Title Edmund Burke and the heritage of oral culture Author(s) O'Donnell, Katherine Publication date 2000 Original citation O'Donnell, K. 2000. Edmund Burke and the heritage of oral culture. PhD Thesis, University College Cork. Type of publication Doctoral thesis Link to publisher's http://library.ucc.ie/record=b1306492~S0 version Access to the full text of the published version may require a subscription. Rights © 2000, Katherine O'Donnell http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ Embargo information No embargo required Item downloaded http://hdl.handle.net/10468/1611 from Downloaded on 2017-02-12T14:01:46Z DP ,too 0 OO'DtJ Edmund Burke & the Heritage of Oral Culture Submitted by: Katherine O'Donnell Supervisor: Professor Colbert Kearney External Examiner: Professor Seamus Deane English Department Arts Faculty University College Cork National University of Ireland January 2000 I gcuimhne: Thomas O'Caliaghan of Castletownroche, North Cork & Sean 6 D6naill as Iniskea Theas, Maigh Eo Thuaidh Table of Contents Introduction - "To love the little Platoon" 1 Burke in Nagle Country 13 "Image of a Relation in Blood"- Parliament na mBan &Burke's Jacobite Politics 32 Burke &the School of Irish Oratory 56 Cuirteanna Eigse & Literary Clubs n "I Must Retum to my Indian Vomit" - Caoineadh's Cainte - Lament and Recrimination 90 "Homage of a Nation" - Burke and the Aisling 126 Bibliography 152 Introduction· ''To love the little Platoon" Introduction - "To love the little Platoon" To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) ofpublic affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Reyolution in France 1 Introduction· ''To love the little Platoon" It is one of the ironies of eighteenth-century studies that the marginal political figure of Edmund Burke holds such a central position. Most of Burke's political career was spent in opposition and even when the Whigs enjoyed a brief period of power, Burke never held a cabinet position. Moreover, he seemed to consistently support the least successful causes: at the beginning of his political career he advised the British Govemment to conciliate with the American Revolutionaries and he argued for fair trade between Britain and Ireland. For some fourteen years Burke investigated the colonial crimes of the East India Tea Company and he was the foremost prosecutor in the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the Govemor General of India. Burke insisted that he knew what he was doing "whether the white people like it or nor, but prosecuting the man who had won India for the British doomed him to public odium.1 Then, when "Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive" Burke led the charge in denouncing that French Revolution which proclaimed Equality, Freedom and Brotherhood for the world. However, Burke remains the focus of academic attention and one of the primary reasons why so many monographs and biographies have been written on Burke is that the potency of his speeches still continues to arrest the emotions and attract the intellect.2 Burke's speeches are wonderfully composed but they are also deemed to be strange and curious, not only without precedent in British literature but also having a prophetic, prescient quality in describing events and realities which only later came to pass. Burke's treatise on The Sublime and Beautifyl describes the effects of terror and beauty on the viewer and listener. The oscilation between terror and beauty was a staple of the Gothic aesthetic but The Sublime and Beautiful was written some years before the first recognisably Gothic literary works in English. Burke depicts British rule in India in terms which generations 2 Introduction· "To love the Iitde Platoon" later become the rhetoric of anti-colonialists, and he prophesies the French Dictatorship in the first flush of the Revolution. While Burke's speeches are curious anomalies in the tradition of British literature, his political career is also understood to be 'inconsistent', in that at the end of his career he changed from being one of the Whigs' great spokesmen to voice a conservative protest against revolutionary republicanism. In the Cold War era, Burke, defender of the American Revolution and opponent of the 'socialist' French Revolution, was particularly popular with American conservatives,3 many of whom sought with varying degrees of failure to resolve the 'contradictions' in Burke and read him as a 'coherent' figure working to a particular (modem conservative) theoretical programme.4 Other academics present Burke as a figure who is conflicted in his choice of philosophies: hence we get Burke "in revolt against the eighteenth century", Burke, an "ambivalent conservative", and "the seeming incoherence between Burke the traditionalist and Burke the bourgeois Iiberal."5 Even in Burke's lifetime he was regarded as embodying a number of contradictions. He was caricatured as a Jesuit, which was a shorthand way of alluding to his Irish Catholic antecedents and sympathies and his rumoured predilection for sodomy, but he was a strange Jesuit in that he was not given to the Jesuitical characteristics of intellectual duplicity and Machiavellian subterfuge, but was presented as a myopic dreamer, lean and idealistic, a Cervantic knight, in contrast with the astute, corpulent, unshaven, democratic Charles Fox. Contemporary opinions on Burke's speeches also register a recognition of the strangeness of his compositions. He is credited with being one of the foremost orators in the history of the British Parliament, and yet, according to Burke's first 3 Introduction - ''To love the little Platoon" biographer, Bisset, "the uncommon genius and eloquence of Burke" was often treated most disrespectfully by the members of the House of Commons who expressed loud disdain for what Bisset admits were Burke's "most violent expressions" in his crusading speeches against the East India Company. Matthew Arnold complains of Burke's "Asiatic style....barbarously rich and overloaded" and Sir Philip Magnus explains that Burke's lrishness allowed for an added impetus to the hooting and jeering which accompanied many of his speeches towards the end of his career: "Burke spoke always with a pronounced brogue, which helped to emphasise his strangeness, and his gestures when he was on his feet were ungainly."6 In his annotated bibliography of works on Burke, Conor Cruise O'Brien gives an example of one of the more gratuitously offensive depictions of the Irish Burke which were common currency until the publication of Burke's correspondence, and echoes of which still survive today: "If we regard his social origins, we can only classify as an Irish adventurer the great Edmund Burke, the theorist and the high priest of snobbery."7 There are many examples, even in Burke's own lifetime, where he is depicted as the eighteenth-century theatrical stereotype: the lrishman-on-the-make. The successful tagging of Burke as an 'Irish Adventurer' by those who wished to belittle or dismiss his achievements has perhaps led to the situation where many academics who found much to value in Burke chose to ignore his Irish nationality. This troublesome Irish dimension of Burke which Magnus says accentuated his 'strangeness' has only recently been used to provide a perspective on the apparent contradictions of his life and work. Conor Cruise O'Brien reads Burke's speeches on America, India and France to show how Burke's private 4 Introduction· ''To love the little Platoon" preoccupation with Ireland ghosts those great public crusades, particularly his impeachment of Hastings. Seamus Deane argues that Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France is a "foundational text" in the canon of Anglo-Irish literature and can be read as "generating the possiblity" for a narrative of that great body of work which is Irish writing in English.8 The result of reading Burke's politics as those of a 'crypto-catholic' Irishman and reading his Reflections within the context of the Irish literary tradition is that he no longer is an 'ungainly', strange, confusing or confused British statesman, nor an Irish adventurer replete with violent oratory, but he is clearly a brilliant and unique eighteenth-century Irish orator, a product of his Gaelic Jacobite upbringing and his Patriotic Irish education at Trinity College Dublin. By investigating Burke's 'social origins', we are provided with the backdrop that brings Edmund Burke's political performance into sharp relief. It is very clear that a great many Irish authors have drawn deeply from the rich reserves of the Irish oral tradition and storytelling conventions. Many of the novels of Maria Edgeworth, child of the British Whig Enlightenment, were preoccupied with the issues, misuses and abuses of 'English as spoken by the Irish'. This influence of the spoken word on the Irish text is most evident in those authors who were bilingual or lived in largely Gaelic speaking or bilingual areas but it is also evident in even our most urbane and European authors. Though James Joyce is recognised as one of Europe's leading modemists it is inconceivable that any discussion of Joyce's language could continue without any reference to the glories of the dialect of Hibemo-English or Dublin's vibrant oral culture. Discussions of Burke which have ignored or been ignorant of the traditions in which he was steeped and from which he draws so much of his 5 Introduction - ''To love the Uttle Platoon" language and politics have resulted in a Burke who appears an oddity within a narrowly defined eighteenth-century English literary and political canon. This dissertation proposes that one of the more fruitful ways of interpreting Burke's work is to evaluate him as an oral performer rather than a literary practitioner and it argues that in his voice one can hear the modulations of the genres and conventions of oral composition as practised in eighteenth-century Gaelic Ireland.