, “Making the Past Present: Modernism and the Middle Ages”. Making the Past Present: David Jones, the Middle Ages & Modernism (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007) 157–62. 195

Anglo-Saxon settlements. Employing a series of multilingual parallels, Jones reflected in his diction the shift in culture and language which had overtaken Britannia following the collapse of Roman rule.

Is Marianus wild Meirion? is Sylvánus Urbigéna’s son? has toga’d Rhufon (gone Actaéon) come away to the Wake in the bittern's low aery? along with his towny Patricius gone the wilde Jäger?

From the fora to the forests. Out from gens Romulum into the Weal-kin dinas-man gone aethwlad cives gone wold-men . . . from Lindum to London bridges broken down.677

What once was distinctively Latinate Jones scattered into new linguistic forms, forms of

Welsh, English, French and German. The “toga’d Rhufon”—the urbane Roman whom

Jones recognized as the “dinas-man”—has been driven from the center of imperial power. And like Actaeon, the man turned stag on Mount Cithaeron, he now appears transformed, “forced”, as René Hague has argued, “back into a life of hunted and hunter.”678 Likewise, the “towny Patricius [has] gone the wilde Jäger”, and Sylvánus too—a Latin toponymic denoting the woodlands—has been pushed out of the city even

677 Jones, “Angle-Land”. The Anathémata (London: Faber and Faber, 1952) 110–15: 112–13. 678 René Hague, A Commentary on The Anathemata of David Jones (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977) 138–9; See also Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 3: 162–205. “Dinas” means “city” in modern Welsh, but the word has roots in the Welsh for “fort” or “citadel.” For reference, see Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, A Dictionary of the Welsh Language, Volume 1: A–Ffysur. R. J. Thomas, ed. (Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 1967). 196 though he remains “Urbigéna’s son”, the offspring of a “city-born” mother. The rise of

Anglo-Saxon civilization had irrevocably altered, both geographically and linguistically, the intricate synthesis of the Roman and the Brythonic. And in these lines, Jones dispersed the Roman tradition into new and uncharted forms of language and culture. The gens Romulum had become aethwlad, “outlawed” on an island country where their classical inheritance was now, bit by bit, being “subtly meshed” and transformed by the

“Weal-kin” of early medieval England.679

By striating this passage with many foreign borrowings, Jones stretched his idiom across the “densely wooded, inherited and entailed domains” of language in Britain.680 In so doing, he fashioned a macaronic form of poetry that functioned, as Christopher

Dawson once told him, like the Hisperic Latin of sub-Roman Britain.681 The Celts of that age, Dawson explained, were highly inventive with their Latin, making up

‘new words because they liked the sound of them, whereas with you it is a question of increasing the density & meaning. Yet all the same there is a resemblance and I think it would be easy to establish stylistic parallels between Hisperic Latin’…‘and Davidic English.’682

679 For reference, see the entry for “aethwlad” in Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, A Dictionary of the Welsh Language, Volume 1: A–Ffysur. On the decision to contract Romulorum to the unusual genitive form, Romulum, see David Jones, Letter to Desmond Chute (26 January 1953). Inner Necessities, 31, 35n. 680 Ibid., 34; Jones, Preface to The Anathémata, 20. 681 “Christopher Dawson…said he thought Ana in some ways used the English language rather as the 6th Cent. Celts used Latin. He then asked if this was deliberate on my part! Dear Xtopher, he always thinks that chaps are as learned as he is himself. I fear I don’t know at all what the 6th Cent. Celts did to the Latin language. But I’ve no doubt the analogy is pertinent and meaningful, for I’ve never known him to make a wrong guess yet, not where historical comparisons were involved”. David Jones, Letter to Rev. Desmond Chute (4 February 1953). Inner Necessities, 45–7: 46. See also Miles, “Oswald Spengler”. Backgrounds to David Jones: A Study in Sources and Drafts, 46–8. 682 Jones, Letter to Rev. Desmond Chute (4 February 1953). Inner Necessities, 46. “According to Nora Chadwick in a passage marked by Jones, Hisperic Latin ‘consists of a highly specialized and fantastic vocabulary containing a large foreign element and an extremely artificial figurative style combined with alliteration’. Certainly this suggests ‘parallels’ with ‘Davidic English’.” Miles, 47. 197

Nowhere is the stylistic parallel Dawson detected perhaps more apparent than in the hybrid neologisms and “hyphenated forms” Jones created.683 In the passage above, the word “Weal-kin” is a “germane example”, for as Jones himself noted, to get the literal meaning needed for this verse, he could have simply written Wealcyn, the Anglo-Saxon word for “Welsh race” or “Welsh people”.684 But to do this, he thought would have marred the poem with “a dead word, [a] student’s word”. “It would have been just a straight A. S. [Anglo-Saxon] word”, he explained,

taken from any Anglo-Saxon document…but by hyphenating Weal with ‘kin’, the word can be made to take on a certain life, because we still use the word ‘kin’ and can’t see it without thinking of ‘kith’, whereas cyn is remote.685

Alternatively, Jones could have translated it “‘Welshmen’ or ‘Welsh folk’”.686 But this too, he thought, “would have given no historic undertone, or, in the case of ‘Welsh folk’ a rather bogus, or ‘poetic’ or dated feeling.”687 Instead, by joining an Anglo-Saxon root to a more familiar modern word, Jones believed he could complicate notions of the native and the foreign, compressing in a single compound the “Babel-like” character that defined sub-Roman Britain. In doing so, he syntactically scattered the gens Romulum, pushing its pure Latinity out into a neologism whose mixed origin and meshed “density & meaning”

683 Jones, Letter to Rev. Desmond Chute (26 January 1953). Inner Necessities, 34. 684 For reference, see “wealh” and “cyn” in An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary: Based on the Manuscript Collections of the Late Joseph Bosworth. Thomas Northcote Toller, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898) 1173 and 183. See also “-cyn” in An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary: Based on the Manuscript Collections of the Late Joseph Bosworth: Supplement. Thomas Northcote Toller, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921) 761; and Jackson, Language and History in Early Britain, 227–8. 685 Jones, Letter to Rev. Desmond Chute (26 January 1953) Inner Necessities, 34. 686 Ibid. 687 Ibid. 198 gathered within itself the metamorphic history of Britain’s classical tradition.688

______

Following the outbreak of World War II, David Jones grew increasingly wary of making public statements about current events and political debate. Although he was sympathetic to many of the ideas espoused by his friend, Saunders Lewis, Jones made no mention of Welsh nationalism in his poetry.689 In the preface to The Anathémata, he did not discuss any popular cause of the day, refusing even to comment on the distaste he felt for contemporary British politics. The Anathémata, as he intended it, was not a crude screed against the banality of English modernity. Nevertheless, from the beginning, Jones understood that even in this “complex phase of a phenomenally complex civilization”, the writing of poetry remained profoundly political.690 In the preface he wrote:

When rulers seek to impose a new order upon any such group belonging to one or other of those more primitive culture-phases, it is necessary for those rulers to take into account the influence of the poets as recalling something loved and embodying an ethos inimical to the imposition of that new order.691

Modern Britain was now “far removed” from a time when “the poet was explicitly and by profession the custodian, rememberer, embodier, and voice of the mythus”, but still,

Jones argued, poetry remained “dangerous” for it possessed the authority to “evoke” and

688 Jones, Letter to Rev. Desmond Chute (4 February 1953). Inner Necessities, 46. 689 Though Jones never became an ardent advocate of Welsh-Wales nationalism, Saunders Lewis did admire the multilingualism poetry, for it made “us more aware”, he wrote, “of life’s richly meshed complexities”. After hearing an excerpt of The Anathémata read on the BBC in 1958, Lewis told Jones “how very much I was moved by [the poem]. And you were well served; the production was sensitive and human, Cockney voices and Welsh and plain chant all made an understanding [a] unity of your poem, a reflection of all you were putting together in your lines. Yes, it was good.” Saunders Lewis, Letter to David Jones (7 April 1958) folio 18. David Jones Papers, CT 1/4, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. See also Saunders Lewis, “Epoch and Artist”. Agenda, David Jones Special Issue (Spring- Summer 1967) Vol. 5, Nos. 1–3, 112–15. 690 Jones, Preface to The Anathémata, 21. 691 Ibid. 199

“recall” the ethos of a previous age—an ethos whose fragments could still pattern the present day.692 The task of poet, as Jones saw it, was to embody what remained of that ethos, to “propagand” its fullness, however inimical it might appear to the “imposition of

[a] new order”.693 In this sense, Jones insisted that poetry “is inevitably propaganda”, not political pamphleteering but a “real formal expression [which] propagands the reality which caused those forms and their content to be.”694

To propagand the reality of Romanitas in modern Wales, Jones believed that his verse had to bear witness to the complex reception which that tradition had endured throughout British history. The Rome of The Anathémata was thus depicted, as D. S.

Carne-Ross has argued, as both “pagan and imperial Rome and also Christian

Rome…Rome did not spring into existence ex nihilo and the poem takes proper care of

Rome’s relation to Greece and the ancient Near East.”695 For Jones, Romanitas was not static. It exists en route, always passing through history and continually being transfigured and translated by it into new hybrid shapes. In Wales it possessed a

“Brythoneg-Rhufeinig” form, and Jones’ work set out to track its development, showing not only Rome’s connection to Greece and the Near East, but its intricate links with the

Briton and Anglo-Saxon deposits which had generated the “subtly meshed” content of

692 Ibid. 693 Borrowing the Greek word Christ used to consecrate bread and wine, Jones insisted that the effect of poetry was “a kind of anamnesis of, i.e. is an effective recalling of, something loved”. Like the transubstantiation accomplished at Mass, Jones believed the poet’s task was to create “a valid sign” in his verse, to embody ancient fragments and make effectual the presence of the past. On the centrality of anamnesis to The Anathémata, see John Heath-Stubbs, “Daughters of Memory: The Anathemata of David Jones”. The Literary Essays of John Heath-Stubbs (Manchester: Carcanet Press Ltd., 1998) 128– 33. 694 Jones, Preface to The Anathémata, 21. 695 D. S. Carne-Ross, “The Last of the Modernists”. The New York Review of Books (9 October 1980) Vol. 27, No. 15, 41–3. 200

British modernity. Because of this, Jones insisted the Roman tradition could not be faithfully portrayed using only a contemporary English vernacular. Nor, however, could it be purified with Welsh alone. On both counts, Jones refused to compromise, for to give into the popular demands for either Welsh purity or an easy accessible English would be

“to impose a new order” on a “primitive culture-phase” whose multilingual ethos was

“inimical to the imposition of that new order.”696 Rather than assimilate The Anathémata to a monoglot ideal, Jones dedicated the poem to the “business of site”, to depicting the local aspects and obscure “cross-currents” of ancient language that still impacted modernity.697 This approach to language and to antiquity he absorbed, not solely from studying Britto-Romanic history, but by reading James Joyce whose preoccupation with the “Celtic hinterland” of Ireland dominated his own thinking about the “formal problems” of modern literary art.698

In a 1955 interview, broadcast on the BBC Home Service in Wales, Saunders

Lewis once asked if his audience could recall these notorious words James Joyce put into the mouth of Stephen Dedalus.

When the soul of a man is born in this country, [sic] there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, 699 religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.

Although Lewis was, by this time, a fervent advocate for Welsh nationalism, he

696 Jones, Preface to The Anathémata, 21. 697 David Jones, “James Joyce’s Dublin”. Epoch and Artist, Selected Writings of David Jones. Harman Grisewood, ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1959) 303–7: 305. First published in the Dublin Review (December 1950), a book review of Patricia Hutchins, James Joyce’s Dublin (London: The Grey Walls Press, 1950). 698 Ibid. See also Jones, Preface to The Anathémata, 26. 699 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Seamus Deane, ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1992) 220. As quoted by Lewis in “By Way of Apology”, Dock Leaves, 12. 201 confessed that he too had once tried to “fly by the nets” of nationality, language, and religion. As a young man, he explained, it was “in that spirit and that intention that I went to war”, joining the third battalion of the King's Liverpool regiment in November

1914.700 However, when the war dragged on, Lewis began to eschew the Dedalean impulse that had gripped his imagination, for he realized then that “Wales was for me not a net but a root.”701 Influenced by the ethnic nationalism of the French novelist, Maurice

Barrès, Lewis abandoned Joyce and began to look instead to the dramatic verse of Yeats,

Synge, Lady Gregory and Pádraic Colum.702 “Their poetic speech and regionalism and nationalism”, he later wrote, “were an answer to the all-invading industrialism of the time.”703 By contrast, Joyce’s literary work now seemed an irrelevant “waste of ingenuity”, crippled in its “self-torment and self-analysis”.704 According to Lewis, Joyce loathed Ireland in much the same way that Stephen Dedalus had described his ambition.

This fact weakened his work, for no matter how hard he tried, Joyce could not shake off his national heritage. He might refuse to “write for Ireland” but to Lewis, he remained an artist “of Irish race”, and “the Irishmen I like best”, Lewis told his wife, “are not those

700 Lewis, “By Way of Apology”, Dock Leaves, 12. Lewis was later accepted into a Battalion of the South Wales Borderers in May 1915. On his military service, see T. Robin Chapman, “Y Milwr”. Un Bywyd O Blith Nifer: Cofiant Saunders Lewis (Llandysul: Wasg Gomer, 2006) 20–38. 701 Lewis, “By Way of Apology”, Dock Leaves, 12. 702 “Among the books Saunders Lewis read in France was Le Culte du Moi by Maurice Barrès, and a few years later he quotes from it a passage which helped him to decide his own future. ‘It is by throwing himself into the life of his country and his people that a man can best come to know himself…and live as an artist to the limits of his consciousness…He who cuts himself off from his own past, his own land, his own people, starves and frustrates his own soul.’” See Emyr Humphreys, “Poet and Proletariat”. The Taliesin Tradition: a Quest for the Welsh Identity (London: Black Raven Press, 1983) 215–23: 217. 703 Lewis, “By Way of Apology”, Dock Leaves, 11. 704 Saunders Lewis, Letter to Margaret Gilcriest (20 October 1920). Saunders Lewis, Letters to Margaret Gilcriest. Mair Saunders Jones, Ned Thomas, and Harri Pritchard Jones, eds. (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1993) 425–6: 425. 202 who, like James Joyce, hate Ireland but cannot escape it”.705

Where Lewis saw only scorn for Ireland in Joyce, David Jones found him to be

“of all artists ever…the most dependent on the particular, on place, site, locality.”706

According to Jones, Joyce too was riven by political skepticism—so much so that he lived in self-imposed exile from his homeland. But Joyce’s “lifelong exile” from Dublin had done nothing to dampen the fidelity he expressed to “his natal place”. Instead, it

“served only to sharpen, clarify and deepen his devotion to the numina of place, not of any place, but of this place, Eblana…‘Hircus Civis Eblanensis’.”707 Unlike Lewis, Jones did not see a hatred of Ireland in Joyce. He saw, rather, a poetic imagination that was enmeshed in the “vast fabric” of his country’s cultural and linguistic history. Joyce was convinced, as he once explained, that Ireland was a place “in which the most diverse elements are mingled”, where “the Danes, the Firbolgs, the Milesians from Spain, the

Norman invaders, and the Anglo-Saxon settlers have united to form a new entity”.708

In such a fabric, it is useless to look for a thread that may have remained pure and virgin without having undergone the influence of a neighboring thread. What race, or what language…can boast of being pure today?709

Putting this vision in his own terms, Jones claimed that Joyce understood how the “Celtic deposits” of early Ireland had “incorporated pre-Celtic ones and these together underlie

705 Lewis, “Is there an Anglo-Welsh Literature?”, 7. See also Saunders Lewis, Letter to Margaret Gilcriest (10 January 1922). Saunders Lewis, Letters to Margaret Gilcriest. Mair Saunders Jones, Ned Thomas, and Harri Pritchard Jones, eds. (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1993) 479. 706 Jones, “James Joyce’s Dublin”, 304. 707 Ibid. The Latin is excerpted from Finnegans Wake (215.26–7): “Latin me that, my trinity scholard, out of eure sanscreed into oure eryan! Hircus Civis Eblanensis!” 708 James Joyce, “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages” (1907). The Critical Writings of James Joyce. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann, eds. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989) 153–74: 165–6. 709 Ibid. 203 the Germanic-Latin fusion and this whole amalgam is the West.”710 Joyce did satirize the union of Irish nationalism and modern literature, but he had done so, Jones thought, in

“absolute fidelity to a specified site, and the complex historic strata, special to that site”.711 That site was Dublin itself, and Joyce Fawr—“Joyce the Great” as Jones called him—had not abandoned the city or its Celtic past. Instead, Jones argued, Joyce successfully balanced the ancient strata of Irish history against the contemporary, linking the “industrial slum-culture” of modern Dublin to the “immemorial thought-patterns of a genuine ‘folk’.”712

Unlike Lewis, Jones aspired to Joyce’s example in his own literary work.713 The impulse which had shaped The Anathémata, he told W. H. Auden, was greatly “indebted” to the style “stupendous old Joyce” had achieved in Anna Livia Plurabelle.714

Nevertheless, Jones was cautious when discussing “the business of ‘derivation’ and

‘influences’” on his latest work. After its publication in 1952, The Anathémata was rejected by some critics who saw it as a mimicry of high modernism—“seedless fruit”

Hugh Kenner called it, especially when compared with the lasting achievements of Joyce and Ezra Pound.715 Jones did believe he was beholden to Joyce—“what person of my generation could not be?”—but he grumbled at the notion that his work was no more than

710 Jones, “James Joyce’s Dublin”, 305. 711 David Jones, “Notes on the 1930s”. The Dying Gaul and Other Writings. (London: Faber and Faber, 1978) 41–9: 46. 712 Jones, “James Joyce’s Dublin”, 304. See also David Jones, Letter XXIII to Aneirin Talfan Davies (10 October 1962). Letters to A Friend, 78–91: 88. 713 Jones, “James Joyce’s Dublin”, 305. 714 David Jones, “To W. H. Auden, 24 February 1954”. Dai Greatcoat, 160–4: 161. 715 Ibid. See also Hugh Kenner, “Seedless Fruit”. Poetry (February 1954) Vol. 83, No. 5, 295–301. On Jones’ relation to the first generation of modernism, see Jonathan Miles, “History, Myth and the Form of the Writing”. Backgrounds to David Jones: A Study in Sources and Drafts (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1990) 65–77: 74–6. 204 a “direct imitation”.716 The matter of influence in The Anathémata, even with Joyce, he wrote, “can be tricky when it comes to citing explicit examples.”717

I see how perfectly natural it is for critics to suppose that I based my ‘style’ on Joyce. Of course, I knew about him. And an Irishman read to me Anna Livia Plurabelle in the nineteen-twenties and I was deeply impressed. But I believe the truth is that a given civilisational situation will, necessarily, produce the same problems for people of certain sorts of perception, and that therefore, both in form and content, their work will show an affinity that looks like direct borrowing but which is, in reality, a similar response to an identical ‘situation’ on the part of persons of similar perception.718

Jones had not imitated Joyce in any direct way. Instead, as he saw it, the two writers had shared a parallel “civilisational situation” in Ireland and in Wales, and “What one is

‘influenced’ by” most, he argued, “is the absolute necessity to find a form that fits the contemporary situation.”719 From the beginning, Jones knew that the fit of his own form was in the tradition Joyce had begun in Finnegans Wake. Even as he drafted The

Anathémata in early 1940, he acknowledged this fact, asking his friend, Harman

Grisewood,

why more [literary work] has not been done with this language thing – why are there not a whole lot of leaders-up-to-and from Joyce – I mean the pleasure is endless and the possibilities infinite.720

Even Saunders Lewis himself later observed that as Jones explored the endless

716 Jones, “To W. H. Auden, 24 February 1954”. Dai Greatcoat, 162, 161. In his review, Auden took Jones’ hint. The Anathémata was not an imitation: “Joyce, certainly, and Dante probably, have had a hand in Mr. Jones’ development, but his style is in no sense an imitation. Nor is this verse as ‘free’ as at a superficial glance it looks.” W. H. Auden, “A Contemporary Epic”. Encounter (February 1954) 67–71: 68. 717 Jones, “To W. H. Auden, 24 February 1954”. Dai Greatcoat, 162, 161. 718 David Jones, Letter to William Hayward (12 July 1961). Letters to William Hayward. Colin Wilcockson, ed. (London: Agenda Editions, 1979) 58. 719 David Jones, Letter to John Johnston (2 May 1962), as quoted in Johnston, English Poetry of the First World War, 321–2. 720 David Jones, Harman Grisewood (19 March 1940), as cited in Staudt, At the Turn of a Civilization, 130. 205 possibilities of “this language thing”, he became devoted, more and more, to “the lore of semantics” that Joyce had exploited before him.721 Jones admired, Lewis wrote, “Joyce’s puns because their play discovers affinities not previously caught, because it concertinas history.”722 Joyce’s ability to compress many languages against a specific historical site fascinated Jones, and though the result often seemed to be “verbal chaos”, Joyce’s work was “not an ‘emancipation’ from the rules of language”.723 On the contrary, his

“linguistic virtuosity” was made possible only by his “vast knowledge of language and its structure.”724 Likewise, by parallel, Jones composed his own “mixed mess-up” of prosimetrum, not to liberate his verse from the demands of history and the modern nation, but to drive his idiom deeper into the bedrock of Welsh civilization.725 Though he was not an avowed nationalist, Jones did not fly by the nets of nationality, language and religion in Wales. As Kathleen Raine has argued, he remained “a national writer, a bard in the strict sense of the word. He invites us to participate not in a private world but in a shared and objective world, to which each of us is attached by the same texture of living strands as is the poet himself.”726 Though Jones knew only a little Welsh and had, at best, a half-read knowledge of Latin and Greek, he used what “living strands” he did know to invent a new hybrid literary language, a modernist idiom whose pitch-against-pitch strove to propagate Romanitas and bring British modernity back to “the deep roots and the

721 Ibid. See also Lewis, “Epoch and Artist”, 115. 722 Ibid. 723 I here paraphrase Kathleen Raine’s analysis of Joyce in David Jones, Solitary Perfectionist. (Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 1974) 5. 724 Ibid. 725 Jones, Letter to Rev. Desmond Chute (26 January 1953) Inner Necessities, 34. 726 Kathleen Raine, “David Jones and the Actually Loved and Known”. The Inner Journey of the Poet (New York: George Brazilier, Inc., 1982) 118–36: 126. 206 ancient springs” of the classical and the Celtic.727

727 Raine, David Jones, Solitary Perfectionist, 5. 207

Chapter Five

“A form of Doric which is no dialect in particular”: the Cosmopolitan Classicism of Hugh MacDiarmid

Writing to T. S. Eliot in early December 1930, Christopher Grieve—more widely known by the pseudonym, Hugh MacDiarmid—proposed an article he wanted to see published in Eliot’s journal, The Criterion. “Would you care to consider an article,” he asked,

discussing the way in which, instead of pooling their resources, or at least acting and reacting freely upon each other (on a common bilingual or multi-lingual public) and giving British literature far more variety, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, and to a lesser extent, Scottish Vernacular, and even English dialect literature…have been practically excluded from the knowledge of most British people – and consequently have had their potentialities inhibited.728

Eliot eagerly accepted his proposal, and Grieve soon dispatched to the London office of

Faber and Faber an essay entitled “English Ascendancy in British Literature”. The piece was issued in July 1931, and it came out on the heels of a new report on primary school education in Britain, a report written by the British government’s Consultative

728 C. M. Grieve, Letter to T. S. Eliot (9 December 1930). The Letters of Hugh MacDiarmid. Alan Bold, ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984) 434. 208

Committee on the Board of Education.729 Grieve found much to praise in the

Committee’s findings, specifically the stress which had been laid on the “need to realize that there are many varieties of English; [and] that it is not the function of schools to decry any special or local peculiarities of speech”.730 As Grieve saw it, this suggestion was a significant departure from established educational policy in Britain, which from the time of Matthew Arnold had often openly encouraged what he called a “narrow ascendancy tradition” in the literary and cultural life of the entire island.731 Consequently,

intelligent readers of English, who would be ashamed not to know something (if only the leading names, and roughly, what they stand for) of most Continental literatures, are content to ignore Scottish, Irish, and Welsh Gaelic literatures and the Scots Vernacular literature.732

Rather than “broad-basing” themselves in “all the diverse cultural elements and the splendid variety of languages and dialects on the British Isles”, readers in Britain had been taught to confine themselves solely to the “central English stream” of British literature.733 As a result, they had heard only “one side of a complicated case”, having become the victims of what Grieve called “an extensive spiritual and psychological blindness”.734

729 C. M. Grieve (‘Hugh McDiarmid’), “English Ascendancy in British Literature”. The Criterion (July 1931) Vol. 10, No. 41 as reprinted in Hugh MacDiarmid, Selected Prose. Alan Riach, ed. MacDiarmid 2000: the Collected Works (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1992) 61–80. 730 Ibid., 61. See also Board of Education, Report of the Consultative Committee on the Primary School. (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1931). 731 Grieve, “English Ascendancy in British Literature”, 67. 732 Ibid., 67. 733 Ibid., 69, 68. 734 Ibid., 68, 69. 209

However, the Board of Education drew a clear distinction between “local variations” of dialect and the incorrect use of standard English among “young children”.735 “The capital aim”, the report observed,

must be to secure that they begin to use language freely and easily; a nearer approach to the standard speech may be dearly bought by an unnatural reticence on their part. The teacher must boldly face the fact that there are many varieties of the English language; it is not the duty of the school to decry any special or local variations…Above all, the degenerate speaking of standard English should not be confused with the speaking of dialect.736

In light of these recommendations, Grieve believed that the Celtic languages of Scotland and of Wales might now, at last, enjoy greater official acceptance by British government, for the languages and literatures of these countries were, he argued, “products of substantially the same environment and concerned for the most part with the same political, psychological, and practical issues, the same traditions and tendencies, the same landscapes, as poets in English”.737 And yet, Scottish and Welsh could not be dismissed simply as “valuably complementary” to the dominant modes of English expression in literature.738 Their “ancient technique” provided instead what he called a “corrective” whose “alterative values” could balance British literature, setting the “changed English present” against “the unchanged Gaelic present”.739 As Grieve saw it, the potential for balance between these values was the great strength of British letters, for “[f]ew literatures”, he asserted,

735 Board of Education, “Speech and Speech Training”. Report of the Consultative Committee on the Primary School, 156–8: 157. 736 Ibid. 737 Grieve, “English Ascendancy in British Literature”, 68. 738 Ibid., 68. 739 Ibid., 69, 68. 210

offer within themselves so rich a range of alterative values, of material for comparative criticism, as does, not English, but British, meaning by the latter that common culture – in posse, rather than in esse – which includes not only English (and English dialect) literature, but the Gaelic and Scots Vernacular literatures as well.740

Broadly speaking, Britain still possessed all these diverse elements within its literary culture, but that “narrow ascendancy tradition” had largely shut Welsh, Gaelic and Scots vernacular literature out of the British canon, keeping any “corrective” impact of the

Celtic far from the common English imagination in Britain.741

And yet, despite this chance for greater recognition, the Celtic languages still faced a further threat, for a new movement emphasizing the need to standardize a

“‘correct English’” as an International Auxiliary Language (IAL) had begun to gain favor among some of Britain’s more prominent intellectuals, linguists and politicians.742 Led by the Cambridge University critics, C. K. Ogden (1889–1957) and I. A. Richards (1893–

1979), this movement towards a “Basic English” claimed that an English effectively simplified and stripped of its purely idiomatic characteristics could serve as a universal mode of communication for the modern world. Since the 1918 Armistice, Ogden and

Richards had been promoting the development of this condensed version of English,

740 Ibid., 69. 741 Ibid., 67, 68. 742 Ibid., 62. On the diverse efforts to create an international language in the twentieth century, see Umberto Eco, “The International Auxiliary Languages”. The Search for the Perfect Language. James Fentress, trans. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, Ltd., 1995) 317–36. On the genesis and initial reception of Basic English in Britain, see Rodney Koeneke, “The Cambridge Background”. Empires of the Mind: I. A. Richards and Basic English in China, 1929-1979 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004) 22–52; and A. P. R. Howatt with H. G. Widdowson, “Choosing the Right Words”. A History of English Language Teaching. Second edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) 278–93: 283–8. 211 arguing that peace and security in postwar Europe depended on the existence of a tongue held in common between nations.743

The so-called national barriers of today are ultimately language barriers. The absence of a common medium of communication is the chief obstacle to international understanding, and therefore the chief underlying cause of War. It is also the most formidable obstacle to the progress of international Science, and to the development of international Commerce.744

By combating the problem of Babel in modern Europe, “Basic English” promised to do the work which Latin had once accomplished when it was the dominant tongue of literary, political and religious discourse throughout the West.745 Comprised of only 850 words, Basic would at once “meet the universal demand for a compact and efficient technological medium” and bolster the fragile peace brokered in the Treaty of

Versailles.746 In doing so, Richards insisted that the language could still successfully

743 “During a discussion with I. A. Richards on 11 November 1918 Ogden outlined a work to correlate his earlier linguistic studies with his wartime experience of ‘the power of Word-Magic’ and the part played by language in contemporary thought. Ogden converted the Cambridge Magazine into a quarterly in which he and Richards published a series of articles as a first draft of the book which appeared in 1923 as The Meaning of Meaning. This empirical approach to theoretical confusion about language, setting forth principles for the understanding of the function of language, rapidly became one of the important books of the decade.” J. W. Scott, “Ogden, Charles Kay (1889–1957)”, rev. W. Terrence Gordon. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, May 2009). 744 C. K. Ogden, “The Function of a Universal Language”. Debabelization, With a Survey of Contemporary Opinion on the Problem of a Universal Language. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., Ltd., 1931) 13–40: 13. 745 Ibid. “Five hundred years ago Latin was the literary language of Western Europe. Its downfall was due to the awakening of the masses, to their revolt against the routines and dictates of a caste. Today the English schoolboy can acquire no more than a smattering of its complexities after ten years’ intensive misery; the scholar still writes slowly and faultily after twenty years of practice. Outside of Italy, even in the universities, Latin is losing all along the line.” C. K. Ogden, “Why Not Latin?” The System of Basic English (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1934) 11. 746 C. K. Ogden, “Introductory”. Basic English, A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., Ltd., 1932) 9–30: 14. 212 remain clear of “any threat to the economic, moral, cultural, social, or political status or independence of any person or any people.”747

It must carry no political no implications of intellectual, technological, or other domination. No one in learning the world language must have excuse for even the least shadow of a feeling that he is submitting to an alien influence or being brought under the power of other groups.748

If adopted, Basic had to come “into use freely, as a general convenience, under the urge of the everyday motives of mankind”, for both Ogden and Richards knew well that when

English was accepted internationally, the Anglophone countries of the world would likewise grow in power and in prestige.749 As English became more and more “enriched and cosmopolitanized…through the expansion of modern science”, Ogden argued, the tongue would meet the “universal demand for a compact and efficient technological medium”, becoming “not only the International Auxiliary language, but the Universal language of the world.”750

In the smaller world of contemporary English drama—especially the commercial theatres of London’s West End—the stress on reducing English to its most basic components had a broad and influential impact. The belief espoused by Ogden and

Richards that language should be an efficient “Universal medium” for the swift communication of ideas was often promoted crudely in common journalistic criticism of

747 I. A. Richards, “On the Choice of a Second or World Language”. Basic English and Its Uses (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1943) 11–22: 11. 748 Ibid. 749 Ogden, “Introductory”, Basic English, 13–14. On the charge that Basic English constituted a form of “linguistic imperialism”, see John Paul Russo, “Basic English: the Years in China”. I. A. Richards: His Life and Work (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) 397–404. 750 Ogden, “Introductory”, Basic English, 13–14. 213 contemporary drama.751 And when defending London theatre in the 1920s, many reviewers routinely praised a less literary and less artificial English—an English marked by a clear lack of dialect—as more appealing to the ears of the general audience in

Britain than any of the experimental idioms—the “art of impassioned speech” set out by the modernist avant-garde.752 St. John Ervine (1883–1971), an Ulster-born playwright and sometime opponent of Grieve, strongly preferred this vision of English drama, dismissing as “contrived stuff” and “withdrawn from reality” the so-called “‘literary drama’” of Ireland and England.753 “‘[L]iterary drama’ is”, he asserted, “generally full of stiff sentences that have more resemblance to the language used in editorial articles and

‘middles’ printed in the weekly reviews than to the language used in conversation.”754

The “business” of the modern playwright was, Ervine believed,

to write dialogue which shall have the look of literature and the sound of the street: it must have the similitude of ordinary conversation and, at the same time, be attractive and compact and shapely.755

In spite of this assertion, Ervine himself had, in fact, first embraced and exploited his dialect of Ulster English on the stage. In the 1915 tragedy, John Ferguson, he deliberately employed an Anglo-Irish idiom, hoping to build on the work begun by Yeats,

Synge and Lady Gregory. However, he could not get his plays produced in the West End or recognized in London. Thus Ervine began to see the literary use of dialect as an

751 Ogden, “The Function of a Universal Language”, Debabelization, 14. 752 W. B. Yeats, excerpted from “Speaking to Musical Notes – Interview with Miss Florence Farr”. Freeman’s Journal (31 October 1902) 4. Previously cited in Schuchard, The Last Minstrels, 105. 753 St. John Ervine, How to Write a Play (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1928) 17. On the life and dramatic work of St. John Ervine, see John Cronin, “Introduction”. Selected Plays of St. John Ervine (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, Ltd., 1988) 7–16. 754 Ibid., 16. 755 Ibid., 22. 214 impediment to effective speech in modern drama, obstructing not only commercial success but also clear communication of ideas as well.

His criticism caught the attention of Grieve in early 1931, for that winter Ervine had elaborated his views in a series of reviews of the theatre for The Observer. There he vehemently insisted that “[a]nything that makes oral communication difficult is essentially evil.”756 Citing the work of the British linguist, Sir Richard Paget (1869–

1955), Ervine argued that though English was by nature “a wild growth…a potpourri compounded of hedgerow flowers—Greek and Latin”, its speech could still be tamed, modernized and “made more useful by conscious effort on our part.”757 To achieve a plainer idiom in contemporary theatre, Ervine encouraged all actors and writers to read

Richard Paget’s 1930 treatise entitled, Babel, or The Past, Present, and Future of Human

Speech.758 There Paget had outlined a scientific rationale for perfecting English into a

“clear and flexible instrument for communication” across the globe.759 “If the language”,

Paget wrote, “were improved…so as to make it consistent, but without altering it so much as to make the classical form difficult to understand, English would in all probability

756 St. John Ervine, “At the Play. Speech and the Actor’s Craft – II”. The Observer (1 February 1931) 13. 757 Richard Paget, Babel, or The Past, Present, and Future of Human Speech (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1930) 8, 11. 758 Paget’s contribution to the study of English speech lay in his development of a “theory of pantomimic action of the tongue and lips”, the principles of which became the foundation for the Paget-Gorman Sign System. Designed for the deaf and deaf mute, this form of signing was not a language but rather a system of signs, providing a “one-to-one, sign-to-word match” between gestures and English words. On the structure of the Paget-Gorman Sign System, see Rachel Sutton-Spence and Bencie Woll, “Linguistics and Sign Linguistics”. The Linguistics of British Sign Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 1–21: 14. On the life of Paget, see Harry Lowery, “Paget, Sir Richard Arthur Surtees, second baronet (1869– 1955)”, rev. John Bosnell. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, May 2009). 759 St. John Ervine, “At the Play. Speech and the Actor’s Craft – I”, The Observer (25 January 1931) 13. 215 become in a relatively short time the universal language of this planet.”760 However, despite his desire to see English standardized through a “systematic and scientific study”,

Paget knew the “great majority of the literary world” still believed that “the fate of our language ought properly to be left to chance, or rather to herd instinct. Reason must be ruled out.”761 But for him, this “comfortable policy” and “laissez-faire” approach was not

“practicable to-day, for the fate of English speech is in the balance.”762 “If we do nothing”, he wrote,

one thing will be likely to happen, namely that the English language will break up—America going one way, Australia another, and so on, till in the end these different communities will no longer be able to understand each other.763

Now it was the time to seize the moment, Paget felt, to make English more universal, for

“[b]roadcasting, long-distance telephony, the talking film, and the gramophone” could, he argued, “make such standardization possible, and even comparatively easy to establish.”764 These new technological media had provided a “unifying influence” over modern English, and through them, the language was slowly beginning to overcome what

Paget saw as the obstinate “tendency of all communities to develop their own individual gestures of articulation in a characteristic way so as to produce new dialects and languages.”765 For Paget, it was now time to dispense—as much as possible—with this impulse, for the scientific precision of a universal English was within grasp: “we are just

760 Paget, Babel, 82. 761 Ibid., 83, 9. 762 Ibid., 92. 763 Ibid., 82–3. 764 Ibid., 83. 765 Ibid., 92. 216 beginning to realize—that our own (and all other languages) are but the babblings of children,” he wrote, “and that it is only by systematic and conscious effort that we can hope to attain unity and an approach to perfection in the future.”766

In light of the conclusions Paget had drawn, St. John Ervine asserted that a more condensed English idiom could better serve as a “unifying agent” of clear communication, not only on the stage but also across the world. English was, as he saw it, fast becoming a more “exact and simple” tongue, so much so that its clarity had made it

“more suitable to be a universal language than any other.”767 For this reason, Ervine believed that all use of dialect and “obsolete languages” on the British Isles had to be rooted out.768 The continued survival of Goedelic and Brythonic tongues in Scotland, in

Ireland and in Wales had done little, he felt, to further advance what he defined as the

“first principle of speech, that its use is to make us understand each other.”769 “I have no sympathy”, he complained,

with those reactionaries who are all for the revival of obsolete languages. It would not upset me if knowledge of Gaelic perished out of these islands, and if I had the power of dictating in these matters I should forbid the Highlander and the Irishman and the Welshman to continue in the use of his dying speech. When I hear reactionaries orating about the desirability of a diversity of tongues I feel inclined to remind them that what was wrought at the Tower of Babel was confusion.770

For Ervine, the desire to preserve a diversity of language throughout Britain and Ireland was tantamount to warding off the “day when all men will be able to understand each

766 Ibid., 93. 767 Ervine, “At the Play. Speech and the Actor’s Craft – I”. 13. 768 St. John Ervine, “At the Play. Speech and the Actor’s Craft – III”. The Observer (8 February 1931) 13. 769 Ibid. 770 Ibid. 217 other”—a time when simple English alone could be used for plain-spoken communication and an absolute understanding between peoples.771 No longer would the language then be exploited for obscure artificial aims or the putting on of “literary airs”.772 Instead, it would be used, he claimed, “for its purpose, the understanding of each other, and not the preservation of quaintnesses or the indulgence of literary idiosyncrasies.”773

Christopher Grieve, for his part, could not abide the “dull uniformity” and utilitarianism which marked Ervine’s vision of a simple universal English.774 He despised the playwright’s criticism of dramatic poetry, and argued in his essay for The Criterion that Ervine had not only abandoned the cause of Gaelic languages in Britain, he had also willingly betrayed his Ulster homeland. Rather than write with an English idiom that reflected his own Celtic roots, he choose easy commercial success instead—a success which translated into poor, digestible drawing-room comedies, plays focused entirely on

“winning the London success, and international vogue of a kind, denied to his earlier and better work”.775 Stripped of its local qualities and robbed of its Ulster English, Ervine’s drama had fallen victim to the same “sorry imperialism which has thrust Gaelic and dialect literatures out with the pale and concentrated on what has become to use Sir

William Watson’s phrase, ‘scriptive English’”.776 Contrary to Ervine, Grieve believed

771 Ibid. 772 Ervine, “At the Play. Speech and the Actor’s Craft – I”, 13. 773 Ervine, “At the Play. Speech and the Actor’s Craft – II”, 13, quoted by Christopher Grieve in “English Ascendancy in British Literature”, 62. 774 Ervine, “At the Play. Speech and the Actor’s Craft – II”, 13. 775 Grieve, “English Ascendancy in British Literature”, 62. 776 Ibid., 63. 218 that as English had slowly turned into “more and more of a world-language”, the language had become “progressively useless for higher literary purposes”.777 Without the corrective pressures which Scottish, Welsh and Irish literature could bring, English had devolved into a “far less concentrated and expressive language”.778 For this reason,

Grieve believed that modern British literature needed not only strong infusions of local

English dialect, but also the Gaelic, Scots vernacular and Welsh literary traditions too, traditions which had been “virtually proscribed by the ‘English Ascendancy’ policy and practically forgotten”.779 With Scots in mind, one could only speculate, he argued,

what the results today would have been if this great literature…had been concurrently maintained with the development of ‘English Literature’. Would such a synthesis or duality of creative output (each element of it so very different that they could have complemented and ‘corrected’ each other in a unique and invaluable fashion) not have been infinitely better.780

Grieve here refers to an English contemporary, William Watson (1858–1935). A popular Georgian poet, Watson had received a knighthood in 1917 for composing a patriotic panegyric, “The Man Who Saw”, dedicated to British prime minister, David Lloyd George. In a 1916 book he entitled, Pencraft, Watson argued that literature could be divided “into three kinds or orders, and to call them the cantative, the scriptive, and the loquitive”. These designations formed a range upon which one could plot kinds of language and speech, the “cantative” applying to those instances “capable of uttering themselves through but one medium, the medium of quite obviously and literally chanted words”, the “scriptive” being “the essentially written, as distinguished from that not necessarily greater but perhaps more elemental thing, the essentially chanted word, and the “loquitive” which “in form and substance is little if at all distinguishable from conversational speech.” According to Watson, “the immense middle region” which comprised the scriptive was, in essence, “absolutely literature; neither a sublimely abnormal, half preternatural phenomenon nor a transfiguration of everyday chit-chat”. Unlike the cantative and loquitive, the scriptive prized a “deliberate and ordered language”, a language as the “preeminently efficient manner of speech”. Scriptive language, he argued, “delivers the message which the other has dropped by the way.” William Watson, Pencraft, A Plea for the Older Ways (London: John Lane, the Bodley Head, 1916) 9–10, 13, 16, 18, 21–2. On Watson’s life and poetic work, see J. M. Wilson, I Was an English Poet: a Critical Biography of Sir William Watson 1858–1936. (London: Cecil Woolf, 1981). 777 Grieve, “English Ascendancy in British Literature”, 66. 778 Ibid., 62. 779 Ibid., 63. 780 Ibid. 219

But now with educational policy beginning to shift, Grieve believed that this “infinitely better” synthesis comprising the less recognized traditions in British literature might still come about. The Board of Education had started to see diverse value in the “splendid variety of languages” across Britain, and their new tolerance of dialect had led to an official admission that previous attempts “to correct local peculiarities” had too often had a “depressing effect upon the child’s power of speech”.781 For this reason, Grieve felt that the country’s “children of tomorrow” might soon be relieved of that “subtle but far- reaching psychological outrage which has been inflicted on many generations of pupils and seriously affected the quality and direction of those of them who had any literary inclinations.”782

The effect of such relief had already begun to emerge in contemporary Ireland, for since the advent of the Literary Revival in the late 1880s, the Irish language and literature in Gaelic had experienced an unexpected resurgence in popularity and prestige. During the late nineteenth century, he observed, “highly-educated Irishmen were incapable of conceiving that in this whole corpus [of Gaelic literature] there was anything worth recovering”.783 But now it was clear: there was a great deal to salvage, for Ireland still possessed in its native literature what he called an “entire classical tradition”, a tradition

“with its own elaborate technique, its own very different but (if only because incomparable) not inferior values which maintained itself intact…for at least two

781 Ibid., 67. See also Board of Education, “Speech and Speech Training”. Report of the Consultative Committee on the Primary School, 157. 782 Grieve, “English Ascendancy in British Literature”, 61. 783 Ibid., 63. 220 thousand years”.784 As Grieve saw it, the revitalization of the classical in Ireland had not come about through imitating Greek and Roman antiquity. There had been no need to replicate either the form or content of classical literature, for Irish Gaelic, he believed, had maintained within itself what Grieve called an “alternative value of prime consequence when set against the Greek and Roman literatures which are all that most of us mean when we speak of ‘the Classics’.”785

According to Grieve, an accurate meaning of the classical had previously eluded both poets and artists during the European Renaissance. They, he asserting, had been mistaken from the start, for in attempting to mimic the formal trappings and stylistic achievement of the Greek and Roman world, the essentially national character of the classical had often been confused, transformed into false international standards of achievement. These in turn encouraged neo-classical imitation and the arid reformulations of antiquity found throughout modern literature. But citing Daniel

Corkery’s study, The Hidden Ireland (1924), Grieve insisted that “Renaissance standards are not Greek standards. Greek standards in their own time and place were standards arrived at by the Greek nation; they were national standards.”786 But as the power of

Greek civilization grew in authority and stature, it was “[c]aught up at second hand into the art-mind of Europe” so much so that its principles attained a universal prominence through which “the youthfully tender national cultures of Europe” were slowly

784 Ibid. 785 Ibid. 786 Daniel Corkery, The Hidden Ireland: A Study of Gaelic Munster in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin: M. H. Gill and Son, Ltd., 1925) xiv, as quoted by Grieve in “English Ascendancy in British Literature”, 79. 221

“whitened” and made barren.787 In this way, the “standards of a dead nation” overwhelmed the native genius of many latent national traditions in Western Europe.788

The “aptitudes through which [these] themselves had become memorable” were, bit by bit, annihilated in a botched effort to rediscover “the secret power that lay behind Greek art”.789 This secret power was never retrieved, Grieve felt, and all attempts to do so in

Europe had resulted only in the “sham strength” and “uneasy energy” of “mere neo- classical formalism”.790

Because of this fact, Grieve believed that “[s]ince the Renaissance there [had] been, strictly speaking, no self-contained national cultures in Europe.”791 The desire to imitate Greek antiquity had destroyed nationality and encouraged instead a pseudo- classicism whose derivative methods, he thought, could be of no help to contemporary

Scottish writers—writers intent on breaking down the “narrow ascendancy tradition” in

British literature.792 Nevertheless, the “limited channels” of English dominance in Britain had to be challenged, but Grieve felt that only the emergence of a “new classicism today” in Scotland could effectively accomplish this.793 This novel form of the classical could not be rooted simply in nostalgia for the Celtic past or in neo-classical formalism.794

787 Ibid., xiv–xv, as quoted in Grieve, 79. 788 Ibid., xv, as quoted in Grieve, 79. 789 Ibid., xv, xvi, as quoted in Grieve, 79, 80. 790 Ibid., xv, xiv, xvi, as quoted in Grieve, 79, 80. 791 Ibid., xv, as quoted in Grieve, 79–80. 792 Grieve, “English Ascendancy in British Literature”, 67. On the place of the neo-classical in MacDiarmid’s work, see also Scott Lyall, Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poetry and Politics of Place: Imagining a Scottish Republic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd., 2006) 42–3. 793 Grieve, “English Ascendancy in British Literature”, 77, 80. 794 Ibid., 80. 222

Scottish poets had to instead, he argued, “get down to Ur-motives—to get back behind the Renaissance” where they could at last successfully throw off that “deplorable whitewashing whereby Greek and Latin culture has prevented other European nations realizing their national genius in the way Greece and Rome themselves did.”795 Rather than ape the form of an ancient foreign tradition, the Scots had to do nationally on their own what “Greece and Rome themselves” had done in their time but for their own place.

With this end in mind, Grieve believed that the recent Literary Revival in Ireland was perhaps the most instructive example of how a new modern classicism might be achieved in Scotland. The reputedly Gaelic values which Yeats and other Anglo-Irish writers had promoted were, he admitted, “largely phoney and based on misunderstanding and falsification”, but the “Celtic Twilight was”, Grieve later claimed, “…the only way at first to get even a modicum of Gaelic culture across in an overwhelmingly hostile environment. It succeeded in doing so and led on to the genuine article.”796 That genuine article, as he saw it, could now be found both in the widespread revival of the Irish language and further in new “re-translations” of Irish poetry which stressed not “the stars and shadows of Yeats” but the “hard realism and sharp satire” of Gaelic literature.797 And yet, even with all the gains made in Ireland, the patrimony of Scotland remained

practically a terra nullius…non-Gaelic readers can still only approach the best Scottish Gaelic poems through such inadequate and distorting translations as were those, in Ireland, of Sir Samuel Ferguson and the beginners of the Irish Literary Revival, which have only to be compared

795 Grieve, “English Ascendancy in British Literature”, 80. See also Hugh MacDiarmid, “Towards a Celtic Front” (1953). Selected Essays of Hugh MacDiarmid. Duncan Glen, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970) 171–6: 173. 796 MacDiarmid, “Towards a Celtic Front”, 173. 797 Grieve felt that new translations by Osborn Bergin (1873–1950), Robin Flower (1881–1946), and James Stephens (1882–1950) better captured the essence of Irish Gaelic. Grieve, “English Ascendancy in British Literature”, 78, 70. 223

with the re-translations, far ‘harder’ and truer to the original Gaelic spirit and free of the ‘Twilight’ nonsense.798

Because Scottish poets had too long been focused on composing work in English, they had failed to make thus far what Grieve called “all-in view of the literary production of our country”.799 A “mere subsidiary to English letters”, Scotland had had no “first-class work, indispensable or even relevant to the main line of English literary evolution.”800

Yet rather than remain creatively inferior, Grieve exhorted Scottish poets to cut through the “crust of imitation”, to make manifest in a national literature all the “potentialities of incalculable difference.”801

But revealing the depth of these potentialities would not be easy. Recent Scottish writing had at best been too “‘hit and miss’ and unscientific” to create the necessary ethos for a “new classicism” in Scotland.802 Nevertheless, Grieve believed that he had identified three essential conditions which could encourage a literary renaissance in modern Scotland. First, he argued that the “tide of Scottish national consciousness” had to rise to new and ever greater heights.803 For too long, the central differences between the English and Scots imagination had been obscured by the “increasing Anglicization of the latter”, but Scotland’s “assimilation to the English” had never been complete.804

Many “deep-seated and unalterable psychological differences remain”, he argued, “Only

798 Ibid., 77–8. 799 Ibid., 69. 800 Ibid., 70. 801 Ibid., 73. 802 Ibid., 73, 80. 803 Ibid., 73. 804 Ibid., 72. 224 the ‘surface minds’ (in the Bergsonian sense) of the Scots have been Englished”.805 For this reason, Grieve believed—as a second condition—that formal education could easily be re-centered on the study of native Scottish literature both in public schools and in private universities. “No other people in the world,” he argued,

have ever preferred an alien literature to their own, and practically excluded the latter from the curricula of their schools and Universities…The disparity between the two to-day may yet be redressed to some extent if anything like the same attention is given to Scottish literature in Scottish schools and elsewhere in Scotland as is presently given to English.806

According to Grieve, this “thorough-going reconcentration” in school curricula would help spread an “all-in view of Scottish poetry”, a view grounded in the notion that Scots comprised an entirely “separate literary tradition.”807

Already, both of these two conditions were being met in Scotland, for with the founding of the National Party in June 1928, the nationalist movement had slowly begun to gain wider acceptance across the country.808 The Party brought together four

805 Ibid., 72, 73. The “Bergsonian sense” of “surface mind” and “crust of imitation” to which Grieve refers here was drawn from his reading of Henri Bergson’s An Introduction to Metaphysics (1912). In the introduction to the treatise, Bergson argues that the perceptions impressed on the mind by the material world were but a “crust solidified on the surface”. “When I”, he writes, “direct my attention inward to contemplate my own self (supposed for the moment to be inactive), I perceive at first, as a crust solidified on the surface, all the perceptions of the material world. These perceptions are clear, distinct, juxtaposed or juxtaposable one with another; they tend to group themselves into objects. Next I notice the memories which more or less adhere to these perceptions and which serve to interpret them. These memories have been detached, as it were, from the depth of my personality, drawn to the surface by the perceptions which resemble them; they rest on the surface of my mind without being absolutely myself”. Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics. T. E. Hulme, trans. (London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912) 10–11. 806 Grieve, “English Ascendancy in British Literature”, 73. 807 Ibid. 808 On the social makeup and political establishment of the National Party, see Richard J. Finlay, “The National Party of Scotland 1928–1933”. Independent and Free, Scottish Politics and the Origins of the Scottish National Party 1918–1945 (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers Ltd., 1994) 71–125; as well as Christopher Harvie, “The ballads of a nation: political nationalism, 1707–1945”. Scotland and Nationalism: Scottish Society and Politics, 1707 to the Present. Fourth edition (New York: Routledge, 2004) 11–35: 28–31. 225 previously separate associations, and in so doing, it pushed Scottish nationalism away from the “somewhat remote, residually cultural organization[s]” of the early twentieth century to a concrete ideological platform set on greater political action.809 And yet, in spite of this, Grieve insisted that a literary Renaissance in Scotland could not come about without meeting a third and final condition. “The third point”, he explained,

is the necessity to bridge the gulf between Gaelic and Scots. Both have been tremendously handicapped by circumstances and yet in their evolution, thus miserably attenuated and driven underground by external factors, they have continued to complement and correct each other in the most remarkable way. I am not going to make use of the terms ‘Romantic’ and ‘Classical’, although these dubious counters do roughly correspond to the Scots and Gaelic traditions in poetry respectively.810

According to Grieve, if modern poets could bridge the radical split between Highland

Gaelic and the varieties of dialect spoken in the Lowlands, then the nation might “lead the way in the great new movement in poetry which is everywhere being sought for”.811

But realizing a convergence of Scots dialects would be difficult, for on one hand, Scots

Gaelic had been gradually receding from common use for well over a century. In 1891 over 250,000 people were fluent in the tongue, but only forty years later, that number dropped precipitously. The British census reported that less 130,000 people still spoke

809 The National Party grew out of the Scottish Home Rule Association (founded in 1886) led by Roland Eugene Muirhead, the Scots National League (founded in 1904), the Scottish National Movement (founded in 1926), and the Glasgow University Student Nationalist Association (founded in 1927). On the origin of these movements and their contributions to the fledging party, see Jack Brand, “The Beginnings of Modern Nationalism”. The National Movement in Scotland (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978) 173–95: 195. See also Marcus Tanner, The Last of the Celts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) 63–4; and H. J. Hanham, “The Fundamentalists”. Scottish Nationalism. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969) 119–30. 810 Grieve, “English Ascendancy in British Literature”, 73. 811 Ibid., 74. 226 it.812 Gaelic was fast becoming an artifact, a cultural curiosity whose idiom was now

“choked” with what Grieve derided as “an excessive formalism.”813 On the other hand, the diversity of Lowland Scots faced no such threat, but its popular use in the borderlands still, Grieve felt, did not serve the national interest at large. The language’s lack of standardization had given its dialects great variety, but such variety also brought disunity and “formlessness” into twentieth-century Scottish writing.814 This language was unfit for literary use, as it had been allowed to simply “disintegrate into dialects and these have gradually lost all the qualities befitting them for major expressive purposes rather than for homely, local uses.”815

With one language scattered among provincial variants and the other strangled by a formalism driving it to extinction, Grieve knew that something had to be done. Both languages, he argued, “have been tremendously handicapped by circumstances and… miserably attenuated and driven underground by external factors.”816 And yet “[t]he role of our race in history—”, he believed, “the special qualities and functions of Scottish nationality—have not yet been voiced by our poets; the prevalent conceptions are all out- of-date or too puerile and sectional, and lack the necessary dynamic force.”817 To invigorate the “necessary dynamic force” one could not simply return nostalgically to the

812 On the erosion of Scottish Gaelic in the twentieth century, see Kenneth MacKinnon, “Language-Retreat and Regeneration in the Present-Day Scottish Gàidhealtachd”. Linguistic Minorities, Society and Territory (Clevedon, Avon: Multilingual Matters, 1991) 121–49: 122. On the current status of Scottish Gaelic, see also Kenneth MacKinnon, “Scottish Gaelic”. Languages in Britain and in Ireland. Glanville Price, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2000) 44–55. 813 Grieve, “English Ascendancy in British Literature”, 74. 814 Ibid. 815 Ibid. 816 Ibid., 73. 817 Ibid., 75. 227

Gaelic of the Highlands. What was needed rather was the innovation of a new synthetic literary vernacular, a vernacular generated by the fusion of various Scots dialects with

Gaelic itself. Only by bridging the “gulf” between these languages, Grieve argued, could a “new classicism” emerge in Scotland.818 Though many claimed that these languages could not and ought not be mixed, Grieve believed that a standard Scottish idiom—what he called in the tradition of Burns and Stevenson, “Lallans” —could be fashioned by working “back from the bits to whole” through a “synthetic process”.819 Though an artificial tongue, this literary dialect would, as he envisioned it, unify the nation with a language that reintegrated and gathered unto itself “all the disjecta membra of the

Doric”.820

818 Ibid., 73, 74. 819 Grieve first challenged this claim in an essay for a 1926 issue of the Scottish Educational Journal: “It is amusing”, he declared, “to find a few Scots assessors at Musical Festivals and other self-regarded experts – none of them with any work in Scots of the slightest consequence to their own credit – laying down the law, in evident alarm at the new tendencies which are manifesting themselves in recent Vernacular literature, that ‘there must be no mixing of different dialects’ – i.e. (for this is what it amounts to), no working back from the bits to the whole, no effort to reintegrate the disjecta membra – but despite these stick-in-the-muds, and no matter how long it may take the great body of lovers of Scots to arrive at any conception of the new position, it is happily obvious that Scots has at last – and not too late – been committed to a synthetic process.” Hugh MacDiarmid, “Towards a Synthetic Scots” (13 August 1926). Contemporary Scottish Studies. Alan Riach, ed. (Manchester: Carcanet Press 1995) 368–73: 369. 820 Hugh MacDiarmid, “The New Movement in Vernacular Poetry: Lewis Spence, Marion Angus” (November 1925). Contemporary Scottish Studies. Alan Riach, ed. (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1995) 196–204: 198. After the publication of Allan Ramsay’s popular play, The Gentle Shepherd (1725), the epithet “Doric” was used to describe the rough speech of Northumbria and the Scottish Lowlands. Used to describe a dialect of ancient Greek in the western and northern regions of the Peloponnese, the term was appropriated by the critic, Alexander Tytler [more commonly called Lord Woodhouselee (1747–1813)] who, when praising Ramsay’s work, stressed the rustic simplicity of Scots vernacular compared to the urbane English of London. “To us”, Tytler wrote, the “dialect is an antiquated tongue, and as such it carries with it a Doric simplicity”. Lord Woodhouselee (Alexander Tytler), “Essay on Ramsay’s Gentle Shepherd”. The Gentle Shepherd. A Pastoral Comedy by Allan Ramsay (New York: William Gowans, 1852) xxxi–lix: xxxv, lviii. Gradually, Doric became identified with the dialects of North-East Scotland, and this comparison between “Grecian Doric” and Scots vernacular stuck in subsequent criticism. Later, when reviewing N. F. Moore’s Lectures on the Greek Language and Literature (New York, 1835), an American critic insisted likewise that “[i]n English, the dialect of Allan Ramsay’s Gentle Shepherd, and of many of the sweetest songs of Burns, corresponds in no slight degree with the Grecian Doric.” Unsigned review, 228

______

With the publication of a poem entitled “The Watergaw” in late 1922, Christopher

Grieve undertook to realize this reintegration and “revival of the Doric” in poetry.821

Scotland’s literary vernacular “is not dead”, he wrote, “but [it] sleepeth”.822 Caught “in a state of suspended animation,” Scots still possessed what he called “an unexhausted evolutionary momentum”, and it was this momentum which pushed Grieve “to think himself back into the spirit of the Doric” when composing his landmark modernist poem,

A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle.823 Published in November 1926 under the pseudonym of Hugh MacDiarmid, this work brought together all that Grieve thought a synthetic vernacular could be, all that “evolutionary momentum” which could best articulate the

North American Review (January 1836) Vol. 42, 94–116: 107. See also the comparison between Theocritus and Ramsay made by the eighteenth-century Edinburgh classicist, Andrew Dalzel (1742– 1806) in “Lecture XXVIII, Pastoral Poetry”. Substance of Lectures on the Ancient Greeks, and on the Revival of Greek Learning in Europe (Edinburgh, 1821) Vol. 2: 233–52: 249. On the development of “Scotland’s Doric” in the modern era, see also J. Derrick McClure, “Scots and Scotland”. Language, Poetry, and Nationhood: Scots as a Poetic Language from 1878 to the Present. (East Linton, Scotland: Tuckwell Press, 2000) 1–13; as well as J. Derrick McClure, Doric: the Dialect of North-East Scotland (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2002). 821 C. M. Grieve, “Introducing ‘Hugh M’Diarmid’”. The Scottish Chapbook (August 1922) Vol. 1, No. 41 as reprinted in Hugh MacDiarmid, Selected Prose. Alan Riach, ed. (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1992) 9–12: 10. On the writing of “The Watergaw”, see Alan Bold, “Montrose or Nazareth”. MacDiarmid: Christopher Murray Grieve, a Critical Biography (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988) 118–61: 137– 40. On the history of synthetic writing in the twentieth-century modernism, see Matthew Hart, Nations of Nothing But Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Synthetic Vernacular Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2010). 822 Grieve, “Introducing ‘Hugh M’Diarmid’”, 11. 823 Ibid., 10. On the development of A Drunk Man from manuscript to publication, see W. N. Herbert, To Circumjack MacDiarmid: The Poetry and Prose of Hugh MacDiarmid (Clarendon: Oxford University Press, 1992) 42–67, as well as Alan Bold, “Sic a Nicht”. MacDiarmid: Christopher Murray Grieve, a Critical Biography (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988) 180–224. 229

“distinctive potentialities” in “Scots psychology”.824 “To prove my saul is Scots”,

MacDiarmid declares,

I maun begin Wi’ what’s still deemed Scots and the folk expect, And spire up syne by visible degrees To heichts whereo’ the fules ha’e never recked.

But aince I get them there I’ll whummle them And souse the craturs in the nether deeps, —For it’s nae choice, and ony man s’ud wish To dree the goat’s weird tae as weel’s the sheeps!825

From the outset, the poem did not fare well commercially or critically.826 Early reviewers found its idiom excessively slipshod and peculiar. “A poem…deliberately and provocatively incoherent” one critic called it.827 Another castigated MacDiarmid for his apparent inability to write “anything but constant plangent grieving over his inhibitions.”828

Nevertheless, the poem did have some important admirers. Among them was the

Irish poet and ancient Greek enthusiast, Oliver St. John Gogarty. Writing in the Irish

Statesman, Gogarty lauded the work for its elasticity, its “flexible and containing form”, a form which even MacDiarmid’s sometime adversary, the Scottish critic Edwin Muir

824 Hugh MacDiarmid, “The New Movement in Vernacular Poetry: Lewis Spence, Marion Angus”, 198. 825 Hugh MacDiarmid, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), as reprinted in Complete Poems, Volume I. Michael Grieve and W. R. Aitken, eds. (Manchester: Carcanet Press Ltd., 1993) 81–167: 83. 826 Of its initial print run of 500 copies, only 99 copies sold before the end of 1926. On the poem’s commercial unsuccess, see Bold, “Sic a Nicht”, 222. 827 Unsigned review, Times Literary Supplement (22 September 1927) No. 1338: 650–1, as quoted in Margery Palmer McCulloch, Scottish Modernism and Contexts 1918–1959 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009) 46. 828 Unsigned review, Press and Journal, Aberdeen (27 November 1926) 5, as cited in Bold, “Sic a Nicht”, 223. On the poem’s early reception, see McCulloch, “Hugh MacDiarmid and Modernist Poetry in Scots”. Scottish Modernism and Contexts 1918–1959, 29–52. 230

(1887–1959), would likewise praise for its “instinctive rightness” throughout.829 “The form of the present poem”, Muir argued,

…permits [Mr M’Diarmid] to express with their appropriate degree of conviction his various intuitions of the world…it is a picture of a mind; it is an image of the world as symbolized in the thistle. The world changes its shape, is lost appears again as Mr M’Diarmid follows the transitions, daring and yet natural, in the mind of the monologist.830

Despite such praise, Muir also saw in MacDiarmid’s work a “frequent carelessness of style” whose “hasty, slipshod manner” led him to think that the artificial synthesis of

Scots which MacDiarmid had created could not, in fact, be a national language for modern Scottish literature.831 “Hugh MacDiarmid”, Muir asserted in his 1936 book, Scott and Scotland,

has recently tried to revive [Scots] by impregnating it with all the contemporary influences of Europe one after another, and thus galvanize it into life by a series of violent shocks. In carrying out this experiment he has written some remarkable poetry; but he has left Scottish verse very much where it was before.832

According to Muir, MacDiarmid’s experimentation with synthetic language was “an isolated phenomenon”, a phenomenon whose inorganic character was wholly unsuited for the forging of a “complete and homogeneous Scottish literature” in the twentieth

829 Oliver St. John Gogarty, under the pseudonym ‘Gog’. “Literature and Life: A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle”. Irish Statesman (8 January 1927) 432, as quoted in Bold, “Sic a Nicht”. MacDiarmid: Christopher Murray Grieve, a Critical Biography, 223. Edwin Muir, “Verse”. Nation and Athenaeum (22 January 1927) 568, as reprinted in Modernism and Nationalism: Literature and Society in Scotland 1918–1939. Margery Palmer McCulloch, ed. (Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2004) 73–4: 74. 830 Ibid., 73. 831 Ibid., 74. 832 Edwin Muir, Scott and Scotland (London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd., 1936) 21–2. 231 century.833 The landscape of literary culture in Scotland “is not noticeably diversified with poets [like MacDiarmid] chanting in synthetic Scots…the village bards who have excruciated us for so long still calmly proceed on their traditional way.”834 For this reason, Muir felt that only two choices now existed for Scotland if the nation were to have “a complete and homogeneous language” for a modern national literature. One was

Gaelic and the other was English, for “[t]here seems to me”, he wrote, “to be no choice except for these: no half-way house if Scotland is ever to reach its complete expression in literature.”835 Scotland had once possessed its own vernacular in which “everything can be expressed that a people wishes to express…but we cannot return to it”, Muir claimed,

“to think so is to misunderstand history.”836 By the time of Robert Burns began composing verse in the late eighteenth century, Scots vernacular had lapsed and “lost its richness and thinned to a trickle”, it was, bit by bit, scattered amongst many provincial dialects—dialects that were, Muir insisted, “to a homogeneous language what the babbling of children is to the speech of grown men and women; [dialect language] is blessedly ignorant of the wider spheres of thought and passion and…as irresponsible as that of the irremediably immature”.837

With the creative utility of Highland Gaelic also in doubt, Muir saw English as the sole practicable language for ambitious writers of Scottish extract. “This may be a regrettable fact, but it must be accepted”, he explained, “…there is no Scots language to

833 Edwin Muir, “Scotland Once Had a Scots Literature”. The Bulletin (27 January 1938) 18, as reprinted in Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Muir, “For the Vernacular Circle”. Scottish Studies Review (May 2005, Vol. 6, Issue 1) 59–73: 70. See also Muir, Scott and Scotland, 178. 834 Muir, “For the Vernacular Circle”, 70. 835 Ibid., 178. 836 Ibid., 177–8. 837 Muir, “For the Vernacular Circle”, 69. See also Muir, Scott and Scotland, 70–1. 232 which we can pass over from the restricted and local province of dialect: there is only

English.”838 And yet, in spite of this fact, Muir believed that there was no impediment to

Scotland having a modern national literature. The country could still “assert its identity” through a literature composed in English, for even among the countries of Celtic world,

English had been used before, he explained, in “the contemporary case of Ireland”. 839

Irish nationality cannot be said to any less intense than ours; but Ireland produced a national literature not by clinging to Irish dialect, but by adopting English and making it into a language fit for all its purposes. The poetry of Mr. Yeats belongs to English literature, but no one would deny that it belongs to Irish literature pre-eminently and essentially.840

Yeats’ example had shown that Celtic nationality across the British Isles could find— even under the strictures of English—an appropriate mode for literary expression. But the tragedy of modern Scotland lay in the obdurate desire of its writers to cling closely to the

“bits and patches” of Scottish dialect which still remained live, but “Ireland”, he explained, has “produced a national literature not by clinging to Irish dialect, but by adopting English and making it into a language fit for all its purposes.”841

MacDiarmid, for his part, could not abide the “absurd pro-English prejudice” that motivated what he called Muir’s “stab-in-the-back” betrayal of the nationalist cause in

Scott and Scotland.842 The response he lodged in the Glasgow district newspaper, The

838 Ibid., 71. 839 Ibid., 182, 179. 840 Ibid., 179. 841 Ibid. 842 C. M. Grieve, “Scots as a Literary Medium: Point of View for Burns Day”. The Bulletin (24 January 1938) 13, as reprinted in Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Muir, “For the Vernacular Circle”. Scottish Studies Review (May 2005) Vol. 6, Issue 1) 59–73: 61. See also Muir, Scott and Scotland, 178. On Muir’s complex relationship with Scottish nationalism, see H. J. Hanham, “The Rise and Fall of Literary Nationalism”. Scottish Nationalism. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969) 146–62: 161– 233

Bulletin, in January 1938 was biting and personal.843 “Scotland's worst enemies have always been Scotsmen themselves,” he declared,

and it is therefore not surprising to find a Scottish writer going far farther in his denigration of Scottish language and literature…Mr Muir is not exactly a Scotsman himself…He is an Orcadian, and in arguing as he does that a writer in Scots handicaps a critic because the critic must criticise in a different language to that in which the work is written he unwittingly destroys the supposed value of his own remarks on Scots literature.844

According to MacDiarmid, Muir’s insistence that the effort to revive Scots was just a

“petty provincial fad” was a “wholesale attack” not only on his poetic idiom but on the new literary vernacular emerging throughout Scotland, a vernacular MacDiarmid hailed as the “manifestation among us in Scotland of a worldwide tendency.”845 With his

“contemptuous dismissal” of Lallans, Muir had assumed the “English inability to tolerate anything that does not ‘do pujah’ to themselves. It is this inordinate English ascendancy policy”, he complained, “that has determined all [English] history, and accounts for their

2. See also Alan Bold, “Mature Art”. MacDiarmid: a Critical Biography (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988) 337–80: 341–3. 843 MacDiarmid’s regard for “slithy Edwin” Muir remained savage. He never forgave him for the surprising reversal of opinion sketched out in Scott and Scotland. “I cannot agree”, he later told a professor at Glasgow University, “that he is a good, let alone an important, poet. I do not believe at all from my knowledge of him in his professed Christianity or his near saint-hood of character. On the contrary I do not believe he had any intellectual integrity at all.” C. M. Grieve, “Letter to P. H. Butter” (22 December 1966). The Letters of Hugh MacDiarmid. Alan Bold, ed. (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1984) 867–9: 868. See also C. M. Grieve, “Letter to F. G. Scott” (13 July 1940). New Selected Letters of Hugh MacDiarmid. Dorian Grieve, O. D. Edwards and Alan Riach, eds. (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2001) 183–4: 184. Muir, for his part, would later insist that MacDiarmid’s work in Lallans had revived Scottish language. “Because of [MacDiarmid’s] example”, he wrote in 1951, “there has been a revival of the Scottish language, a language that is full of vigour, colour, and potentiality. A new poetry without the mark of parochialism which used to cling to Scottish verse, has been written in it”. Edwin Muir, “Preface”. Catalogue of an Exhibition of 20th-century Scottish Books at the Mitchell Library, Glasgow. (Glasgow: Robert MacLehose and Co., Ltd., 1951) iii–iv: iii. On Muir’s unwillingness to respond to MacDiarmid’s attacks, see P. H. Butter, Edwin Muir: Man and Poet (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd Ltd., 1966) 152–6. 844 Grieve, ““Scots as a Literary Medium: Point of View for Burns Day”, 61–2. 845 Ibid., 64, 62. 234 ruthless treatment of Irish and Scottish and Welsh Gaelic, the Scots vernacular, and their own dialects.”846 With equal contempt, MacDiarmid dismissed Muir and insulted his

English counterparts, comparing them to those “Romans” who remained “inferior to the

Greeks when they made themselves masters of Greece”.847 The example of Yeats and modern Ireland too, he thought, was misplaced, for Yeats himself was known to be “an enthusiastic supporter of the Lallans movement and used to go about reciting certain

Lallans lyrics which he greatly admired and had memorised.”848 Moreover, as

MacDiarmid saw it, Yeats and Ireland’s Literary Revival had “only tinkered with the fringes” of a true renaissance in Celtic literature: “the whole Celtic Twilight business was a dodging of the issue.”849 Yeats knew he had not discovered a “new classicism” in literature, MacDiarmid argued, and he had slowly learned this “great lesson”, confessing to A.E. in 1904 that one ought to now reject all “‘poetry that speaks…with the sweet insinuating voice of the dweller in that country of shadows and hollow images. We possess nothing but the will, and we must never let the children of vague desires breathe it nor the waters of sentiment rust the terrible mirror of its blade.’”850 MacDiarmid felt,

846 Ibid., 62, 61. 847 Ibid., 61. 848 MacDiarmid would later tell the story that he once sent “Mr Yeats and ‘A.E.’ (the late Mr G. W. Russell) representative collections of contemporary poems in English by Scottish poets like Mr Edwin Muir, the late Messrs William Jeffrey, William Soutar Frederick Branford and others. They found the collection quite devoid of merit and said that this confirmed them in their support of the Lallans movement.” Hugh MacDiarmid, “Letter to The Scotsman” (9 December 1950). The Letters of Hugh MacDiarmid. Alan Bold, ed. (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1984) 793–6: 795. 849 Hugh MacDiarmid, “Letter to Kenneth Buthlay” (4 March 1953). The Letters of Hugh MacDiarmid. Alan Bold, ed. (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1984) 863–5: 863. 850 W. B. Yeats, “To George Russell (AE)” (April 1904). The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Volume III: 1901–1904. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) 576 – 8: 577, as quoted in Hugh MacDiarmid, “A Roland for an Oliver” (April 1955). The Raucle Tongue, Hitherto Uncollected Prose, Volume III. Angus Calder, Glen Murray, Alan Riach, eds. (Manchester: Carcanet Press Ltd., 1998) 341–5: 343. 235 like Oliver St. John Gogarty, that this cause—this need for a “new classicism” that Yeats identified—was the work to which synthetic Scots was devoted. Through it one could reject and see through all that “fine-spun, tenuous, shadowy stuff…lacking in variety and in virility”, all in an effort to “get back, through the twilight to the Gaelic sunshine.”851

And yet, as domestic troubles and political attacks mounted on Grieve throughout the 1930s, he saw his vision of creating a “new classicism” in synthetic Scots repeatedly questioned by his contemporaries. By 1933, his relationship with the broader nationalist movement in Scotland had completely disintegrated. That spring the council of the

National Party, a party he had vigorously championed since its founding in 1928, decided to expel him. His stubborn Marxism and penchant for public insult had become too great a liability for the public image of the party, for MacDiarmid had become what one prominent member, J. M. McCormick, called “politically one of the greatest handicaps with which any national movement could have been burdened.”852

His love of bitter controversy, his extravagant and self-assertive criticism of the English, and his woolly thinking, which could encompass within one mind the doctrines of both Major Douglas and Karl Marx, were taken by many of the more sober-minded of the Scots as sufficient excuse to condemn the whole case for Home Rule out of hand.853

Now, however, the handicap which was both Christopher Grieve and Hugh MacDiarmid

851 Hugh MacDiarmid, “An Irish Poet: Oliver St. John Gogarty” (September 1928). The Raucle Tongue, Hitherto Uncollected Prose, Volume II. Angus Calder, Glen Murray, Alan Riach, eds. (Manchester: Carcanet Press Ltd., 1998) 219–23: 221. 852 J. M. MacCormick, The Flag in the Wind (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1955) 35, as quoted in Alan Bold, “The ‘Review’ Reporter Still”. MacDiarmid: a Critical Biography (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988) 225–38: 235. 853 Ibid. 236 was lifted. With a simple letter he was expelled in May.854 In response MacDiarmid poured his scorn into a series of verses, attacking ‘King John’ MacCormick and his band of moderate Home Rule nationalists—that “troupe of gibbering lunatics” he called them.855

There is nae ither country ’neath the sun That’s betrayed the human spirit as Scotland’s done, And still the betrayal proceeds to the complete Dehumanisin’ o’ the Scottish breed …… Nae man, nae spiritual force, can live In Scotland lang. For God’s sake leave it tae. Mak’ a warld o’ your ain like me, and if, ‘Idiot’ or ‘lunatic’ the Scots folk say, At least you’ll ken – owre weel to argue back – You’d be better that than lackin’ a’ they lack.856

Ostracized both politically and artistically, Grieve set out to do as his alter-ego

MacDiarmid had advised: to “mak’ a warld o’ your ain like me”. He moved his family to the remote Shetland Island of Whalsay that spring, and there he spent the next eight and a half years living in deep isolation and extreme poverty. But on the Shetlands the imaginative impulse which had first pushed MacDiarmid towards synthetic Scots now drove him beyond Lallans and the Doric he admired. Soon he was at work on a new form of “synthetic English”, a multilingual language which, he thought, could set out the classical ingenium of each nationality in a single poem, a poem that would unshackle

854 The text of this letter has been reproduced recently in “37. From J. M. MacCormick, National Party of Scotland” (10 May 1933). Dear Grieve, Letters to Hugh MacDiarmid. John Manson, ed. (Glasgow: Kennedy and Boyd, 2011) 73–4. 855 Hugh MacDiarmid, “Letter to Neil Gunn” (19 May 1933). The Letters of Hugh MacDiarmid. Alan Bold, ed. (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1984) 249–50: 250. 856 Hugh MacDiarmid, “Letter to R.M.B.” Complete Poems, Volume II. Michael Grieve and W. R. Aitken, eds. (Manchester: Carcanet Press Ltd., 1994) 1271–3: 1273. On the “lunatics”, see Hugh MacDiarmid, “Letter to Neil Gunn” (19 May 1933). The Letters of Hugh MacDiarmid. Alan Bold, ed. (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1984) 249–50: 250. 237 what he decried as “our helpless submission to a fraction of our expressive possibilities”.857

Motivated by his expulsion from the National Party, MacDiarmid’s communist sympathies began to harden, and he was now determined to set a new Marxist course for his poetry, fostering through it a radical international language which, he believed, could liberate consciousness and throw off “the bias given to human mentality by economic, political, religious and other factors (including above all the vis inertia) [sic]”.858 Writing in the The Free Man later that year, MacDiarmid justified his new vision of a synthetic world language. “The reason why”, he wrote,

nineteen-twentieths of any language are never used is shrewdly related to the problem of the freedom of the consciousness. As Dostoevski said, all human organizations tend to stabilize and perpetuate themselves – to become a ‘church’ and to short-circuit human consciousness. This is most marked in our language-habit.859

As MacDiarmid saw it, the “particular habits of intellection” brought together by modern capitalism and by the dominance of English in British society had clogged the public mind with “incrustations” masked under the false names of thought and of reason. For

“what we call thought”, he explained, “is generally only [a] rationalism of our preconceived or inherent prejudices, or limitations, conscious or unconscious, of our

857 C. M. Grieve, Letter to The Free Man (9 December 1933). The Letters of Hugh MacDiarmid. Alan Bold, ed. (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1984) 770–2: 771. 858 C. M. Grieve, “Constricting the Dynamic Spirit: we want life abundant” (2 May 1936). The Raucle Tongue, Hitherto Uncollected Prose, Volume II. Angus Calder, Glen Murray, Alan Riach, eds. (Manchester: Carcanet Press Ltd., 1998) 548–50: 548. Grieve’s expulsion from the National Party and his staunch commitment to Marxist principles came at a time when communism and the radical Left in Scotland was moving into political retreat. See William Kenefick, “The Fall of the Radical Left, c. 1920 to 1932”. Red Scotland! The Rise and Fall of the Radical Left, c. 1872 to 1932 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd., 2007) 184–206. 859 Grieve, Letter to The Free Man (9 December 1933), 771. 238 powers of thought to suit our interests.”860 Drawing on the metaphysics of Bergson, he argued that thought and reason, typically defined, were “misleading superficial crusts” whose economic and political limits had to be “broken through to release the dynamic spirit which has no more to do with these incrustations than a running stream has to do with a layer of ice which forms on its surface.”861 To unleash this kind of dynamism in language and in modern literature was tantamount to acquiring an absolute freedom of speech, a “‘freedom of speech’”, he asserted,

in the real meaning of the term – something completely opposed to our language habits and freely utilising not only all the vast vocabulary these automatically exclude, but illimitable powers of word formation in keeping with the free genius of any language.862

In contrast to the reductive model of Basic English set out by Ogden and Richards,

MacDiarmid believed that a true form of world language would bring together and synthesize the specific geniuses of all languages and all national literatures. His model, while literary in its aim, was closer to that of his communist contemporaries in Britain, particularly that of the suffragette, E. Sylvia Pankhurst (1882–1960) who insisted in her book Delphos: The Future of International Language, that a global tongue or

“Interlanguage” could not be achieved through eradicating particular national languages.

The “Interlanguage”, she insisted,

will develop with the general consensus of world-opinion, led by the specialists. Its discovery and perfection must be mainly the work of philologists, working, not as propagandists and politicians, but as

860 Grieve, “Constricting the Dynamic Spirit: we want life abundant”, 548. 861 Ibid. 862 Grieve, Letter to The Free Man (9 December 1933), 771. 239

scientists and students. After the philologists will come the stylists; the poets, and thinkers.863

Far from dismantling or antagonizing the local speech of specific nationalities, Pankhurst proclaimed that a “world auxiliary” language could be formed from “definite scientific principles”, and for that reason, could “serve as a master-key to the most universally employed of the great speech-families, and will assist in a readier and deeper understanding of the national tongues.”864 In this way the Interlanguage, Pankhurst claimed, would resemble “a language so much like Latin” and its knowledge “would tremendously accelerate the spread of learning and the breaking down of social barriers.”865 National and international language could work in seamless harmony, she believed, employed to different purpose and utilized in separate fields of human endeavor.866

863 E. Sylvia Pankhurst, Delphos: The Future of International Language (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., Ltd., [1926]) 86. Pankhurst favored the adoption of Interlingua, a form of scientific, uninflected Latin designed by the Italian mathematician, Giuseppe Peano (1858–1932). According to Pankhurst, “the palm for linguistic excellence, amongst the existing interlanguages, must…be given to Peano's Interlingua, because it is the first systematic attempt to build up an inter-European vocabulary on a consistent scientific basis; because it goes furthest in the elimination of grammar, under the guidance of observed tendencies in natural language; above all, because it is a logical etymological attempt to create the poor man's simplified Latin, which will open to him the nomenclature of the sciences”. Ibid., 84–5. 864 Ibid., 41 47. 865 Ibid., 50. 866 Ibid., 93–5. “Probably fifty (perhaps even thirty) years hence no one will be troubled by learning the Interlanguage. It will be acquired at the toddling age, side by side with the mother-tongue. The schools will be wholly bi-lingual. The Interlanguage and the native language will be used in teaching children, who will enter school with a familiar-speaking knowledge of both. For arithmetic, geometry, mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, the geography and history of foreign countries, the Interlanguage will be the vehicle of instruction, the national language being employed for the literature, history, and geography of the native land. Elocution will be practised in both tongues.” On Pankhurst’s communism and its impact on her view of world language, see Patricia W. Romero’s biography, E. Sylvia Pankhurst: Portrait of a Radical (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987) 181–2. 240

In a similar fashion, the world language MacDiarmid envisioned did not require the annihilation of local cultural traditions or the destruction of specific national languages. On the contrary, he thought that the strength of his new poetic idiom lay in its power to draw on all national literatures effectively, in its ability to create not a heteroglossic poetry drawn from dialects of the same language—as he had once done with Lallans—but a polyglossic synthesis grounded in the juxtaposition of diverse national tongues, each imparting its own “alternative value of prime consequence”.867 For this reason, Grieve saw no conflict between the nationalist impulse of his verse and his commitment to international communism.868 The “new classicism” which he had proposed in the essay, “English Ascendancy in British Literature” was integral to the

Marxist vision of world language he was now adumbrating, for as one critic has recently observed, the notion that

the nation fully realized on its own terms, is central to the international community is a concept peopling MacDiarmid’s political landscape, a place where, however marginal national particularity seems to be, the universal is the particular.869

To articulate all knowledge in a new “poetry of facts”, MacDiarmid thought it essential that every nation achieve both its political and aesthetic potential—its original genius—in a classical literature all its own. The understanding expressed in the language and

867 Grieve, “English Ascendancy in British Literature”, 63. 868 Later, when defending his rejection of Scottish Home Rule and the alleged paradox of his political commitments in the 1930s, Grieve noted further that “the Communist Party of Great Britain is the only party which has the restoration to Scotland of a Parliament of its own as a plank in its platform”. Hugh MacDiarmid, “Burns Today and Tomorrow” (1959). Albyn: Shorter Books and Monographs. Alan Riach, ed. (Manchester: Carcanet Press Ltd., 1996) 205–96: 276. On MacDiarmid’s “Nationalist Internationalism”, see Hart, “The Impossibility of Synthetic Scots; Or, Hugh MacDiarmid’s Nationalist Internationalism”. Nations of Nothing But Poetry, 51–78. 869 Lyall, Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poetry and Politics of Place, 19. 241 literature of every particular nation was, as he saw it, unique and in its singularity, classical. But classical ideals could not be, he argued, confused with a stale neo- classicism whose universal principles were mere abstractions drawn from the life of

Greek and the Roman art. As such they were, as James Joyce once suggested, only a

“syllabus of greenroom proprieties and cautions…advanced to the dignity of inspired pronouncements”.870 MacDiarmid agreed. He refused any artificial neo-classical constraints on the local genius of particular nations. “I have”, he declared,

no more use for ‘consistency’ of this kind than I have for any other shibboleth which tries to confine the infinite vitality and potentiality of humanity to any particular ‘rut’… I do not believe in – or in the desirability of – any ‘likemindness’, any ‘common purpose’, any ‘ultimate objective’, but simply in ‘life and all that more abundantly’, in the lifting of the all suppressions and thwarting and warping agencies.871

But to keep his new idiom of world language far from the rut of “likemindedness”—from being “‘cribbed, cabined, and confined’ in any creeds, conventions, or formulae”—

MacDiarmid set out to draw on all languages and literatures in their original form, for it was “vitally necessary to remember”, he asserted, that language itself “is just as much a determinant of what is expressed in it as a medium of expression.”872 Seeking an

“adequate synthetic medium” to express the “free consciousness” of mankind through all language, he began composing a new long poem entitled Cornish Heroic Song for Valda

Trevlyn, in which he synthesized the many ancient and modern languages whose corrective values had shaped both the past and the present of world literature.873

870 James Joyce, “Drama and Life” (1900). The Critical Writings of James Joyce. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann, eds. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989) 38–46: 39. 871 Grieve, “Constricting the Dynamic Spirit: we want life abundant”, 549. 872 Ibid., 549, 548; Grieve, Letter to The Free Man (9 December 1933), 771. 873 Ibid. 242

The ambitious multilingual form of this epic was, MacDiarmid felt, essential to its communist polemic, for no man could, he later wrote (quoting Lenin):

become a Communist without making [his] own the treasures of human knowledge…Communism becomes an empty phrase, a mere façade, and the Communist a mere bluffer, if he has not worked over in his consciousness the whole inheritance of human knowledge…made his own, and worked over anew, all that was of value in the more than two thousand years of development of human thought.874

With European fascism gaining a firmer foothold in Britain—among many Scottish nationalists—Grieve felt that all “fascisising pseudo-satisfaction” had to be countered, for such enthusiasm was, he wrote, “a complete perversion of the Scottish Literary

Movement…on one hand, and of the Scottish Nationalist Movement on the other.”875 The

On the composition and piecemeal publication history of the Cornish Heroic Song for Valda Trevlyn, see W. N. Herbert, “Mature Art I” and “Mature Art II”. To Circumjack MacDiarmid: The Poetry and Prose of Hugh MacDiarmid (Clarendon: Oxford University Press, 1992) 157–225. 874 These words MacDiarmid excerpted from a speech V. I. Lenin gave to the Russian Young Communist League in October 1920. I have been unable to source this translation. See the text of this speech in a different translation in “‘The Tasks of the Youth Leagues.’ Speech Delivered At The Third All-Russia Congress of the Russian Young Communist League” (2 October 1920). Collected Works. Second edition. David Skvirsky and George Hanna, trans. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965) Vol. 31: 283–99: 286. See also Hugh MacDiarmid, written under the pseudonym ‘Arthur Leslie’, “The Poetry and Politics of Hugh MacDiarmid”. Selected Essays of Hugh MacDiarmid. Duncan Glen, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970) 19–37: 30. 875 In response, MacDiarmid insisted that Scotland lead all Celtic nations in a “Celtic USSR”, a “United Front against Fascism and war, and so enable Scotland, with its splendid old Radical and Left Wing tendency, to…at last pull its full weight on the side of Peace and the Commonwealth of Mankind at this great turning-point in human history, as the only means of ensuring the possibility of the development of Scottish culture”. Hugh MacDiarmid, “Scottish Culture and Imperialist War” (1937). The Raucle Tongue, Hitherto Uncollected Prose, Volume III. Angus Calder, Glen Murray, Alan Riach, eds. (Manchester: Carcanet Press Ltd., 1998) 5–8: 8; see also Hugh MacDiarmid, “Celtic Front” (1939). The Raucle Tongue, Hitherto Uncollected Prose, Volume III. Angus Calder, Glen Murray, Alan Riach, eds. (Manchester: Carcanet Press Ltd., 1998) 21–6. MacDiarmid’s desire for a socialist union among Celtic nations originated, in part, during his experience of the Great War: “I was associated with soldiers”, he later explained, “who were English, Welsh, Irish and so on. And I found that wherever these elements were brigaded together, we got on very well—Irish, the Welsh, the Scots but not the English. That caused me to think. And when I came back to Scotland, after serving several years for a war that was ostensibly fought for the determination of small nations— poor little Belgium and all that—I was suddenly confronted by the fact that I didn’t know anything about my own country of Scotland, and I didn’t see why on earth so many friends of mine had been slain fighting a war that we didn’t know anything about.” Hugh MacDiarmid, interviewed by his son Michael Grieve, “Hugh MacDiarmid: No Fellow Travelers”, A film made for the 1972 Edinburgh Festival, 243 militant nativism advanced by Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists had exacerbated public ignorance with deliberately reductive accounts of the past.

MacDiarmid, however, was intent on fulfilling V. I. Lenin’s call that Communism “must not abandon the past”.876 The kind of understanding—the kind of poetry—he wanted was one which embraced all complexities of history and of language, a “Communist poetry” he wrote,

that bases itself On the Resolution of the C. C. of the R. C. P. In Spring 1925: ‘The Party must vigorously oppose Thoughtless and contemptuous treatment Of the old cultural heritage As well as of the literary specialists… It must likewise combat the tendency Towards a purely hothouse proletarian literature.’877

But despite his bold aims, Hugh MacDiarmid was no scholar, not in any strict sense of the term. He had come into the world with few social or educational advantages, having been raised among the Scottish working-class in the mill town of Langholm. At school, he had little formal training in the classics or even in contemporary European languages.878 But nevertheless he had exhibited from a young age what he later called “an

directed by Oscar Marzaroli (Ogam Films, 1972). The film may be viewed online at: http://ssa.nls.uk/film.cfm?fid=2688 876 V. I. Lenin, “Speech At A Plenary Session of the Moscow Soviet” (November 1922). Collected Works. Second edition. David Skvirsky and George Hanna, trans. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965) Vol. 33: 435–43: 439. 877 Hugh MacDiarmid, “Further Passages from The Kind of Poetry I Want”. Complete Poems, Volume I. Michael Grieve and W. R. Aitken, eds. (Manchester: Carcanet Press Ltd., 1998) 607–27: 615. The initials refer to the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party. 878 When he moved to Edinburgh to train as a teacher at Broughton Junior Student Center in 1908, MacDiarmid did receive a meager level of training in languages and the classics. The institution had completely reorganized and expanded its curriculum in 1907 to include the “Liberal Arts subjects— English, Languages, Maths, Science, History, Classics, Geography and Art”. See Hugh MacDiarmid, “Introduction”. The Hugh MacDiarmid–George Ogilvie Letters. Catherine Kerrigan, ed. (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 2008) xiii–xxxiii: xv; as well as Alan Bold, MacDiarmid, The Terrible Crystal (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983) 6. 244 unusual readiness of speech”, and MacDiarmid soon became an ardent autodidact.879 And throughout his life, he crowed over what he taught himself with very little modesty. “I have never met anyone”, he later mused,

who has read anything like as much as I have, though I have known most of our great bookmen; and it is a common experience of mine to have professors and other specialists in this or that language or literature, or in subjects ranging from geology to cerebral localization or the physiological conditions of originality of thought, admit that I am far better read even in their own particular subject than they are themselves.880

Convinced that a half-read knowledge of many languages could be enough to reveal the universal in the local and the particular, MacDiarmid worked assiduously throughout the

1930s to carry synthetic verse composed in a world language “much further than it has yet been carried by anyone else known to me”.881

And as he pushed farther than Lallans had allowed, MacDiarmid turned away from the model set by W. B. Yeats and the Celtic Revival, and embraced the example of

James Joyce whose cosmopolitanism and “European range in technique and ideas”, he felt, bore “striking affinities” with his own.882 As Alan Bold has noted,

On his early education at Langholm Academy from 1897–1907, see Hugh MacDiarmid, “On Seeing Scotland Whole”. Lucky Poet. Alan Riach, ed. (Manchester: Carcanet Press Ltd., 1994) 218–33. 879 Ibid., 229. 880 Ibid., 13. As Lyall observes, MacDiarmid’s “pugnacious pride” about the extent of his self-taught learning masked an “insecurity as to the absence of an institutional basis for such learning”. This attitude persisted as “MacDiarmid retained the educational anxieties of a working-class autodidact his whole life, and was ‘habitually deferential towards academics with little of his intellect and nothing of his creative powers merely because they represented a world he found esoteric, in which he was never at ease, but which he continued to admire.’” Scott Lyall, “Debatable Land”. Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poetry and Politics of Place, 56–80: 57. 881 C. M. Grieve, Letter to William Soutar (14 January 1938). The Letters of Hugh MacDiarmid. Alan Bold, ed. (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1984) 168. 882 MacDiarmid first observed these affinities in 1924, writing of his own work under the pseudonym ‘J. G. Outterstone Buglass’: “Mr M’Diarmid thus resembles Mr Joyce in his attitude to the religion of his countrymen, to sexual problems, to political and cultural nationalism, to humbug, hypocrisy, and 245

his opinion of Yeats was qualified by his disapproval of Yeats’s ‘pro- Fascist’ politics. Yeats’s Celtic Twilight period did not appeal to MacDiarmid though he felt that Yeats would be acknowledged as ‘the greatest poet of his period in the English language.’883

But the affinities with Joyce, however, had now come into sharp focus, for MacDiarmid was no longer just attempting “a form of Doric which is no dialect in particular” but a

“new literary language” drawn from all forms of human speech.884 “I go further”, he declared in 1933, “and agree with Joyce in regard to the utilisation of a multi-linguistic medium – a synthetic use, not of any particular language, but of all languages.”885

MacDiarmid would indeed go much further, and by the end of the decade, he had written by his biographer’s count well over 20,000 lines of synthetic poetry, and because of this achievement, he began to proudly tell friends that his own experiments with a synthetic multilingualism had far exceeded his Irish master: he had left “Joyce at the starting-post so far as the use of multi-linguistics is concerned”.886

And yet, the sheer volume of the verse he produced kept MacDiarmid from successfully setting this new work into complete form as an epic poem. Moreover, with stringent publishing restrictions and paper rationing put in place at the outbreak of World

War II, it was difficult for MacDiarmid to publish his new work. Nevertheless, he began

sentimentalism, [and] in his preoccupation with ‘interior revelation’”. J. G. Outterstone Buglass, “Arne Garborg, Mr Joyce, and Mr M’Diarmid” (September 1924). The Raucle Tongue, Hitherto Uncollected Prose, Volume I. Angus Calder, Glen Murray, Alan Riach, eds. (Manchester: Carcanet Press Ltd., 1996) 233–8: 237. 883 Alan Bold, Scots Steel Tempered wi’ Irish Fire: Hugh MacDiarmid and Ireland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh College of Art, 1985) 8. 884 Buglass, “Arne Garborg, Mr Joyce, and Mr M’Diarmid”, 237. See also Bold, Scots Steel Tempered wi’ Irish Fire, 4–5. 885 Grieve, Letter to The Free Man (9 December 1933), 771. 886 Grieve, Letter to William Soutar (14 January 1938), 168. See also Alan Bold, “Mature Art”. MacDiarmid: Christopher Murray Grieve, a Critical Biography (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988) 337–80: 346–7. 246 to break up his work up into smaller bits, at first publishing some piecemeal during the war and leaving much of the new material untouched until the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Prior to the outbreak of the war, MacDiarmid once again approached T. S. Eliot, hoping that The Criterion would have some desire—and even more space—to publish a 4000 to

5000 line section of the Cornish Heroic Song for Valda Trevlyn, a section MacDiarmid had now re-titled Mature Art.887 The idiom of this new work was entirely singular, he explained to Eliot,

a ‘hapax legomenon of a poem – an exercise in schlabone, bordatini, and prolonged scordatura’ and it is…[an] example of ‘learned poetry’, much of it written in a multi-linguistic diction embracing not only many European but also Asiatic languages, and prolific in allusions and ‘synthetic poetry’, demanding for their complete comprehension an extremely detailed knowledge of numerous fields of world-literature.888

Despite the promise of the poem—it was an “extremely interesting, individual, and indeed very remarkable” work Eliot wrote—The Criterion could not afford to publish it in its entirety.889 Eliot chose instead to print only the “First Appendix” of the poem in what would be the final issue of The Criterion.890 Mature Art would only see full publication well after the war in 1955 when the sequence was renamed In Memoriam

James Joyce—Joyce who likewise believed in the imaginative authority of what Eugène

Jolas lauded as that “amalgamation of numerous modern languages” – “the forward-

887 While Eliot was not sympathetic to Marxism, The Criterion was an apt place for MacDiarmid to seek publication. The magazine brought together both his internationalist interest in world literature, as well as the desire for a “new classicism” in the literature of the modern age. See Peter White, “Literary Journalism”. T. S. Eliot in Context. Jason Harding, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) 93–104. 888 C. M. Grieve, Letter to T. S. Eliot (4 February 1938). The Letters of Hugh MacDiarmid. Alan Bold, ed. (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1984) 446–7: 446. 889 T. S. Eliot, Letter to C. M. Grieve (8 June 1936), as quoted in a footnote in The Letters of Hugh MacDiarmid. Alan Bold, ed. (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1984) 447. 890 The “First Appendix” appeared under the title, “Cornish Heroic Song for Valda Trevlyn”. The Criterion (January 1939) Vol. 18, No. 71. 247 straining vision of [the] single mind” that was Joyce.891 In like manner, MacDiarmid declared that,

There lie hidden in language elements that effectively combined Can utterly change the nature of man; Even as the recently-discovered plant growth hormone, Idole-acetic acid, makes holly-cuttings in two months Develop roots that would normally take two years to grow, So perchance can we outgrow time And suddenly fulfill all history Established and to come.892

By using an idiom which combined the “multitudinous waves of speech”, MacDiarmid was convinced he had created a new international form of epic, a form which was at once cosmopolitan and yet faithful to the vision of nationalism and modern classicism he set out in “English Ascendancy and British Literature”.893 This form, he thought, had brought together in one place the ingenium—“the alternative value of prime consequence”—from each and every nation, and in so doing, it substantiated a unified vision of world language with diverse and often opposed literary traditions juxtaposed against one another.

As MacDiarmid saw it, the greatest strength of his new epic lay in its ability to balance these traditions. For by modulating conflicting elements of language, science and mythology, his work had begun to add to “the stock of available reality” in world

891 Eugene Jolas, “Style and the Limitations of Speech”. Irish Statesman (26 January 1929), as reprinted in James Joyce: the Critical Heritage. Robert H. Deming, ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970) Vol. 2, 398–9: 399. 892 Hugh MacDiarmid, “In Memoriam James Joyce, From a Vision of World Language”. Complete Poems, Volume II. Michael Grieve and W. R. Aitken, eds. (Manchester: Carcanet Press Ltd., 1994) 737–805: 781. On the publication history of In Memoriam James Joyce, see Margery Palmer McCulloch, “Visionaries and Revisionaries: Late Muir and MacDiarmid”. Scottish Modernism and Contexts 1918–1959 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009) 169–97. 893 MacDiarmid, “In Memoriam James Joyce, From a Vision of World Language”, 787. 248 literature, exploiting what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called the “prime & loftiest Faculty” of the mind: the “esemplastic power” of human imagination.894 And “[i]s this not what we require?”, MacDiarmid asks,

Esemplasy and coadunation Multeity in unity – not the Unity resulting But the mode of the conspiration (Schelling’s In-Eins-Bildung Kraft) Of the manifold to the one, For, as Rilke says, the poet must know everything, Be μυριόνους (a phrase I have borrowed From a Greek monk, who applies it To a Patriarch of Constantinople), Or, as the Bhagavad-Gita puts it, visvato-mukha.895

Translating Friedrich Schelling’s notion of Ineinsbildung, Coleridge had coined the word

“esemplastic” from the Greek phrase, εἰς ἓν πλάττειν, defining it as the ability to fuse

894 First introduced by Coleridge in Chapter 10, Biographia Literaria (1817). See Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 7. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate, eds. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983) Vol. 1, 168–70. On “esemplastic power”, see also Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Chapter 13, Biographia Literaria, Vol. 1, 295–306. See also Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notebook 24, Page 72 (February–June 1813), where esemplasy is contrasted with the “Imagunculation”: “His Imagination, if it must be so called, is at all events of the pettiest kind—it is an Imagunculation—How excellently the German Einbildungskraft expresses this prime & loftiest Faculty, the power of co-adunation, the faculty that forms the many into one, in eins Bildung.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 3: 1808–1819. Kathleen Coburn, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973) Vol. 3, No. 1, 4176n. See also R. P. Blackmur, “Art and Manufacture” (1935). Form and Value in Modern Poetry (Garden City, New York: Anchor Doubleday Books, 1957) 337. 895 Though written earlier, this section was first published in 1943. In the first published version of the poem, MacDiarmid did not write μυριόνους but instead the word “mindedness” in Greek spelling with no accent, μινδεδνεσς. Though false in this case, MacDiarmid kept the same attribution to a “Greek monk”. To compare versions of the poem, see Hugh MacDiarmid, Lucky Poet. Alan Riach. eds. (Manchester: Carcanet Press Ltd., 1994) 122; as well as MacDiarmid, “The Kind of Poetry I Want”. Complete Poems, Volume II. Michael Grieve and W. R. Aitken, eds. (Manchester: Carcanet Press Ltd., 1994) 1001–35: 1016. See also Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Chapter 15, Biographia Literaria in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 7. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate, eds. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983) Vol. 2, 19–28: 20. 249 many divergent elements into a “unity of effect”.896 As he saw it, it was Shakespeare above all who possessed this “power of reducing multitude…[of] modifying a series of thoughts by some one predominant thought or feeling.”897 For this reason, Coleridge declared him “our myriad-minded” poet, the ἀνὴρ μυριόνους of English letters whose mastery of “combination or intertexture” had confirmed the aphorism often attributed to

Pseudo-Acro, the second-century Latin grammarian: “Poeta nascitur non fit.”898

And yet, the myriad-mindedness of Hugh MacDiarmid was not inborn. It was acquired—forged on the remote wastelands of the Shetlands where MacDiarmid spent nearly ten years “brooding in uninhabited islands; seeing no newspapers and…cutting myself completely away from civilised life.”899 As a young student, Christopher Grieve had had few advantages in the study of classics, science and even modern languages. Yet through self-taught knowledge, Grieve fertilized his work in synthetic poetry with a partial understanding of both ancient and modern tongues. He inflected the polyglossic idiom of Hugh MacDiarmid with these and articulated a vision of cosmopolitanism classicism in In Memoriam James Joyce, a poem whose broad international form

896 Ibid., 20. See also Coleridge, Chapter 10, Biographia Literaria, Vol. 1, 168–71. 897 Coleridge, Chapter 15, Biographia Literaria, Vol. 2, 20. 898 “A poet is born, not made.” Ibid., 20. Coleridge first encountered the Greek word, μυριόνους, in 1801 when reading Naucratius’ eulogy of Theodorus Studites (759–826), published in William Cave’s Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Historia Literaria (1688–9) Vol. 1, 509–13; and in the 1743 edition, Vol. 2, 8–11. The passages from Cave are reproduced in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notebook 21, Page 195, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 1: 1794–1804. Kathleen Coburn, ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1957) Vol. 1, No. 1, 1070n. On the origin of the saying, “Poeta nascitur non fit”, see William Ringler, “Poeta Nascitur Non Fit: Some Notes on the History of an Aphorism”. Journal of the History of Ideas (October 1941) Vol. 2, No. 4, 497–504. 899 C. M. Grieve, Letter to Neil M. Gunn (19 May 1933). The Letters of Hugh MacDiarmid. Alan Bold, ed. (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1984) 249–50: 250. 250 foreshadowed a new communist order based in what MacDiarmid called “difficult knowledge”.900 Such knowledge would, he promised, help rid British modernity of the

“English Ascendancy”, establishing in its stead “Workers’ Republic in Scotland, Ireland,

Wales and Cornwall…a sort of Celtic Union of Socialist Soviet Republics.”901 Thus as

Hugh MacDiarmid returned from the Shetland Islands in January 1942, he emerged with a new creativity and a new literary form grounded in communist polemic, a poetry driven

“against intellectual apathy”,

Its material founded, like Gray’s, on difficult knowledge And its metres those of a poet who has studied Pindar and Welsh poetry, But, more than that, its words coming from a mind Which has experienced the sifted layers on layers Of human lives – aware of the innumerable dead And the innumerable to-be-born.902

Yet, from the beginning, it was MacDiarmid’s desire to see a “new classicism” take hold amongst his Scottish contemporaries—to have done “as Greece itself had done”—which drove his imagination, both when forging Lallans and when fostering the multilingual idiom of his later verse during the 1930s.903 Scotland had to get back to the “Ur-motives” of its own national identity, he insisted, to rediscover a classical ingenium in its own language and literature. Each nation possessed, hidden beneath the crust of mimicry and

900 MacDiarmid, “The Kind of Poetry I Want”, Complete Poems, Volume II, 1013. 901 I use the term, cosmopolitanism classicism, borrowing from Christopher Harvie’s notion of a “cosmopolitan nationalism”, a phrase he first used to describe MacDiarmid’s literary and political work in Scotland and Nationalism, 77. See also MacDiarmid, Lucky Poet, 26. As one scholar has observed, MacDiarmid was drawn to writing epic, in part, because of its immense range and length. His work would be, he wrote, “‘far too long / To be practicable for any existing medium’ (LP, 130). If capitalist communication mediums are corrupt then in eschewing such outlets an oppositional poetry, whilst seemingly elitist, actually presages a radical new order.” Lyall, 183–4. 902 MacDiarmid, “The Kind of Poetry I Want”, Complete Poems, Volume II, 1013–14. 903 MacDiarmid, Lucky Poet, 375. 251

English influence, a literature parallel in beauty and authority to those of classical Greece and Rome. As MacDiarmid saw it, the rediscovery of national genius would be

“something more radical than a return to any ‘classical’ formalism”, for it would directly impact the “fundamental form” of the emerging world language MacDiarmid was advancing.904 This full power of this idiom could only be fully felt and apprehended, he thought, when every nation reached back “to get behind the Renaissance, through which the native cultures of Greece whitened the native potentialities of all other European peoples”, to realize for themselves that “classic effect as the Greeks themselves did.”905

904 C. M. Grieve, “Wider Aspects of Scottish Nationalism” (November 1927). The Raucle Tongue, Hitherto Uncollected Prose, Volume II. Angus Calder, Glen Murray, Alan Riach, eds. (Manchester: Carcanet Press Ltd., 1998) 60–3: 60. 905 Ibid., 61. 252

Appendix I

Lord Chamberlain’s Plays Correspondence File: Oedipus Rex 1910/814, British Library Archive.

253

[Directory of Advisory Board Members, Censorship of Plays, November 1910]

Lord Chamberlain’s Office, St James’s Palace, S.W.

CENSORSHIP OF PLAYS Advisory Board Members

The Rt. Hon. Sir Edward Carson, K.C., M.P. 5, Eaton Place, S.W.

Sir Squire Bancroft. 18 Berkeley Square, W.

Sir John Hare. 5, Cleveland Square, W.

Professor Walter Raleigh. The Hangings, Ferry Hinksey, near Oxford.

S. O. Buckmaster, Esq. K. C. 1, Porchester Terrace, Hyde Park W.

[marked] 392/10

254

[George A. Redford, Letter to the Lord Chamberlain (10 November 1910]

Lord Chamberlain’s Office, St James Palace, S.W.

10 Nov 1910

Dear Lord Spencer,

May I take this opportunity to bring before you a letter I received from Mr. Herbert Trench of the Haymarket Theatre, submitting for Licence a version in English of the “Oedipus” of Sophocles, by Dr. Gilbert Murray. In reply I pointed out that an English version of this play by Mr W. L. Courtney had recently been read by your Lordship and that a previous version had been before the Lord Chamberlain. In both these cases it had been intimated to the parties concerned that the subject of Oedipus was deemed ineligible for Licence. I also added that personally I considered there was no likelihood of the official decision being reversed, but that if Mr. Trench wished it, I would consult you on the matter. I enclose his reply.

I have read the Gilbert Murray version. In many respects it differs from Mr. Courtney’s treatment, but it follows the classic story throughout, and the character of Jocasta “now wife of Oedipus”, is represented and all the well known situation of the play are retained. Subject to your approval, I should propose to return the copy, and the fee with a letter to the effect that the Lord Chamberlain desires to inform you that he considers the subject of Oedipus as ineligible for Licence, and he sees no reason to reverse his former decision. I would point out that Mr. Trench and Dr. Gilbert Murray are opponents of the office, and no doubt desire to make capital out of a prohibition of an ancient Greek classic * familiar to every school boy ** I am inclined to think it might be more politic to decide the question on precedent rather than consider this particular version, and refuse the Licence in the ordinary course. If you should wish to see me on the subject, I will of course attend at the office with the copy.

I am, Dear Lord Spencer Yours faithfully G. A. Redford 255

[Written in red ink on front page]

28/11/10 infd. Mr. Redford that this play was to be licensed in the ordinary way.

[marked] 814/10 [marked] 392/10

256

[Douglas Dawson, Letter to George A. Redford (11 November 1910]

Lord Chamberlain’s Office, St James’s Palace, S.W.

11 November 1910

Dear Mr. Redford,

Will you please reply to Mr Trench’s letter of the 7th inst and tell him that the Play “Oedipus Rex” is under consideration, and that you will let him know the result as soon as you possibly can.

Yours truly, (sd) Douglas Dawson.

G. A. Redford Esq

[marked] 392/10

257

[Douglas Dawson, Letter to the Rt. Hon. Sir Edward Carson (11 November 1910)]

Lord Chamberlain’s Office, St James’s Palace, S.W.

Dear Sir Edward

I am sorry to trouble you so soon after you have consented to become a Member of the Advisory Board on Stage Plays, but a Play, which the Lord Chamberlain feels is a concrete example of the reason for which the Board was formed and upon which he would be glad to receive the advice of the Members, has just come before him. A blank rhyming verse version, in English, of Sophocles’s “Oedipus” by Professor Gilbert Murray has been submitted for production at the Haymarket Theatre. Some years previously a translation of the same drama was made by W.L. Courtney and was refused Licence for Stage Performance on the ground that it was impossible to put on the Stage in London England a play dealing with incest. There was a precedent for the action which the Lord Chamberlain took on this occasion in the refusal of successive Lord Chamberlains to license “The Cenci” What I would ask you to be so kind as to do is to read the enclosed play, forward it and this letter to Sir Squire Bancroft with your opinion as to the advisability of it being licensed or not. I have attached to the play a list of the Members of the Board, so that it can be passed on from one to the other, eventually returning to me, with the individual opinions of each Member of the Board, from Mr Buckmaster. Of course, if it is felt that it would be advisable for the Board to meet, I could arrange a meeting here to suit your joint convenience, but, as a meeting to suit everybody may be difficult to arrange, I thought perhaps this way might be more convenient to all parties. Would the Members of the Board kindly pass the play on as quickly as possible.

Yours sincerely, (sd) Douglas Dawson

258

The Rt Hon Sir Edward Carson, K.C., M.P.

[marked] 392/10 and Private Confidential

259

[Rt. Hon. Sir Edward Carson, Letter to the Lord Chamberlain (11 November 1910)]

5 Eaton Place, S.W.

I think the Lord Chamberlain may be advised to allow this play. It is a well known classic & altho’ it is true that incest is an incident in the play it is not introduced in any offensive manner nor in such a way as to support or inculcate immoral teaching in any way. On the contrary, it presents it as a horrible fatality.

Nov, 11.10.

[marked] 392/10

260

[Squire Bancroft, Letter to the Lord Chamberlain (16 November 1910)]

18 Berkeley Square

For my part, however scholarly may be the translation, I can neither understand desire to produce such a work, nor inclination to witness its performance[s]: but [I] should not refuse a licence, the painful mythological story being so well-known.

S.B.

November 16, 1910.

[marked] 392/10

261

[Sir John Hare, Letter to the Lord Chamberlain (21 November 1910)]

5 Cleveland Square, Hyde Park, London

I agree with the opinion expressed by Sir Edward Carson so far that on the grounds that the play is a classic, and its theme, terrible tho’ it be, treated in such a manner as not in any way to involve immoral teaching, the licence for its performance should not be withheld. On the other hand I have very grave doubts as to whether the public performance of Oedipus might not prove injurious, inasmuch as it may, & probably will, lead to a great number of plays being written & submitted to the censor appealing to a vitiated public taste solely in the cause of indecency. Many authors will not I fear scruple to shelter themselves behind their licence, claiming rights on this ground that it has been granted to [Dr. or W.?] Gilbert Murray’s version of Sophocles great tragedy— Therefore I venture to suggest that the greatest caution should be exercised and the matter very seriously and deliberately considered in all its bearings, before a licence is granted.

John Hare

Nov 21 1910

262

[Walter Raleigh, Letter to the Lord Chamberlain (22 November 1910)]

The Hangings, Ferry Hinksey, near Oxford.

22 Nov 1910

I agree with Sir Edward Carson’s opinion.

Mr. Murray’s translation is scholarly and sparse: in one or two places he softens the language a little to save susceptibilities.

The play cannot, I think attract any but those who care to see one of the greatest of Greek dramas; nor can it possibly gratify any lower taste. I do not think that any supposed analogies should be allowed to have weight. Shelley’s Cenci, for instance, is a different question: it deals with the crime of incest and rape, while the Oedipus represents incest as the most horrible evil that can befall a righteous man hunted by fate; and keeps it, a dark shadow, in the background.

Walter Raleigh

[marked] 392/10

263

[Stanley Buckmaster, Letter to the Lord Chamberlain (23 November 1910)]

1 Porchester Terrace, Hyde Park, W.

23.11.10

I agree in thinking that there is no sufficient reason for prohibiting this play. It deals with a purely classical story in a classical way and can make no appeal to the general public. The central horror of the plot is dealt with treated in a manner that can neither create nor gratify unclean and morbid sentiment. Most people who would go to see it know the story already. I myself read it as a boy at school and I imagine it is still taught read in schools & universities. The translation modifies rather than accentuates anything in the language which would cause offence.

Stanley Buckmaster

[marked] 392/10 264

Appendix II

Selected Writings and Interviews by Saunders Lewis and David Jones.

265

“Anglo-Welsh Theatre, The Problem of Language” – J. S. Lewis The Cambria Daily Leader (10 September 1919) 4. 906

Mr. J. O. Francis has given us the only tolerable English plays about Welsh life; the rest are nowhere. To read them or see them acted would be fit penance for a soul in purgatory; that they should be performed and printed argues a strange humour in our companies and publishers. Nor has Mr. Francis quite escaped misfortune. He is best known by his poorest work, which is “Change.” “Change” was acted in London. The English critics drivelled patronisingly about it, compared it with Galsworthy, and fastened it like an albatross round the poor author’s neck. Happily, Mr. Francis knew better than the Londoners, and very definitely he turned from the mock heroic falsetto of his stupid tragedy, and with far more conscience and seriousness gave us two one-act plays, “The Poacher” and “The Bakehouse,” which have proved him a pleasant humorist. These little comedies are neatly turned, and they reveal that amused tolerance of men’s weaknesses which belongs to a playwriter. A dramatist’s quality may easily be known from his stage directions. Here is an example from “Change”: —“Lewis faces his father. His lips are set, his eyes ablaze. He shows signs of intense emotional strain.” Compare that with this note in “The Bakehouse”:—“Mrs. Price nods approvingly. Enter Maggie Howells, a little girl of 12. She carries a basket.” It is plain that the second is more reticent, more decent and self-reliant; for there is an etiquette of writing, and breeding may be told in a phrase. I would restore the first meaning of the adjective and say that “The Bakehouse” is the gentlest work of Mr. Francis. But neither Mr. Francis nor another may hope to give us a good English play about modern Wales until the central difficulty of an Anglo-Welsh theatre is attacked—the problem of language. A note on the title page of “The Poacher” tells us that “this play will shortly be translated into Welsh,” and it calls to my mind a retort of Tom Kettle to an English novelist. “My book,” the novelist boasted, “has already been translated into six other languages.” “I hope,” answered Kettle, “it will shortly be translated into English.” It would be easy to translate a play by Mr. Francis, for it is only when speech has character that it is difficult to translate. I suspect that Mr. Francis cares little about style, nor has he pondered the awkwardness of Anglo-Welsh. He is content with the local colour that some Welsh interjections and emphatic repetitions may give him, and his English is mostly the horrible jargon of men who have lost one tongue without acquiring another. I agree that very many people in Glamorganshire speak English as Mr. Francis writes it in his plays. But that is exactly our tragedy. Welshman have had to learn English in the worst of schools. Labour leaders of Cockney dialect, an army of unemployed who came from all industrial parts of England to help exploit the mineral wealth of South Wales, railways from Lancashire carrying the vowels and idioms of Manchester to the valleys of Snowdon, these have been our teachers of English. From these and the newspapers we have formed our Anglo-Welsh speech, and no feebler stuff is spoken in these islands. It is instructive to compare ourselves with

906 This article is reprinted with the permission of Saunders Lewis Estate.

266

Ireland. The Irish theatre at its very beginning found a language in daily use among the southern peasantry that was richer in imagery, more beautiful in idiom, sweeter in sound, than any since the flowering time of the Elizabethan stage. And the reason is that Ireland learnt English from its gentry in the eighteenth century. A recent reviewer in the ‘Times’ gave examples from the daily talk of Kerry peasants. A fisherman, asked if the sea were too rough for sailing, replied: ‘There is a white blossom on the fisherman’s garden.” A poor woman, hurrying to the hospital where her sick child lay, cried: “There is a wing in my heart till I see him.” This is the imagery of old Irish poetry translated into the literary English of the eighteenth century, and preserved for us to-day by the political loneliness of the Irish people. From such a speech did Synge and Lady Gregory and Padraig Colum gather the sentences of their plays. There is, I fear, no such fortune awaiting the Anglo-Welsh dramatist. A man of genius might perhaps weave beauty out of Cockneyisms of Glamorgan, but it would be an unfruitful use of power. And I imagine that when this playwriter comes, he will turn from the “indeed you,” and “mindia nawr,” of Mr. Francis, and will search out the remotenesses of West Wales and the North for villages that English newspapers never discover, and where Welsh is a pure tongue. And his chief task will be one of translation. Accepting the imagery and ideas of our language, he will seek in English a rythm [sic], a turn of idiom, a choice of words, which will, I think be artificial and archaic, or perhaps Biblical, but will garner the remnant of homely or traditional images left from the Saxonising influences of the last 50 years—the railways and the Welsh Education Boards. For you may still and often hear unhackneyed phrases in the talk of Welsh folk. I know of an invalid lady in Swansea, whose bed gives her a vision of the hills, and to a friend a short while back she said: “Yn a bore bach y mae’r byd yma mor lan. Mi fyddaf yn teimlo’n iach fy ysbryd wrth weled y dydd yn goleuo” (In the little morning this world of ours is so clean. I feel a health come over my spirit while I watch the day lighten). Why then attempt an Anglo-Welsh drama? Why not write only in Welsh? There is but one answer: A thing of beauty justifies itself, and until it appears there is neither pleasure nor reason. The immediate future is, I think and hope, with the purely Welsh theatre; but there are growing numbers of English-speaking Welshmen who yet brood on their heritage of race, and it is well that they also, in the language they know, should try to shape their memories and hopes into forms of literature and drama. 267

Foreword to The Eve of Saint John, A Comedy of Welsh Life (In Two Scenes) – J. Saunders Lewis. Newtown: The “Welsh Outlook” Press, 1921.907

The practice of “conjuring,” which provides the main incident of this little play, was frequent in Wales up to the early years of the last century. There are other beliefs— such as in the efficacy of the holy bell to ward off evil spirits, and in the dogs of Hell,— which lingered until very recently, and may still exist in quiet corners of the land. But elementary education, in Wales as elsewhere, has well waged its war on the imagination; only the scientists now treat these things seriously.

I would say something on the language of the play. I have tried to suggest in Engli,h the rhythms and idioms of Welsh, and the play is practically a translation. Even to-day it may be of use to remind English people—and especially English novelists—that we do not speak Welsh as Sir Hugh Evans spoke English. Schools and railways have indeed done their worst for Welsh civilisation; and the Anglo-Welsh of the border counties, of popular holiday towns in North Wales, and of mining regions in Glamorganshire, is something more hideous than any parody can suggest. But in places where trippers from Lancashire and workers from the English midlands have not spread their devastating accents and newspapers, there yet remains a Welsh speech that delights in muscled rhythm and vivid imagery. Since I have come to Cardiganshire. I have heard shepherds, in the inn-kitchens of remote hamlets, use words and phrases that were common in Welsh poetry in the seventeenth century, words of noble race, phrases that give dignity to a speaker.

The fault of my own attempt to render that richness is that it suggests too often a convention of Anglo-Celtic dramatists,—instead of something fresh and living. But perhaps thus to state the problem will rouse some other to its solution, and that shall be my excuse for publication. Yet of this we may be certain,—drama's chief business is talk; all else, characterisation, action, reveal themselves through it. Unless, therefore, the language be rich, expressive, individual, powerful, the drama will die. That is what we need to remember in Wales. – J. S. L.

P.S.—The fragment of song in the second scene I have translated from a familiar folk- song in Anglesey, which was published in one of Mrs. Gwyneddon Davies's collections.

907 This foreword is reprinted with the permission of Saunders Lewis Estate.

268

“Is there an Anglo-Welsh Literature?” Being the Annual Lecture delivered to the Branch on December 10th 1938 – Saunders Lewis. Caerdydd: Swyddfa Gofrestri, Parc Cathays, 1939.908

This question would seem on the first glance to mean: Is there an Anglo-Welsh nation which has its own literature in its own language? It is unlikely that anyone would answer that question with a “Yes,” except possibly some native of South Pembrokeshire.

A writer of literature belongs to a community. Normally, he writes for that community. His instrument of expression,—the speech he uses,—has been shaped for him and given to him by that society. Moreover, there belong to that society traditions and experiences and a secular mode of life as well as a literary heritage which have impressed themselves not only on the language but on all those who so use it that their use of it is seen to be literature. Every separate literature implies the existence of a separate moral person, an organic community. Such a community, possessing its own common traditions and its own literature, we generally call a nation.

Who, then, are the Anglo-Welsh? Actually we never think of an Anglo-Welsh people. The term is an abstraction, a literary abstraction, even as “Britisher” is an abstraction, but a political one. Neither term has reference to an organic society. Neither term has any social or cultural connotation. If anyone should have understanding on this matter it would be an Ulster patrician who is also an English army officer of high rank. I quote a letter from Major-General Sir Hugh Montgomery, published in the Belfast News Letter on November 10th of this year:—

“Sir, My ancestors and I have been Irishmen for 320 years, and in spite of all temptations to belong to other nations' I remain an Irishman. A ‘Britisher’? No, thanks. —Hugh Montgomery, Major-General.”

Similarly, if one asked even the English writers in this audience to-day, are you Anglo- Welsh? They would answer, “No, thanks. That doesn’t describe me. It may describe my class of books, but I, the man, am Welsh.” He would be a white-livered man indeed who would wish to call himself Britisher or Anglo-Welsh. Proper men in these islands are English or Welsh or Scots or Irish,—or merely naturalised.

Anglo-Welsh then refers not to men or any society, but is a term of literary classification. I take it that it describes a certain group of writings and their writers qua writers. Even so, take warning that the term has as yet very small circulation. With rare exceptions English literary critics have never heard that there was, or is, a Welsh literature in a Welsh language, so that when they discuss writers such as Edward Thomas or W. H. Davies they do not call them Anglo-Welsh writers but simply Welsh, and they often add an expression of agreeable surprise that curiously, and at long last, Wales should be producing men who have some gift of literary composition.

908 This lecture is reprinted with the permission of Saunders Lewis Estate.

269

It is the less comic and less complacent Welshmen themselves, those who write in English, who use the term Anglo-Welsh to describe their own activities. Let us take it then that an Anglo-Welsh writer is a Welshman who writes of Wales and of Welsh life in the English language. The group would not include Borrow or Theodore Watts-Dunton. Nor would it include living Englishmen who have found themes or “cases” in Wales. It would be well also to exclude from it writers of Welsh birth or living in Wales, who belong otherwise to the English literary tradition, and whose Welsh interests are only incidental or accidental or just social. It would not include, for example, Mr. Richard Hughes in the novel, or Mr. Dylan Thomas in verse. To give an example, here is the first sentence by Mr. Dylan Thomas in that lively little quarterly called Wales,—

“As I walked through the wilderness of this world, as I walked through the wilderness, as I walked through the city, with the loud electric fences and the crowded petrols of the wind dazzling and drowning me that winter night before the West died….”

It is a tiptop sentence. But you will recognise that it belongs to the main stream of the English literary tradition. It is not only a deliberate echo of Bunyan, but that way also have gone Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, and perhaps the Frenchman, André Breton. Mr. Dylan Thomas is obviously an equipped writer, but there is nothing hyphenated about him. He belongs to the English.

That there remains, after all proper deductions, a group of Welshmen writing in English whose background and theme are consistently Welsh will be generally recognised. The question whether there is an Anglo-Welsh literature is not as easy as that. It must mean: Is there a body of compositions in the English language that may be called a separate literature, having its peculiar traditions and character, and acknowledged as Anglo-Welsh?

The exemplar of such a literature is of course in Ireland. We are familiar with the name and fame of Anglo-Irish literature. There are histories of it. We also know, by the way, that there are critics among the Irish who contest the existence of such a thing, and speak of it as though of the Loch Ness monster. I mention this lest we should too hastily conclude on our own problem from this analogy of Anglo-Irish.

Consider this Irish matter. If we admit an Anglo-Irish literature, its greatest and representative figure is W. B. Yeats. How, then, did he look at the problem of an Irish literature in English when he was beginning his literary career? In her second volume of reminiscences, The Middle Years, the late Katharine Tynan published a precious collection of W. B. Yeats’ letters to her during the years 1888 to 1893. Some quotations from these letters shall help this present discussion:—,

“Remember, by being as Irish as you can, you will be the more original and true to yourself…”

“A book such as you are doing should be Irish before all else. People will 270

go to English poetry for Literary poetry…Every poem that shows English influence in any marked way should be rejected…”

“No poetry has a right to live merely because it is good. It must be the best of its kind. The best Irish poets are this.”

“I have an ambition to be taken as an Irish novelist, not as an English or cosmopolitan one choosing Ireland as a background…”

“I wish I was out of London in order that I might see the world. Here one gets into one’s minority among the people who are like one’s self. Down in Sligo one sees the whole world in a day’s walk, every man in a class. It is too small there for minorities…”

“Much may depend, in the future, on Ireland now developing writers who know how to fomulate [sic] in clear expressions the vague feelings now abroad,—to formulate them for Ireland’s not for England’s use…”

“So X is trying to get a professorship in Australia. I was always hoping he would drift into things—do something for nationalism, political or literary…”

Now for some general comments. First, that the life of Ireland, Catholic, peasant, uncommercialised and untouched by industrialism, was a separate world from the industrial civilisation of England.

Secondly, there is an English which, at the time Yeats was writing, was the general language of that separate Ireland, rich in traditional idiom and folklore and folksong, and capable of use in a poetry which was not “literary poetry,” and contained no echoes or rhythms of the English literary tradition. For clearly there are only two sources for English and for English rhythms; they are the poets and the dialects. Yeats could say, “every poem that shows English influence should be rejected,” only because Irish poets had already at that time an English dialect, the English of Ireland, which was the native speech of a traditional peasantry, and had been their speech for about a hundred years, and in that time had grown in the insulated environment of a separate and Catholic countryside into something rhythmically and emotionally and idiomatically separate from all the dialects of progressive and industrialised England. That fact has decisive importance for our present discussion.

The third point is equally important. Yeats was writing for Ireland. He says it in his letters, and also in his verse:—

“To write for my own race,” and it is true not only for Yeats but for all the genuine Anglo-Irish writers, for Synge, Russel, Colum, Corkery, and the Abbey Theatre, and it distinguishes them from other writers who are of Irish race, and use an Irish background but who do not write for 271

Ireland, such as James Joyce. The true Anglo-Irish writers were not concerned with interpreting Ireland for English readers. They were concerned with interpreting Ireland to herself.

That explains also the close contact of these writers with Irish scholarship. A good part of their work has been the popularising of the work of Irish archaelogists [sic] and historians and literary researchers. Their aim was to restore the literary and social traditions of the old Irish Ireland to the non-Irish speaking Ireland of their own day. It was a work of vulgarisation, but it was also needful as a foundation for their own creative work, giving it solidity and depth, so that it should not be an English regionalism branching out in an unusual growth, but should be a separate plant with its own roots and nourished by a separate earth.

Fourth, this Anglo-Irish school was consciously and deliberately nationalist. It derived, not only from Davis and Mangan, but also from Parnell. In Yeats’ phrase, even a writer of lyrics of this school was “doing something for nationalism.” The group of writers had a sense of a significant part in the realisation as well as the vindication of Irish nationhood. That saved them from dilletantism. It even saved them from the threatening shadows of the Celtic twilight. There is a paragraph of much acuteness in these early letters of Yeats:—

“I have noticed some thing about my poetry I did not know before…It is not the poetry of insight and knowledge but of longing and complaint,—the cry of the heart against necessity. I hope some day to alter that and write poetry of insight and knowledge…”

This insistence on “insight and knowledge” is worth nothing in the development of Yeats into a major poet. Kotice also that the conscious nationalism of the Irish literary movement gave it the great days of the Abbey Theatre. A national theatre cannot be made without a nation. The whole Anglo-Irish movement was part of the nationalist resurgence of Ireland and took colour from its ambience.

Take now these four observations and ask how they may be applied to the Anglo- Welsh writers. Is there a life that these writers belong to which is in Yeats’ phrase a separate world from that of England? Mr. Wyn Griffiths’ Spring of Youth gives us a glimpse at such a world, and in any discussion of Anglo-Welsh letters must be regarded as a necessary document. It is, however, a little strange in its class. The especial world of the Anglo-Welsh novelists, and they are mostly novelists, is the industrial life of South Wales. But industrialism is the destroyer of all nationhood, reducing men to hands and community to a mass. We have seen it so in Wales, and an eminent German economist, Sombart, has maintained that the Celtic peoples have an inherent inaptitude for industrial capitalism, being incapable of organising social life on such a basis. Industrialism means the impoverishment of personality and the depression of all local characteristics to a grey sub-human uniformity. I can only conceive of a true Anglo-Welsh novel of industrialism as a study of a native society with some richness of tradition and characteristic institutions struggling to preserve these their inheritance against the levelling pressure of the cosmopolitan industrial machine. It would be the story of the struggle of spirituality 272 to survive. The novel of the Welsh industrial slump seems to owe its success more to the vogue of the proletarian or sociological novel in England and elsewhere than to any separateness of the Welsh scene or of the Welsh tradition.

The next matter demands fuller attention. The Anglo-Irish writers had around them a dialect of English which had grown into a speech, having its own idioms and rhythms and poetry of the folk. Only a peasant community that is largely self-contained and organic can make a dialect. It is a product of the creative life of a healthy countryside. Ireland, up to the eighteen-nineties, was such a countryside, and when it turned to English in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it had still enough vitality to develop those rhythms and idioms and meanings that gave Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory a basis for song and drama. Now the history of English in Wales is different in three ways. There are a few spots of genuine English dialect in South Pembrokeshire, in South Gower, and perhaps in Radnorshire. But English in Wales is eminently the language of industrialism. With the unimportant exceptions named it has not been the speech of an organic community. Whatever culture there has been in the mining valleys of South Wales has been the remnant of the social life of the countryside, and has been Welsh in speech. The extension of English has everywhere accompanied the decay of that culture, the loss of social traditions and of social unity and the debasement of spiritual values. It has produced no richness of idiom, no folksong, but has battened on the spread of journalese and the mechanised slang of the talkies. There is a Welsh accent on our English,—it is the mark of our foreignness,—but there is no pure dialect. We very often admire a countryman who speaks his dialect with purity, and we are well aware of a standard of Welsh dialect. It is so also in the English countryside. But we don’t even conceive of such a standard in the English of Wales.

I admit of course that English is to-day penetrating the Welsh countryside as never before, so that one might suggest that it may yet evolve as it evolved in Ireland, that “the best is yet to be.” No. It is penetrating the countryside just at the moment in history when the creation of dialect seems beyond the powers of the countrymen. Every scholar who knows and cherishes the Welsh dialects is aware that in the last 20 years there has been an alarming deterioration in the standard of their purity and richness. Industrialism has invaded the countryside with the motor bus, the radio, the chain stores of the market towns, the schools and the cinemas. There is no longer a self-contained rural community. There is only the outer fringe of industrialism. Farming is now merely ranching. Rural life has lost its independence and its creative powers. And as it grows anaemic it grows Anglicised. Such a community will give no new colour to a borrowed tongue, nor any folksong. It will wear its English like a shroud. What is vital in the countryside will remain Welsh.

There also is the third difference between the positions of English in Ireland and in Wales. Irish Ireland in the eighteen-nineties was English in speech, all but a fragment. But in Wales the only speech that has the dialects and has a millenary literary tradition, and is to-day the language of creative energy is the Welsh. I do not wish to insist too heavily on this point lest this talk should seem too polemical in tone. I wish to discuss the matter in a detached spirit. But you will recognise that this is an embarrassment that did 273 not exist for the Anglo-Irish writers of Yeats’ youth. There is here to-day not only a national language but a national literature in fair vigour. Had that been the condition in Ireland at the end of the last century, is it not safe to say that the whole history of the Lady Gregory, Synge and Yeats group would have been utterly different? It would have compelled them either to master Irish so as to write in Irish for Ireland, or else to throw themselves into the English literary movement and to write for England, using Ireland merely as the background or theme of their compositions.

Actually, we have seen that it was a main intention of the Anglo-Irish literary movement to write for Ireland. It is not my affair to discuss how far the movement fulfilled its purpose, but simply to accept the stated end as one thing essential to the admission of a separate literature called Anglo-Irish. Do then the Anglo-Welsh writers write for Wales? The historians among them certainly do so. It is for Wales and for Welsh Wales that Sir J. E. Lloyd, the late T. P. Ellis, and A. W. Wade-Evans have written, and they have not only given us knowledge of the Welsh past but they have deeply affected our ideas and sensibilities. I wish there were more evidence that they have deepened the understanding of Wales among the Anglo-Welsh writers. Some of them are too clearly deracinés.

But consider the more serious among the novelists and essayists. Mr. Wyn Griffith’s Spring of Youth is a fine thing, subtle and sensitive. But it is an essay in interpretation. Its implied audience is English. It is the sensibility of the English literary body that it advances, and its idiom and vocabulary have their virtues from English poets and letters. The artful simplicity of Miss Margiad Evans—a better writer, I think, than Mary Webb,—is also dedicated to interpretation. It is Anglo-Welsh in the same intelligent manner as A Passage to India may be called Anglo-Indian. In fact, there goes the cat clean out of the bag. Anglo-Welsh literature seems to me to bear a relationship to Welsh life nearer akin to the relationship of Anglo-Indian literature to India than to the relationship Yeats in his letters established with Ireland. At its best it is imaginative and interpretative, and it enriches the English imagination and literary sensibilly [sic]. When it is more ordinary it is regional and picturesque, or perhaps merely sociological. Thus Mr. Jack Jones’ Bidden to the Feast is a good novel in the manner of Mr. Sinclair Lewis. In his play, Land of my Fathers, he does however appear to be writing for Wales more than for England. I say that it speaks to Wales more than to England because the core of the play is the pathetic and heroic effort of a mother to preserve, amid the finally disintegrating forces of industrial depression, the last Welsh institution, the family hearth, and to understand all the significance of that there is need of some knowledge of the Welsh tradition. Here Mr. Jack Jones appears, like his predecessor, Mr. J. O. Francis, to have something to say to his own people. Inevitably he has been translated into Welsh.

What of the poets? It will be allowed that poetry is the core of Anglo-Irish literature, and it will be generally allowed also that here is the ultimate test of a separate literature. Yeats said to Katharine Tynan when she was collecting her anthology: “People will go to English poetry for literary poetry…..Every poem that shows English influence in any marked way should be rejected.” By that standard there is no Anglo-Welsh poetry. It is all literary poetry. Poetry is not characterised by its placenames and locality, else 274

Wordsworth’s lines written above Tintern would remain the great exemplar of Anglo- Welsh literature. The case is no better when the name of the author suggests a Welsh origin. Seneca belongs to Latin, not to a separate Spanish-Latin literature. It is the poet’s speech that gives him away, and we have already seen that there is no help for it,—the Welshman writing English verse has nothing save the literary idiom for his use. The more profoundly English his culture is the better he'll know what is alive and quick and contemporary in that idiom. For in poetry only the best of its kind has a right to live.

I conclude then that there is not a separate literature that is Anglo-Welsh, and that it is improbable that there ever can be that. You will not take it that I therefore demand abruptly that the Anglo-Welsh writers should shut up. There is to-day, and it is natural, some strain, and occasional irritation, between the Welsh writers and the Anglo-Welsh. For if the Anglo-Welsh by writing in English have wider fame, more wordly [sic] honours, more social success, and more money, the writers in Welsh have the prestige of a national literature, and still some sense of assurance that comes from belonging to a great tradition. The result is that Welsh reviews of the Anglo-Welsh, when we deign to do it, are severe and superior, while the Anglo-Welsh disdain the Welsh writers more completely according as they are less able to read them.

Let us take things are they are. This fissure in Welsh literary activities to-day, this incompleteness and lack of any assured sense of function, this awareness we all have of writing in an expanding desert, they are the share that falls to the imaginative writer of the general suffering and lack of health in the Welsh society of to-day. Not literature only, as a thing, must suffer when there are wrongs in the social body, but the writers of imagination must suffer in their minds and powers. It is surely without parallel in modern life that there should be no relation at all between the university and educational system of Wales and the language that alone has a tradition in this nation, and a literary history unbroken from the sixth century. It is without parallel, that with four University colleges in Wales we have not even one Faculty of Arts that is Welsh. There is abundant intellectual ability in Wales, but there is a catastrophic lack of moral courage and decision. And remember that moral courage and decision are higher virtues than intellectual ability. While Wales remains thus spineless, so long must literary men suffer in their minds and in their arts. The growth of Anglo-Welsh writing in recent years is the inevitable reflection of the undirected drifting of Welsh national life. It will go on, becoming less and less incompletely English, unless there is a revival of the moral qualities of the Welsh people. For remember that literary talent will out, and it will attach itself to whatever literature and whatever tradition it must.

Finally, it is not the Welsh and the Anglo-Welsh who alone suffer. It is time we commiserated also with the Anglo-English. It is an English scholar and literary critic, J.W. Mackail, who wrote this passage on the Latin of the later Roman Empire:—

“It is just this influx of the provinces into literature which went on under the early Empire with continually accelerating force, that determined what type the new Latinity would take. Gaul, Spain and Africa are henceforth side by side with Italy, and Italy herself sinks towards the level of a province…It might already have been said of Rome that she had made a 275

city of what had been a world. But in this absorbtion [sic] of the world into a single citizenship, the city itself was ceasing to be a world of its own; and with the self-centred urbs passed away the urbanus sermo, that austere and noble language which was the finest flower of her civilisation.”

That is true of English. It also suffers permanent loss during this decay of Welsh national life. 276

“Sign of the bear – David Jones talks to Nesta Roberts” The Guardian (17 February 1964) 7.

“In Parenthesis” has gone into a paperback, 27 years after its original publication. Faber has done it at 9s 6d, handsomely as to type and format, but without the author’s illustrations, without even the frontispiece that evokes better than could any number of words the essence of the most complete work of art to come out of the First World War. David Jones cannot help regretting the illustrations. “When a man both writes and draws, the two together are one thing.” He lives these days, at Harrow-on-the-Hill, in a big room with a regal panorama of London, the whole sweep of skyline from the Battersea Power Station to St Paul’s. He has been there for twelve years, and now he is rooted in the fertile, crowded order that results when you decide what are the essentials of your life and put four walls round them. There are framed pictures, and ranked portfolios of drawings, and brushes jutting up out of empty Dundee marmalade jars, and the things you are likely to want in a hurry when you are working, like China tea, and Bath Olivers, and Gentlemen’s Relish and Oxo, and a stone slab inscribed with his own exquisite lettering framing the purring gas fire, and an ecstatic profusion of books. He is a small man, with a quite remarkable dishevelled charm (the dishevelment is of manner only: the grey suit would do for a not over dressy lawyer-doctor-accountant). He will be 69 in November, but he does not look any age in particular. The fine, baby hair, falling over his face, is a lustrous mouse colour untouched by grey; the face itself, crumpling in total concentration, puckering into sudden, gurgling laughter, is childlike in its mobility, without being in the least childish. He is a simple, though far from ingenuous, person, in the sense that he strips human contact of its time-wasting rites and ceremonies. This means that, once he has established that you don’t mind instant coffee and take it black and sugarless, you can go straight on to talking about art, love, and death, and how an Anglo-Welsh cockney with no formal education outside an art school came to write a book that is at once faithful documentary and a threnody for our human condition. He really had “never written a stroke” before starting in “In Parenthesis,” whereas he cannot remember a time when he did not draw. He still has the first drawing he can recall working on, at the age of seven. “Here!” He rummages among the portfolios. It is a dancing bear, leashed and muzzled, seen in the streets of Brockley. It is unusually big for a child’s work, a full 20 inches by 11 or 12 inches, and it is perfect, as the infant Menuhin’s violin playing was perfect, because innocent of the possibility of error. The Fall was imminent. David Jones’s father being a printer’s manager, the house was permanently awash with illustrated magazines, and the small boy began, with deplorable success, to emulate the technique of their drawings. This artistic ferment took up all his energies. He could not, or would not, read until he was about eight, preferring to pay his elder sister a penny an hour to read to him, and at 14 he refused to go the local grammar school. “My father and mother were marvellous about it” (his mother, a gifted amateur artist, was no doubt sympathetic). He went instead to the Camberwell School of Art—“Years too young, and in an Eton 277 collar”—and was lucky enough to come under A. S. Hartrick, who introduced him to the painters of Paris and got the magazine illustrations out of his system. Four years later he was facing the alternatives of penury or a detestable future as a commercial artist when his problems were solved. It was 1914. From August to December he, the least military of God’s creatures, tried desperately to get into the Army. “Everybody was joining up. We felt we were getting into history.” He had four years in France. “It is impossible now for me to imagine myself without that period in the ffosydd (trenches) in Gallia Belgica,” he wrote in “Epoch and Artist,” and to meet him today is to be aware of those years like an area of scar tissue. “There was no let-up at all for the infantry—it was more continuous than anything in this last war. I felt the sands running out. If it had gone on much longer I might—” His voice trails off. “I suppose it might not have been true of people of another temperament. But most people got worse and worse. When I went out to France I was a first-class shot. In my last year I was rated third class. You just went off, or perhaps you didn’t care any more.”

The other experience of his life comparable in influence came in 1921 when he was received into the Roman Church. For one whose whole conception of life was sacramental it had been inevitable from the first. Only the Doctrine of Transubstantiation could accommodate his passionate craftman’s sense of the “thingness of things.” He was at the Westminster Art School at the time; afterwards he was to work with that archpriest of craftsmen Eric Gill, at Ditchling and Capel-y-ffin in the Black Mountains. By now he was making literary friends, “Tom Eliot” among them, and reading the flood of war books of the period, of which “Goodbye to All That” and C. E. Montague’s “Fiery Particles” impressed him more than most, but still there was no writing.

Then he got ’flu, and “In Parenthesis” was born. He was staying with his parents at a house in, improbably, Hove, and had the idea of doing some war drawing, “with bits of writing.” But then he had to take to his bed and couldn’t paint. “And so I got down to writing, in terrible secrecy. My father kept saying: ‘What on earth are you doing?’ People are frightful, they won’t let you alone to get on with anything. And then I got more and more interested, especially in the relationship between form and content, and how it works out in writing as compared with painting.” The form was poetic, prose heightening to verse at need, language palpitating with life, hint and echo and allusion chiming like drowned belfries. The content was the first eight months’ active service of the London Welsh Battalion, from their parading for overseas, with the orderly sergeant licking the stub end of his lead pencil and the flaxen young subaltern, “The Squire from the Rout of San Romano smoking Melachrino No. 9,” to their lying in state under the dog violets and sweetbriar of a french oakwood, with the feet of the stripling reserves treading level with their foreheads. It was told in the context of Malory, and the Mabinogion, of the Roman Liturgy and, pre-eminently, of “Y Gododdin,” the earliest surviving Welsh poem that tells of 300 princely young warriors who raided the English at Catraeth (Catterick) and were “mown like the green barley.” 278

Time and again David Jones was tempted to give it up. “Harman Grisewood made me stick to it. There was an underground bar in Simpson’s in the Strand. I used to read bits aloud to him there, and he would say ‘It’s absolutely it—you must go on.’” It was finished by 1932, but publication was delayed till 1937, because the author had a breakdown. It brought him the Hawthornden Prize. Everything he has written since, “The Anathemata,” “The Wall,” “Epoch and Artist,” had been awarded a prize of some kind, here or in America. Between books the painting has gone on—it was summed up by the big Arts Council exhibition of his work at the Tate in 1954–5. “Only as you get older, you get so much slower. I hate it—taking twelve times as long to say something, and then not getting it right. And there’s this terrible ignorance one is trying to make up all the time. I can’t command even one language besides English” (he has taught himself to read a little Welsh but not to speak it). “If I’d gone to school, at least they’d have taught me Greek and Latin—” One glances again at the stacked books. Welsh, Latin, an Italian dictionary, Joyce and Eliot, Jacquetta Hawkes and Spengler, and Maritain and Baron con Hügel, books about history, books about seamanship, books about the Liturgy. The ignorance does not obtrude. It is the collection of a happily gluttonous polymath. Is he writing now? He gestures towards a pile of folios covered with his small, clear handwriting, precise as though done with a graver’s tool. And painting? He props his two most recent watercolours against the table legs and we kneel to study them. One is an Annunciation in a Welsh setting. Our Lady, in the style of Rhiannon of the Birds, sits in a pleasaunce enclosed by the kind of wattle fence that ringed the garden at Capel- y-ffin, in her hand a foxglove in place of a lily.

“I always have to start from something I know.” The other shows Tristan and Iseult after they have drunk the love potion. The ship is making almost no headway, all canvas except the foresail has been taken in, the half-naked seamen are trying to tighten the shrouds. But she is pointing south-east from Ireland for Cornwall and King Mark. The constellation that in the top right hand corner of the picture shows it. Tiny, ascended, immortalised, it is the Bear that danced in the streets of Brockley 61 years ago.

279

David Jones, An Address to the University of Wales, Bangor. Given in absentia c. 15 July 1960], sent to Saunders Lewis (14 August 1960).909

By the courtesy of the Registrar I desire to send a message to you all. I apologise for its lack of brevity, but I’m not much hand at concise statement. First, I wish to say how sorry and frustrated I am in not being able to be with you this evening. I had hoped that, at last, this year I should be able to come in person to receive the honorary degree which the University has, for some years now, wished to confer on me. My only claim to Welshness derives from my father (gorffwysed mewn hedd) Who was born in the most eastern corner of Gwynedd, east indeed, by a few miles, of Clawdd Offa. Now the burial-place of Owain Gwynedd, ‘Owain Fawr’, is in your Cathedral Church of Bangor, and had it not been for the re-conquest and reclamation, by Owain Gwynedd, of the disputed lands between the Conwy and the Dee it seems not improbable to suppose that my father’s ancestors would long since have been outside the Welsh zone of influence and would, in course of time, have become wholly English in tradition and nomenclature: Welsh Prestatyn would have remained English Preston. It would then seem to follow that but for those far-off events, I myself, to-day could not be regarded as a Welsh artist of sorts by the University of Wales. For not even university authorities can argue with the Muse of History – she determines all, until Dydd y Farn. Thus, by good fortune, she allows me to be accounted one half Welsh, if one half Cockney, with a dash of Italian. And, after all, London was once a Britto-Romanic urbs, Augusta of the Trinobantes – the New Troy of subsequent legend. I draw attention to those chancy twists and meanders of history and of quasi- history, because I think that none of us, whoever we are, should neglect to recall those things which have determined what we are. Now, Aberffraw, ‘the principle seat’, and the ‘fort of Degannwy’, Arx Decantorum, and the llys at Aber, and way on the far border, strategic Dolforwyn, and little, solitary, still standing Dolbadarn at the very core, and down, in Meirion, ill-fated Castell-y-Bere (the humted Dafydd’s last H.Q.) are names which powerfully evoke the

909 This address is printed with the permission of the Trustees of the David Jones Estate. The original typescript is located in David Jones/Saunders Lewis Correspondence, MS File #22724E, folio 21–7. National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. Harman Grisewood appended a brief introductory note to an identical typescript of this speech, now located in the Burns Library at Boston College: “The University of Wales in 1960 conferred upon David an honorary degree. He was to have attended the ceremony and would is person have made a speech addressed to the Registrar to thank the University for the honour done to him. David found it difficult to make speeches and any public appearance filled him in advance with an intense dread. So he did not go to Wales on this occasion and wrote a short address to be read for him. – HJG Nov ‘75”. 280 unequal and tangled warfare of the princes of Gwynedd – without which chequered struggle Wales would by now be little more than a geographical expression: think of Strathclyde or the Dumonian Peninsular. But the name Bangor evokes a more universal warfare, and it is indeed appropriate that the University which has for one of its mottoes Optima Musa Veritas or Goreneu Awen Gwirionedd, should have as one of its four centres the place where St. Deiniol’s ascetics sought the Perennial Truth within their lime-washed, wattled bangor some fourteen hundred years ago in the age of Dewi Sant in the Celtic Second Spring, in the young-time of the Cymry. But whether this Ceremony was to be at Bangor or Aberystwyth or Abertawe or Caerdydd I am equally sorry for my absence and am very sensible of the kind consideration shown me by your Vice-Chancellor, Dr. Steel and his colleagues in granting me this Honorary Degree in absentia. And here I would like to thank Dr. Steel for his kindness to me in this matter. St. Augustine said: ‘It is better to love than to know’. Now I speak as one to whom the linguistic heritage of Wales was not, alas, handed on, but as one who can claim a measure of love for what is now, in my case, lost, and whose work – whether drawing or writing – has not been uninfluenced, to this or that degree, by such fragments of that heritage as have become available to me, by this means or that. And here I would thank those Welsh scholars of your University who have, from time to time, helped me. Now, turning, with some relief, from myself to things of real consequence, I would, if I may, say this: The lure and indeed the inevitable demands of our present technological phase tend, as we all know, to distract us from the arts and from the humanities. But, to speak in a kind of a parable: It still remains true that ‘Gwener the Turner of Hearts’ (the guardian of constancy and fidelity, and so of pietas, among the Romans) is of more basic importance to us, as persons with hearts, than space-flights to Gwener the planet can ever be. If we believe, as the Christmas Preface says: ‘that by the love of things seen we may be drawn to a love of things unseen’, then the arts should not be neglected for they have that power so to draw us – that is what they are meant to do, everything to the contrary notwithstanding – and that is saying a very great deal. Everywhere those institutions which are heirs to the medieval studia generalia, that is to say our present universities or prifysagolion, have a responsibility with regard to all ‘humane studies’ in the widest imaginable sense of that term, a term which I know had once a more limited or more precise connotation. But I use it here in its more comprehensive sense. And I hope that, in spite of the increasingly urgent claims of technological studies, Prifysgol Cymru may be able to further and conserve those studies which belong specifically to the mythos of Wales. Not forgetting that that mythos is intricated (very much so) with our common Western deposit, the mythos of Hellas and of Rome, together with the Aramaean mythos of the Mabinog Iesu, who gave cynghanedd to space itself. 281

People often quote those translated words: Their Lord they shall praise Their speech they shall keep but they don’t as often remember that the difficult, hard to learn, formidable lingo referred to and especially the deposits of which it is the subtle vehicle, should be the concern not only of persons of Welsh affinity but of the English also. All said and done the English have been with us for about a millennium and a half, so they can be regarded as naturalized by now. But they should, I think, if only in courtesy to what is anterior, pay respect to this vestigial tradition. For this thing belongs to the mores of all Britain and affords a living, direct, unbroken series of links with Antiquity and so with the formative period and the foundational things of this land (as does, if in another way, the Latin of the Liturgy). So it is a margaron of some worth. And we would not be counted among those innocent and attractive creatures whose trotters unwittingly tread down such pearls. As for those who do wittingly make light of this thing, or worse, are hostile to it – I should prefer not to comment on them, for I can’t, very well, use barrack-language here. As impoverishment of the things of the Cymry (I don’t mean later aberrations, or things stemming from more recent times) must, in the long run, be an impoverishment for England also. For the complex heritage of what is called, in the old tales, ynys hon, ‘this island,’ is very subtly meshed indeed. It is not for nothing that a number of the Metaphysical Poets, the glory of early Seventeenth Century England, should have derived from the Welsh border-lands or the Celtic fringe. It is not for nothing that the Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, influenced as he was by his study of cynghanedd and his stay in Gwynedd, should, many years after his death in 1889, be now seen to have developed an English metric of very great felicity, subtlety and strength. Thus can the hidden things of Wales, under certain circumstances and given a perceptive response, vitalize the things of England. This inheritance is an entailed inheritance, it is not ours to dissipate. Our business is rather to conserve it in whatever devious ways may chance to be open to us. For some of us, for myself perhaps, this may mean fragmented, hidden, oblique, not easily traced ways: but no matter. Or, we may feel we can conserve it only in our hearts. But, if the Scholastic maxim is true which says that ‘Doing follows Being’, we may not do so badly after all. For what’s in the heart will come out somewhere and after some fashion. 282

Well, my thoughts are with you, and of course, as this occasion is one which involves a dinner-party, custom demands a: ‘Iechyd da!’ But, even as I write those customary, conventional, convivial, jocund words I am reminded of a line in that far from jocund poem by Owain Cyfeiliog, prince of Powys:

Dywallaw di y corn argynvelyn ‘Pour out the horn of Cynfelyn’ For the cup we drink is never merely a vessel of joviality, but is lifted in remembrance – as are other chalices. In conclusion: Dewi Ddyfrwr gweddia dros Cymru.

David Jones.

At Harrow-on-the-Hill Dydd Gwener, Gorffennaf pymthegfed, MCMLX.

The Paddington Hotel The Eve of the Assumption 1960 for Saunders fm David

283

David Jones, Cara Wallia Derelicta, 1959.910

910 This inscription is reprinted with the permission of the Trustees of the David Jones Estate. The original is held with the David Jones Archive at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. 284

~ ca raWallJa·d erellcta @f)V@WY~ DAMASEUf ~ BABYRVNVED·OWAR ~ BE60VIrRAGFYR ~ DVW(3WENER+ ~ AC:rWA·r·gWRIWYD g HO~GYM~Y zT~R iLAW<.VENIESVMMA·DIES ~ET'INELVCTAilILE:rEMPVS ~ DAR DAN IlEPENNDR4~OtV tV PENtv·DREIC· OED~RNAW o PENN·ILIWEITN·OEG ~ DTGrN~VRAW ' 8rrBar ~ PAWJ " EAR~ =rRWYDAW. 9 a6_ Ieme·aN-1181

285

Bibliography 286

Adams, Michael. Censorship: The Irish Experience. Dublin: Scepter Publishers Ltd., 1968.

Adamson, Sylvia. “Literary Language.” The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume IV: 1776–1997. Ed. Suzanne Romaine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 589–692.

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– – –. “What is ‘popular poetry’?” (March 1902). The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume IV: Early Essays. Ed. Richard J. Finneran and George Bornstein. New York: Scribner Press, 2007. 5–11.

– – –. “Ireland and the Arts” (August 1901). The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume IV: Early Essays. Ed. Richard J. Finneran and George Bornstein. New York: Scribner Press, 2007. 150–55.

– – –. “A General Introduction for My Work” (1937). The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume V: Later Essays. Ed. William H. O’Donnell. New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1994. 204–16.

– – –. “Thoughts on Lady Gregory's Translations” (1902). The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume VI: Prefaces and Introductions. Ed. William H. O'Donnell. New York: Macmillan, 1989. 119–34.

– – –. “Samhain: 1903 – The Reform of the Theatre.” The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume VIII: The Irish Dramatic Movement. Ed. Mary Fitzgerald and Richard J. Finneran. New York: Scribner, 2003. 26–28.

– – –. “Samhain: 1903 – Moral and Immoral Plays.” The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume VIII: The Irish Dramatic Movement. Ed. Mary Fitzgerald and Richard J. Finneran. New York: Scribner, 2003. 29–31.

– – –. “Samhain: 1904 – The Dramatic Movement.” The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume VIII: The Irish Dramatic Movement. Ed. Mary Fitzgerald and Richard J. Finneran. New York: Scribner, 2003. 40–51.

– – –. “The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson – I” (9 October 1886). The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume IX: Early Articles and Reviews. Ed. John P. Frayne and Madeleine Marchaterre. New York: Scribner Press, 2004. 3–9. 313

– – –. “The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson – II” (November 1886). The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume IX: Early Articles and Reviews. Ed. John P. Frayne and Madeleine Marchaterre. New York: Scribner Press, 2004. 10–27.

– – –. “Bardic Ireland” (4 January 1890). The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume IX: Early Articles and Reviews. Ed. John P. Frayne and Madeleine Marchaterre. New York: Scribner Press, 2004. 109–12.

– – –. “The Message of the Folk-lorist” (19 August 1893). The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume IX: Early Articles and Reviews. Ed. John P. Frayne and Madeleine Marchaterre. New York: Scribner Press, 2004. 209–13.

– – –. “Celtic Beliefs about the Soul” (September 1898). The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume IX: Early Articles and Reviews. Ed. John P. Frayne and Madeleine Marchaterre. New York: Scribner Press, 2004. 415–17.

– – –. “The Literary Movement in Ireland” (December 1899). The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume IX: Early Articles and Reviews. Ed. John P. Frayne and Madeleine Marchaterre. New York: Scribner Press, 2004. 459–70.

– – –. “The Irish Censorship” (29 September 1928). The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume X: Later Articles and Reviews. Ed. Colton Johnson. New York: Scribner Press, 2000. 214–18.

– – –. “Plain Man’s Oedipus”. The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume X: Later Articles and Reviews. Ed. Colton Johnson. New York: Scribner Press, 2000. 244– 45.

– – –. “Oedipus the King” (8 September 1931). The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume X: Later Articles and Reviews. Ed. Colton Johnson. New York: Scribner Press, 2000. 219–23.

– – –. The Early Poetry: Manuscript Materials. 2 vols. Ed. George Bornstein. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.

– – –. Maud Gonne Xmas Notebook 1912. NLI 30, 358. Yeats Archive, Box 88.2. SUNY Stony Brook.

– – –. Memoirs. Ed. Denis Donoghue. New York: Macmillan, 1972.

– – –. Preface. Poems. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1895. v–vi.

– – –. “The Theatre and Beauty” (c. December 1913). Transcribed in Robert O’Driscoll, “Two lectures on the Irish theatre by W. B. Yeats.” Theatre and Nationalism in Twentieth-century Ireland. Ed. Robert O’Driscoll. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971. 66–88. 314

– – –. “The De-Anglicising of Ireland” (17 December 1892). Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats. Ed. J. P. Frayne. New York: Columbia University Press, 1970. Vol. 1: 254–56.

– – –. “Nationality and Literature” (19 May 1893). Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats. Ed. J. P. Frayne. New York: Columbia University Press, 1970. Vol. 1: 266–75.

– – –. The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1957.

– – –. “Sophocles’ King Oedipus, A Version for the Modern Stage.” The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Russell K. Alspach. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1966. 809–51.

– – –. The Writing of Sophocles’ King Oedipus. Ed. David R. Clark and James B. McGuire. Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1989.