Читать книгу Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–2001 - Dr. Brown Terence - Страница 11

It might have been expected that the Catholic nationalist conservatism which dominated Irish society in the first decade of the Irish Free State’s history would have met with some significant political opposition from two sources – from the forces of organized labour and from the ranks of the Protestant minority in the state. The former had, as their intellectual inheritance, the internationally minded writings of the socialist, syndicalist, and revolutionary James Connolly, executed after the Rising of 1916, and experience of the bitter class conflicts of 1913 in Dublin, to generate commitment to a view of Irish society which would emphasize class interests and divisions, rather than a nationalist vision of social and cultural unity transcending class. And Protestant Ireland, culturally and emotionally involved with the English-speaking world and recently represented in Westminster by the Unionist party, was naturally antagonistic to those definitions of Irish nationality current in the new state which emphasized the centrality of either Catholicism or the Irish language and the Gaelic past. The fact is, however, that neither organized labour nor the Protestant community was able to mount any effective political opposition to the dominant political, ideological, and cultural consensus of the early years of independence. The reasons for this require analysis.

In 1922 Irish Labour politics were expressed through the trade union movement and the Irish Labour Party. The Labour Party, with admirable if naive political idealism, had chosen not to contest the elections of 1918 and 1921, believing that such restraint would allow the electorate to express itself unambiguously on the national question. So, despite the incorporation of aspects of Labour policy in the Democratic Programme adopted by the First Dáil in January 1919, a number of years were to elapse before the popularity of socialist policies of however diluted a kind could be tested at the polls. As a result, the Labour Party stood on the sidelines of Irish politics throughout the crucial years of the War of Independence until 1922. As the Free State began reconstruction it found itself unable to make much electoral headway. Furthermore, the trade union movement in the 1920s was ill prepared to mount a sustained attack on the conservative basis of the social order, even if it had wished to do so, nor was it able to provide the industrial muscle for a militant labour programme. The movement was split by inter-union struggles, and in the widespread depression, bred of disunity, trade union membership declined steeply. Furthermore, many categories of workers had no union organizations to represent their interests. By the end of the decade, with the Labour Party’s role as a responsible parliamentary opposition rendered almost nugatory by the entry of Fianna Fáil to the Dáil in 1927 and with the trade union movement at odds with itself and largely ignored by the government and the civil service as the worldwide economic depression began to make itself felt in Ireland, the likelihood that a consistent, energetic, politically powerful, socialist critique might be developed to challenge the prevailing economic and social orthodoxy was dim indeed. At the end of the first decade of independence, organized labour in Ireland could take comfort only from the fact that the Irish Labour Party was still in existence and that the inspirational force of James Larkin (the labour leader who had played a crucial role in Dublin in 1913), to the fore in the Workers’ Union of Ireland, had kept alive the fitful flames of a revolutionary working-class consciousness in Dublin, which had flared almost two decades earlier. In years when the dominant nationalism often combined, in the wake of the Bolshevik successes in the Soviet Union, with outright antagonism to socialist ideas of politics, that even this little was achieved is a testament to the dedication and will of those few individuals who were prepared to plant socialist seeds for a later harvesting.

The policies and approach adopted by the Labour Party in the 1920s reflected the fact that the social panorama scarcely admitted of revolutionary perspectives. The party, under the leadership of Thomas Johnson, who was concurrently secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, abandoned the revolutionary syndicalism of James Connolly while continuing to venerate his memory, preferring a cautious use of parliamentary tactics to advance the workers’ cause. “I have,” Johnson wrote in 1925, “advocated the use by the workers of political means and parliamentary institutions to further their cause. I have opposed the proposition that the workers should rely solely on their economic power to attain their ends. I have acted in the belief that a democratic government would preserve the fundamental rights which have been won and would not lightly cast aside those social obligations which they had inherited from their predecessors.”¹ He continued in a passage that very fully expresses the position adopted by the great majority of Labour Party and trade union members in Ireland, throughout the twentieth century:

Shall the aim be honestly to remove poverty…or are we to agitate and organize with the object of waging the “class war” more relentlessly, and use “the unemployed” and the “poverty of the workers” as propagandist cries to justify our actions…I do not think this view of the mission of the Labour Movement has any promise of ultimate usefulness in Ireland.²

Johnson knew his electorate and suspected how precarious was Labour’s hold on Irish life in the Free State. For, lacking a solid base in a large industrial proletariat (only about 13 percent of the workforce was employed in industry of any kind – the island’s only real industrial centre was north of the border in Belfast), and, after 1926, in competition in rural areas with the popular reformism of Fianna Fáil, Labour had a difficult enough task in mere survival, without espousing what Johnson feared were ideas “in direct conflict with the religious faith of our people.”³

The cultural effects of this socialist eclipse in twentieth-century Ireland are not far to seek. The socialist ideas and preoccupations of much of modern Europe had curiously little currency in a country where ideology meant protracted, repetitive debates on the national question with little attention directed, until the 1960s, to class issues and social conditions. Indeed, one of the obvious weaknesses of Irish intellectual life in much of the period was the absence of a coherent, scientific study of society of the kind that in many European countries had its roots in a socialist concern to comprehend the ills of a manifestly unjust social order. For decades, indeed, such issues as the decline of the Irish language were most frequently discussed in terms of culture and nationality, without any serious effort to challenge an economic order which allowed the haemorrhage of emigration from Irish-speaking districts to flow unabated for forty years. Where other Europeans engaged in a conflict about the very nature of man and society, Irish men and women, writers, artists, politicians, workers committed themselves to a vision of national destiny which often meant a turning away from much uncomfortable social reality to conceptions of the nation as a spiritual entity that could compensate for a diminished experience. The counterpoint that a powerful socialist party and working-class movement might have represented in the intellectual and cultural life of the country in the first decades of independence is a possibility we find sounding only fitfully early in the century and suffering an almost complete extinction in the 1920s. There were, in fact, until recently, very few novels and plays of Irish working-class life in twentieth-century writing. Only in the plays of O’Casey was the world of the urban proletariat employed as the material of a committed art. There were no Irish disciples of Brecht, no efforts, apart from O’Casey’s later plays written in exile, to produce a literature engagé on behalf of socialism; indeed, only in a very few historical studies did the socialist ideas that absorbed so many European minds in the twentieth century find any large-scale Irish expression.

If the left in Ireland was unwilling or unable to pose a politically effective ideological challenge to the governing assumptions of the new state, the Protestant minority was manifestly unable to fill the breach. By 1922 the events of the preceding decade had rendered that once spirited and assured ruling caste nervously defeatist and impotent. Many of its members almost to the eve of revolution had refused to countenance the possibility of Home Rule for Ireland, and even those who had in one way or another so envisaged the Irish future now found themselves overtaken by events which had precipitated an even less desirable resolution of the national struggle. The establishment of the Irish Free State found Protestant Ireland in the twenty-six counties ideologically, politically, and emotionally unprepared for the uncharted waters of the new separatist seas, where they comprised what was seen by many of their nationalist fellow citizens as an ethnic minority.

Ideologically, the Protestants of Ireland, apart from certain few individuals who had been aroused by an enthusiasm for Gaelic revival and the cultural renaissance, had in the decade before independence made almost no effort to comprehend the nationalist cause. A dismissive contemptuousness had often reflected the offensive blend of insecurity and caste snobbery that characterized fairly commonplace Protestant reactions to Irish nationalism. The Irish Ireland movement by turn had not hesitated to reply in kind, proposing a theory of Irish nationality that denied full spiritual communion with the Irish nation to the colonizing, landed Anglo-Irishman with his apparently English accent, manner, and loyalties and his Protestant faith. It was indeed the Irish Ireland movement that had given potent propagandist currency to the term Anglo-Irish itself, to the discomfort of many individuals who had hitherto had no doubts of their fully Irish patrimony. Even those of them who had sought to sympathize with Irish needs and aspirations had found themselves denied a secure hold on their own Irish identity in these years by the propagandist outspokenness of the Irish Irelanders. Accustomed to think of themselves as unambiguously Irish, indeed Irish in one of the best possible ways, they had found themselves swiftly becoming treated in the newspapers, in political speeches, and in polemical pamphlets as strangers in their own land. The Celt and the Irish language were the new orthodoxies comprising an ethnic dogmatism that cast Anglo-Ireland in the role of alien persecutor of the one true faith. Furthermore, the recurrent political and emotional crises of the decade preceding independence had not allowed many Protestant Irishmen and women sufficient leisure and sense of security to devise an intellectual counter to the assaults of Irish Ireland or indeed much opportunity even to consider, had they cared to, the kinds of defence the poet W. B. Yeats had in fact developed in the face of Irish Ireland’s assault on what he thought were values Anglo-Ireland most fully possessed. Rather, the trauma of the Home Rule crisis, followed by the Great War in which so many of their sons perished and the savageries of guerrilla war in their own land, had left them without ideological resource, concerned only with economic and actual survival.

The Irish minority, to which the term Anglo-Ireland had recently been attached so uncomfortably, and which hoped for survival in these difficult circumstances, was not a large one in the twenty-six counties of the Irish Free State. Before the partition of the country in 1920, Protestant Ireland had been able to feel a certain security inasmuch as it comprised one-quarter of the population of the entire island. In 1926 the census in the Free State revealed that only 7.4 percent of the population of the twenty-six counties was recorded as professing the Protestant faith. Of these, only a few were the substantially landed Protestant gentry that for generations had intermarried with one another, with the better-born Catholic Irish, and with the English aristocracy and had supplied the empire with politicians, statesmen, soldiers, and sailors and Ireland with a ruling caste, with sportsmen, churchmen, and occasionally patriots. Many of these Irish gentry had resided on large estates in the predominantly rural provinces of Munster and Connacht, where by 1926 they comprised an extreme minority of the population. Indeed in the 1926 census only 2.6 percent of the population of Connacht was returned as Protestant while in Munster the figure was 3.6 percent.

For the rest, the Protestant population of the Irish Free State was made up of inhabitants of the three counties of Ulster that had been included in the state where 18.2 percent professed the Protestant faith and inhabitants of Leinster where 10.1 percent of the population was Protestant. In the Ulster counties of Cavan, Monaghan, and Donegal many of the Protestants were small and medium-sized farmers, whose emotional centre of gravity often lay across the Irish border as bonds of blood and political instinct tied them to a more vigorous and populist Protestant unionism than had commonly been espoused by the Anglo-Irish gentry to the south (the Orange Order remained a strong influence on Protestant life in these counties almost to the present day). In Leinster much of the Protestant population was made up of professional and businessmen (Protestants were particularly well represented in the banking and legal professions and in the biscuit, brewing, distilling, and builders’ providers trades), who undoubtedly felt a kinship with the Irish Protestant gentry of the former Ascendancy to whom they were often related, but whose interests would increasingly lie in a prudent accommodation with the new order. Such people and their families, helping to give a distinctive social tone to such fashionable areas in and near Dublin as Rathmines and Rathgar, where in 1926 33.2 percent of the population was Protestant, and Greystones, where 57.4 percent of the population declared themselves to be such, probably shared more in social terms (though they often did not care to admit it) with their Catholic, suburban, middle-class contemporaries than with the landowners of the former Protestant Ascendancy. As time went on and the political climate relaxed, this would allow for their integration into the new Ireland in ways which would not be so easily possible for their landed coreligionists and kin, whose possession of such tracts of the Irish soil as they still owned would always be liable to affront nationalist sensibilities. So what before independence had been a social minority bound together by religious affiliation and Unionist politics became fragmented upon independence: the remaining landowners isolated in the countryside, the farmers of the Ulster counties unsettled in mind and ready to move to the more congenial atmosphere of Northern Ireland, and the Protestant professional and business community concerned about stability and nervously ready to accept the new order if it offered such. What they all shared was a sense of isolation and of political impotence.

Independence marked therefore the end of the Protestant minority’s significant political power in the South of Ireland. Indeed, in its fragmented state it is difficult to see how any political party could have represented its interests in specific ways. None attempted the task, and the political associations that had directed the Unionist cause before independence swiftly became defunct. It is true that about seventeen former Southern Unionists were to be granted seats as non-elected members of the Upper House of the Oireachtas, Seanad Eireann (the Senate), but the actual political insecurity experienced by the Protestant community in Ireland at independence can be adjudged the more certainly by the remarkable spectacle of a delegation dispatched by the general synod of the Church of Ireland on 12 May 1922 to wait on Michael Collins to inquire in what may strike one now as plaintive terms indeed, “if they were permitted to live in Ireland or if it was desired that they should leave the country.”⁴ (It is surely revelatory that it was a church body and not a political party or association that took this step.) Collins’s firm assurance that they were welcome to remain and would be protected by his forces must have relieved them as it evidenced in a very important quarter indeed the existence of that republican strand in modern Irish nationalism which owes something to an eighteenth-century vision of an Irish democracy which could offer a secure home to Catholic, Protestant, and dissenter alike. But events in the country itself, over which it is only fair to emphasize Collins and the provisional government’s army had a far from satisfactory military control, must have seemed to many Anglo-Irish people to suggest that less idealistic forces might swamp the exemplary conscientiousness of the new administration. Between 6 December 1921 and 22 March 1923, 192 Big Houses were burned by incendiaries as reported in the Morning Post of 9 April 1923.⁵ Although these attacks on the houses of the former Ascendancy can be understood as part of a political and military strategy (many of the houses were burned by republicans who considered probably rightly that their occupants were supporters of the Treaty party), to Anglo-Ireland itself this must have seemed a veritable Jacquerie and a painful demonstration of their isolated vulnerability in an Ireland which no longer appeared to accept them.

The emotional state of Anglo-Ireland in the period was registered in a number of novels which appeared in the 1920s and early 1930s which employed the Big House as a metaphor that might allow the author to explore the socially disintegrated world of the Protestant Ascendancy. In 1925 Edith Somerville published The Big House of Inver, a chronicle of passion, vice, enmity, and corruption which destroy the great house of the work’s title. In the opening chapters the writer ponders the decline in the fortunes of the house as an emblem of social decay among her Anglo-Irish peers. She is tough-minded and ironic about their plight, convinced that they and their ancestors were in large measure the architects of their own downfall. The Anglo-Irish Big House had been a noble conception: “Inver House embodied one of those large gestures of the mind of the earlier Irish architects, some of which still stand to justify Ireland’s claim to be considered a civilized country.”⁶ Such defiance, she recognizes, comes too late; too many houses have been burned, destroyed before the fire took them, from within. The house that “faced unflinching the western ocean” suffered a fierce blow in the Famine of 1845, but the line of succession had been sullied before that by an act of lustful folly. From this primal sin can be traced subsequent incapacities to outface the blows of fate and history: “The glories and the greatness of Inver therewith suffered downfall. Five successive generations of mainly halfbred and wholly profligate Prendevilles rioted out their short lives, living with country women, fighting, drinking, gambling.”⁷ The Famine was only the axe that felled the dying tree:

Many an ancient property foundered and sank in that storm, drawing down with it – as a great ship in her sinking sucks down those that trusted in her protection – not alone its owners, but also the swarming families of the people who, in those semifeudal times, looked to the Big Houses for help. The martyrdoms, and the heroisms, and the devotion, have passed into oblivion, and better so, perhaps, when it is remembered how a not extravagant exercise of political foresight might have saved the martyrdoms. As for other matters, it might only intensify the embittering of a now outcast class to be reminded of what things it suffered and sacrificed in doing what it held to be its duty.⁸

Such stern resignation to Anglo-Ireland’s demise, with its flash of anger at wasted opportunities, was rare in the ranks of her Anglo-Irish contemporaries, but Edith Somerville bears eloquent testimony here to the bitterness and sense of social isolation many of her fellows experienced in the 1920s.

There were those who hoped that resignation was premature, that Anglo-Ireland might have some role to play in the new Ireland even if its political power was broken. One of the most poignant expressions of this hope was the novel published in 1929 by Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September. In 1942, writing of her own ancestral home, Bowen’s Court, she reflected on the isolation which she felt was a central feature of Anglo-Ireland’s experience, made the more severe by the development of the Irish Free State and the depredations of wartime, but a constant of its history.

Each of these family houses, with its stables and farm and gardens deep in trees at the end of long avenues, is an island – and, like an island, a world…Each of these houses, with its intense, centripetal life, is isolated by something very much more lasting than the physical fact of space: the isolation is innate; it is an affair of origin.⁹

The Last September is set in a Big House at a moment when that innate isolation was intense, during the grim months of the War of Independence in 1920. The heroine, Lois Farquar, orphaned niece to Sir Richard Naylor of Danielstown, becomes conscious, amid the comings and goings of guests, the tennis parties and dances arranged for the British garrison, of a haunting isolation, a sense of space ready to be filled when the transitional years of adolescence are done with, when autumn achieves the definition of winter, when the war that threatens their lives has been resolved.

Looking down, it seemed to Lois they lived in a forest; space of lawns blotted out in the pressure and dusk of trees. She wondered they were not smothered; then wondered still more that they were not afraid. Far from here, too, their isolation became apparent. The house seemed to be pressing down low in apprehension, hiding its face, as though it had her vision of where it was. It seemed to gather its trees close in fright and amazement at the wide light lovely unloving country, the unwilling bosom whereon it was set.¹⁰

The basic metaphor of the novel is the emptiness of the spaces in the house and the space between the house and the landscape and society it has been set amidst. Early in the novel Lois walks among the laurel trees in the shrubbery and comes undetected upon a man in a trench coat:

It must be because of Ireland he was in such a hurry; down from the mountains, making a short-cut through their demesne. Here was something else that she could not share. She could not conceive of her country emotionally: it was a way of living, abstract of several landscapes, or an oblique, frayed island moored at the north but with an air of being detached and drawn out west from the British coast.¹¹

She recognizes that, “Conceivably she had surprised life at a significant angle in the shrubbery,” and the book suggests, in its constant metaphors of empty space, that perhaps some means can be discovered of filling them with a significance that will relate the isolated Ascendancy world of Lois Farquar to the wide, active countryside that surrounds her house. But the book’s expression of hope for such a relationship is muted and rendered plaintive by the valedictory movement of its prose and by the chilly finality of its scrupulously composed social tableaux and vistas. Written with the knowledge of 1929, the whole is contained within the final metaphor of empty spaces filled at the last by fire:

At Danielstown, half way up the avenue under the beeches, the thin iron gate twanged (missed its latch, remained swinging aghast) as the last unlit car slid out with the executioners bland from accomplished duty. The sound of the last car widened, gave itself to the open and empty country and was demolished. Then the first wave of a silence that was to be ultimate flowed back, confident, to the steps. Above the step the door stood open hospitably upon a furnace.¹²

It was possible, perhaps, to those less sensitive to the emotional isolation so precisely explored by an Elizabeth Bowen, to pretend that while the new order might refer to Kingstown as Dun Laoghaire, Kingstown it remained in polite society and that the National Anthem was still “God Save the King,” though Queen Victoria’s statue had vanished from the forecourt of Leinster House, former home of the Royal Dublin Society, now the seat of government.¹³ Brian Inglis, in West Briton, his witty account of Protestant society life in Malahide (a seaside town seven miles north of Dublin) in the period following independence, gives a spirited account of a contentedly vestigial world. He remembers:

Their social world remained stable; like a prawn in aspic it gradually began to go stale, but it did not disintegrate. All around them “that other Ireland” as George Russell (Æ) had called it, was coming into its force, but they remained almost unaware of its existence.¹⁴

Accent, social class, and religion still determined membership of the exclusive Island Golf Club. General satisfaction was expressed at the government’s impeccably orthodox economic policies. Indeed, as he recalls: “The State’s effort to impose what to us was an alien culture and, worse, an alien language, was almost the only feature of life in the Free State which compelled our attention and aroused our active resentment.”¹⁵ Sailing, dancing, hunting, and the club remained to distract Anglo-Ireland and those who felt themselves associated with it from uncomfortable developments, while the thriving condition of the Royal Dublin Society, with its lectures, concerts, and library suggested that the cultural influence of the distinctly Anglo-Irish or Protestant institutions was still strong. Membership of the society, which established itself in new premises in Ballsbridge in Dublin in 1925, increased substantially in the 1920s. In 1919 it could claim 2,221 members; by 1926 that figure had risen to 7,000, and although in 1920–21 only 9,730 attendances were registered at the reduced recitals of that troubled year, by 1925–26 35,780 attendances were registered at recitals and 11,002 at the lectures sponsored by the Society.¹⁶

By contrast to the Royal Dublin Society, the condition of Trinity College, Dublin in the 1920s is a more accurate indicator of the isolated predicament of the Anglo-Irish and Protestant minority in the new state. That university had long been identified with the Protestant Ascendancy (although in the nineteenth century it had rather served the Irish Protestant middle class than the gentry, who often preferred Oxford and Cambridge for their sons) and in the years preceding independence had endured much nationalist obloquy on account of certain intemperate utterances by some of its best-known fellows, in particular, John Pentland Mahaffy, whose contemptuous attitude to nationalist Ireland was not to be easily forgotten or forgiven. Furthermore, the college was in somewhat straitened financial circumstances. A Royal Commission of 1920 had recommended that the college receive an annual subvention from the public purse, and a sum of £30,000 per annum had been designated for Trinity in the Government of Ireland Act of the same year, but the provisions of that act never became active in the South of Ireland, and although the provost of the college sought to have some such financial arrangement included in the Treaty of 1921, he was unsuccessful.¹⁷ So the 1920s found Trinity financially insecure, intellectually and socially remote for the most part from contemporary Irish concerns, and identified in the popular mind with the former, rejected ruling class. There were those, too, ready to express the profoundest ill-will toward the institution. An Eoin MacNeill, with a certain distress, might regret that the college was responsible, as the chief agent of English culture in Ireland, for that anglicization which had almost destroyed the authentic civilization of the country (the college awarded him an honorary degree in 1928). Others were even more vigorously opposed to the college, ready to see in the large crowds that gathered in College Green, in front of the college, on Armistice Day, the symbol of a surviving Ascendancy attitude to be identified with the college itself. That the first provost to be appointed after the foundation of the Free State was a Gaelic scholar (Dr. E. J. Gwynn was appointed in 1927) and that scholarly material on the Irish language and on Irish literature was published in the college’s house journal, Hermathena, could do only very little to reduce antagonism toward an institution which had before independence seemed to set its face against the ideal of Irish freedom.

In the 1920s and 1930s Trinity suffered one of its bleakest periods. The buildings and grounds became dilapidated and a little unkempt. A sense of isolation and economic insecurity was not alleviated by much intellectual or imaginative enterprise. Many of the graduates sought their careers abroad, and the college was unable to play its part in the developing life of the Free State in the way the National University, particularly University College, Dublin, did. Indeed, the college in the centre of Dublin bore in its isolation and decline a striking resemblance in social terms to the Big Houses of the countryside – each symbolizing a ruling caste in the aftermath of its power.

Many Anglo-Irish men and women chose simply to leave the country, preferring the secure if duller life of a villa on the English south-east coast to the strains of further anxiety and isolation in Ireland (and their departure meant that much of the fine furniture and many books and paintings that had escaped the fires of the Civil War went for sale and were bought by dealers from abroad). The period 1911–26 saw indeed a striking decline of about one-third in the Protestant population of the South of Ireland as a whole¹⁸ (in the same period the Catholic population declined by 2.2 percent), which must be accounted for not only by the lamentable losses endured by Protestant Ireland in the Great War but by the large numbers of landed families, Protestant professional men, former members of the Royal Irish Constabulary, civil servants, and Protestant small farmers, who felt that the new Ireland was unlikely to provide a satisfactory home for themselves or their offspring. In the early 1930s one witness recorded the fact that in County Clare seventy Protestant landed families had left the country since 1919,¹⁹ leaving only a small remnant of their class and creed behind them. In other counties of the south and west the pattern was similar, if not quite so starkly etched.

A sense of bitterness and betrayal accompanied these men and women into exile, together with a conviction that the new Ireland was, sadly, no place for them. Their feelings and attitude are, in fact, well represented in a volume of reminiscences by P. L. Dickinson published in 1929. Dickinson, a Dublin architect, in his book The Dublin of Yesterday, remembers his youth and young manhood in a city he reckons has now fallen into enemy hands. Fairly typical of the professional Dublin man who felt a kinship with Anglo-Ireland and the Protestant Ascendancy (his father was vicar of the important St. Anne’s Parish in Dublin, and his family had links with the gentry, while his paternal grandfather had been bishop of Meath), Dickinson had been educated in England before returning to a comfortable Dublin professional life in a social ambiance he found totally agreeable. He had wide contacts in Dublin’s literary, artistic, and medical worlds, numbering among his acquaintances John Pentland Mahaffy (he was secretary to Mahaffy in the Georgian Society founded in 1910), W. B. Yeats, whom he met in the Arts Club, where he enjoyed many sociable occasions, George Russell, Pádraic Colum, and Katherine Tynan. A man of broad views (he was sceptical about revealed religion and prepared to view monogamy as only one form of sexual arrangement), he felt by 1929 that Ireland was “largely ruled by a priesthood and atmosphere based on economic conditions of the medieval and early Renaissance period.”²⁰ It was no place for one of his class and outlook. He was particularly oppressed by the Gaelic enthusiasm:

The Gael was a rung on the ladder, a rung which has long been overstepped. The modern movement in the new political entity – the Irish Free State – the modern movement back towards this Gaelic Hey-Day is pathetic: or if you wish it is comic; certainly it is useless. It cannot last – Ireland is politically and economically and, above all, socially, one with Great Britain; any such retrograde movement as an attempt at the compulsory revival of a dead language only becomes a local racial injury. It hurts every one a little; but it hurts the authors a lot. To those who, like myself have had to leave their native country owing to the acts of their fellow-countrymen, a perfectly dispassionate judgement of the situation must be a little difficult. I love Ireland; few people know it better. There is hardly a mile of its coastline or hills I have not walked. There is not a thought in me that does not want well-being for the land of my birth; yet there is no room today in their own land for thousands of Irishmen of similar views.²¹

All that he now sees in Ireland are “the gestures of the child shaking itself free from its nurse” as he looks on with “a devoted but impotent love.”

Some Anglo-Irishmen were unprepared to accept the position of isolated impotence or exile that seemed their lot in the new political dispensation. Men of substance like Lord Midleton and Andrew Jameson, who had played leading parts in the Irish Unionist Alliance which had attempted to project the Unionist cause in the years before independence, were willing to take places in the Seanad, ready to participate in government and to defend their social and economic position in the political arena (in fact, only Jameson was offered a seat). However, it was in the Dáil that the real legislative muscle was exercised, and although the government contained men who realized the new state could gain much from the former Ascendancy, there were also those, like Ernest Blythe, for a time Minister for Finance, who frankly admitted later of such as Midleton and Jameson, “We looked on them as the dregs of landlordism.”²² So a figure like the remarkable Bryan Cooper, Anglo-Irish landowner, former Unionist MP at Westminster and British army officer, who stood and was elected as an independent for the Free State Dáil, where he played a significant role in legislative business, finally in 1927 joining W. T. Cosgrave’s ruling party, must be seen, I think, as an exception to the rule that more usually saw Anglo-Irishmen and women quite remote from political life in this period. Cooper was probably unique as Anglo-Irishman in his adaptability and personal attractiveness, so while his participation in the Dáil, which was welcomed by various members of that house, can, as his biographer argues, be seen as proving

…that a man of his birth and upbringing could have, and did have, a place in Ireland and could help to shape the new Irish State. His presence in the Dáil and his power there gave the lie to the pedants in the Kildare Street and Stephen’s Green Clubs and gave the lie to the Protestant Bishops and rural Deans²³

one also suspects that Cooper’s genial and attractive personality made smooth his way in an assembly that might not have proved so welcoming to others less happily endowed.

Some few Anglo-Irishmen and individuals who identified with Anglo-Ireland’s fate were prepared in the face of isolation, impotence, and the difficulties militating against political participation to contemplate defiance and intellectual defence as proper responses to their predicament. In 1926, in his play The Big House, Lennox Robinson nicely caught this mood. The play, which was presented by the Abbey in September of that year at what one reviewer called “one of the most enthusiastic first performances that I can remember at the Abbey Theatre,”²⁴ offered four scenes from the recent life of a Big House which has sent its sons to their deaths in the Great War and is finally destroyed in the flames of the Civil War. The heroine, Kate Alcock, is perhaps the most interesting character in the play. Daughter of the house, she has sought to identify with the Ireland she has seen developing about her, but at a crucial moment in the play she senses her absolute separation from those with whom she seeks acceptance. A young woman in the village has perished at the hands of the Black and Tans, and Kate visits the bereaved family:

Oh yes, I threw a bridge across the gulf and ran across it and called Pat, Mick and Larry by their Christian names, and hobnobbed with priests and creamery managers and Gaelic teachers – but it was only a bridge, the gulf remained and when the moment came they instinctively forced me to stand on the farther side. Oh, it wasn’t only tonight I’ve felt it. I’ve been conscious of it ever since I’ve been conscious of anything, but I thought it could be broken down.²⁵

The play ends with Kate accepting her Anglo-Irish distinctiveness, defiantly determining to rebuild the gutted family house, convinced that “Ireland is not more theirs than ours.”²⁶ Now she glories in her Anglo-Irish difference, rejecting the “democratic snobbishness we went in for:”

Now I don’t want to give up the “they” and “us,” I glory in it. I was wrong, we were all wrong, in trying to find a common platform, in pretending we weren’t different from every Pat and Mick in the village…We were ashamed of everything, ashamed of our birth, ashamed of our good education, ashamed of our religion, ashamed that we dined in the evenings and that we dressed for dinner, and after all, our shame didn’t save us or we wouldn’t be sitting here on the remnants of our furniture.²⁷

It was inevitable that some would find this kind of speech offensive. One correspondent wrote to the Irish Statesman pointedly inquiring why the daughters of the Big Houses “grow flat-footed and thin haired, and the sons degenerate, often a little strange in the head,” opining that in his view it was because the Ascendancy “barred its windows against the native vitality” until “gradually its teeth grew longer and its feet flatter and its viscera more withered.”²⁸ The Statesman’s editor, George Russell (Æ), however, greeted the play with enthusiasm, recognizing it as an energetic salvo in a battle he had been fighting on behalf of Anglo-Ireland in his journal for several years:

We do not want uniformity in our culture or our ideals, but the balancing of our diversities in a wide tolerance. The moment we had complete uniformity, our national life would be stagnant. We are glad to think we shall never achieve that uniformity which is the dream of commonplace minds and we imagine that many who saw The Big House felt a liberating thrill at the last outburst of Kate Alcock.²⁹

The Irish Statesman had been revived in 1923, when Æ accepted the editorship at the request of Sir Horace Plunkett who was keen that the new state should have a journalistic organ of a high literary and intellectual calibre to act as a leaven in its life. And for the rest of the decade Russell showed that Plunkett had chosen his editor wisely, for the Statesman proved to be one of the most remarkable cultural organs modern Ireland has known – humane, politically engaged, and broadly literate. In its early years the periodical threw its weight behind the Cosgrave administration, berating the Republicans who still hoped that the Treaty might be dismantled, for their obdurate fantasizing. Almost from the beginning, however, the Statesman was alert to those aspects of Irish intellectual and cultural life that tended to national exclusivism, xenophobia, and cultural imposition. From the first Æ was determined that Irish life should be open to diverse influences from abroad: Ireland should be attentive to contemporary historical developments. Writing in November 1923 on “National Culture”, he declared:

We say we cannot merely out of Irish traditions find solutions to all our modern problems. It is no use reading Wolfe Tone or John Mitchel or Thomas Davis in the belief that they had a clairvoyance which pierced into our times with their complexities, or that by going back to Gaelic Ireland we shall find images upon which we can build anew. We shall find much inspiration and beauty in our own past but we have to ransack world literature, world history, world science and study our national contemporaries and graft what we learn into our own national tradition, if we are not to fade out of the list of civilized nations.³⁰

Accordingly, throughout the 1920s Æ filled the columns of his periodical with international as well as national news and comment, with reviews of most of the major writers writing in the English language, with comparisons of Ireland with such countries as Sweden and Denmark, allowing a sense to emerge of Ireland as one small country among many in an effort to counteract what he felt was a prevailing national narcissism. Æ waged strenuous war against the Irish Irelanders’ conception of Gaelic civilization with the Irish language as the matrix of Irish life. He preferred a vision of the national synthesis, believing that the majority of the Irish people were culturally mixed, whatever the polemicist might wish. He certainly approved “the determination to give every Irish child access to the language in which is locked up the history of their race for two thousand years,”³¹ but he objected both to “the precise methods by which Irish youth is being rushed back into the Gaelic world”³² and to the exclusive dogmas of Irish Ireland. “We do not believe,” he wrote, “that the Irish people will ever allow their knowledge of English to lapse.”³³ Instead of the Irish Irelanders’ vision of an absorbent Gaelic reality, Æ vigorously preached a doctrine of national synthesis in which no ethnic group is predominant, no culture the assimilative one. Ireland is a fertile creation of the historic fusion of races, culture, and language.

We wish the Irish mind to develop to the utmost of which it is capable, and we have always believed that the people now inhabiting Ireland, a new race made up of Gael, Dane, Norman and Saxon, has infinitely greater intellectual possibilities in it than the old race which existed before the stranger came. The union of races has brought a more complex mentality. We can no more get rid of these new elements in our blood and culture than we can get rid of the Gaelic blood.³⁴

Crucial to the force of Æ’s argument here is the distinctiveness and distinction of Anglo-Ireland’s contribution to Irish civilization, and it is to this that he frequently turns in his columns, opening them also to writers and critics who could extol the Irish quality of such figures as Swift, Burke, and Berkeley, highlighting too the remarkable achievements of the Anglo-Irish Literary Revival of the preceding four decades. Anglo-Ireland, through its openness to fertilizing ideas from abroad was, and would remain, vital to Irish cultural health. It could fill a crucial social and cultural role, even though its political power was no more. Ireland, he argues,

…has not only the unique Gaelic tradition, but it has given birth, if it accepts all its children, to many men who have influenced European culture and science, Berkeley, Swift, Goldsmith, Burke, Sheridan, Moore, Hamilton, Kelvin, Tyndall, Shaw, Yeats, Synge and many others of international repute. If we repudiate the Anglo-Irish tradition, if we say these are aliens, how poor does our life become.³⁵

The frequent debates in the Statesman as to what constitutes Irish writing and the arguments about Irish and Anglo-Irish culture, it is important to stress, were disguised debates about politics. The underlying political issues were who should shape the new Ireland and what traditions, if any, should be predominant. As Æ put it frankly in 1925, identifying the cultural debate in which he was engaged with current attitudes which had deprived Anglo-Ireland of real political and national opportunities:

Those who inherit the national tradition should not be so scared at the suggestion that Irish people lately of another tradition might take an active part in the building up of the new self-governing Ireland. Man for man they are just as good human beings as any of their nationalist fellow-countrymen. It is their misfortune to be on the losing side in the political struggle.³⁶

They came, indeed, from a tradition which had supplied a modern Irish literature in English that had attracted the attention of the world.

The Irish Literary Revival was for Æ the chief reason why Anglo-Ireland deserved the respectful attention of all Irishmen. Furthermore, for Æ as to a lesser extent it did for W. B. Yeats, it represented the best hope for a resolution of differences between Irishmen. If, he believed, it could be wholeheartedly recognized by all that men and women of Anglo-Irish stock had contributed through their literary and dramatic works to Irish regeneration and that a genuinely Irish literature had emerged through the fusion of the English language with Gaelic mythology and traditions, then political differences in Ireland might lose their sharp distinctiveness, softened in the beneficent glow of culture. Æ argued that “Anglo-Irish literature only began to take on a quality when writers like O’Grady, Yeats, Hyde, Synge, Lady Gregory, Stephens, Clarke, Higgins, O’Flaherty and others either learned a good deal of the language or studied its cultural content in translations,”³⁷ and “however hateful and unjust the invasion of Ireland was to the Nationalists, the blending of races and cultures finally brought about a more vital and complicated mentality. Some of the most brilliant intellects in modern times are the product of this fusion of races or cultures.”³⁸ And it was Æ’s conviction that “if these names were deleted from Irish history the country would be almost intellectually non-existent as far as the rest of the world was concerned.”³⁹

It was not easy to sustain the force of this polemic throughout the 1920s. There was a troubling sense that the tide of the Revival as a distinctive intellectual and cultural movement directly associated with Anglo-Ireland had somewhat withdrawn, its energies waning. The closure of the Maunsel publishing company in 1926, the company that had published the work of many of the writers associated with the Revival, was a chilly omen of Ireland’s literary future (the firm of Maunsel and Roberts Ltd. was auctioned off in separate lots). Critical works and histories of the movement began to appear which suggested that observers felt the time was ripe for the assessment of a past period. Memorial and collected editions were published in London. For Æ it was imperative that the vitality and vigour of the Anglo-Irish literary movement should not be seen as in decline. He noted that the work younger writers were now producing, many of them those young men whose talents he so assiduously cultivated, tended to realism and psychological subjectivism. The plays of O’Casey, which set the heroic vision of the Easter Rising and the War of Independence against the squalid but vibrant life of Dublin’s slum tenements, the harsh portrait of revolutionary violence in O’Flaherty’s novel The Informer, the spiky satire of Denis Johnston’s expressionist play The Old Lady Says “No!” which sends the eighteenth-century patriot Robert Emmet abroad in a smugly or foolishly nationalistic and uncomprehending suburban Dublin, all suggested that the new modes were realistic and satiric. Æ absorbed such works into the canon of the Literary Revival, which he felt had been idealistic and visionary, in terms of a dialectical continuity:

That action and reaction are equal and opposite is an aphorism which is true not only in the material but psychic sphere. Oscillations of emotion take place in literature and the arts…Twenty years ago the literary movement in Ireland was spiritual and romantic, and the reaction from that has brought us to James Joyce and Sean O’Casey.⁴⁰

Some of the young men whose work Æ gladly published in his journal, perhaps because their presence helped to confirm his theory, though he had also an innate literary hospitality, were less than willing to fit easily into their editor’s grand schemes (and it is surely germane to note that most of them derived from Catholic backgrounds). Frank O’Connor was ready in youthful iconoclasm to dismiss Yeats from the pantheon of Irish poets in the name of a genuine Gaelic tradition (as distinct from the spurious kind O’Connor was also ready to denounce); Liam O’Flaherty could blithely inform his tolerant editor:

I don’t for a moment claim that your paper is not doing good work. But I do claim that it is not Irish, that it is not national, and that it is not representative in any respect of the cultural forces, in all spheres, that are trying to find room for birth in this country at present.⁴¹

O’Flaherty, with others (Austin Clarke, F. R. Higgins), joined in the chorus of those who hated O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars, directing their attack at the playwright and his eminent defender, W. B. Yeats. Perhaps Æ might have viewed such literary wars as the manifestation of the necessary emotional and psychic oscillations of his theory, but the fact that those he wished to encompass within a general thesis that would allow for the continuity of Anglo-Irish literature as he understood it had no intention of being so encompassed, made his position difficult. For the younger writers were energetically determined that the new Irish writing would be distinct from the Anglo-Irish tradition they associated with Yeats. There is, therefore, something poignant about Æ’s mystified efforts to comprehend the later work of Joyce, the Work in Progress that became Finnegans Wake, for which clearly he felt a temperamental distaste, within his optimistic theory about the continued vitality of the Irish Literary Renaissance, while younger men like the poet and art critic Thomas MacGreevy hailed the novelist in the columns of Æ’s journal as “the most suggestive figure in the history of European art or literature since Leonardo da Vinci.”⁴² He associated Joyce not with the Anglo-Irish Revival at all but with the great Catholic writers of Europe, with the Dante of the Divine Comedy.

The poignancy of Æ’s position was compounded by the fact that writers like Joyce, Clarke, O’Flaherty, and MacGreevy himself in fact demonstrated in their work the truth of one element in Æ’s polemic on the nature of Irish reality. The historic fusion of races in Ireland and the introduction of the English language to the country had indeed allowed for the birth of a distinctive Irish literature in English, a cultural endowment that could not be gainsaid. But this literature was and would increasingly be a product of the social and linguistic reality of modern Ireland in which English with an Irish colouring was and is the lingua franca. It could not therefore, even in the 1920s, and certainly could not as the century progressed, be easily employed as a persistent proof of the cultural necessity of the Anglo-Irish Protestants in the new state, which was the other element in Æ’s polemic. In proving the substance of Æ’s ideas on the social and cultural reality of modern Ireland as hybrid and a consequence of racial fusion such writers of Catholic middle-class and rural background were, ironically, vitiating the force of his propagandist efforts on behalf of the Anglo-Irish Protestants. At the high point of the Irish Literary Revival they had perhaps seemed crucial. Now they were less so.