Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–2001. Dr. Brown Terence

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СКАЧАТЬ might interfere with individual perception and expression. A search for the “native standard” is necessary if the country is to become “normal.” So in the contortions of his cultural study of the dramatist John Synge, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (as the critic labours to discover why despite his origins in the alien Ascendancy Synge nevertheless manages to be a good dramatist), one finds the humanistic strain in Corkery’s thinking, his educationalist’s concern for enhancing individual experience, drowned by notes of a nationalist’s celebration of the nation’s will. In denying Anglo-Irish writers of the Literary Revival artistic membership of the Irish nation, he comments:

      If one approaches “Celtic Revival” poetry as an exotic, then one is in a mood to appreciate its subtle rhythms, and its quiet tones; but if one continues to live within the Irish seas, travelling the roads of the land, then the white-walled houses, the farming life, the hill-top chapel, the memorial cross above some peasant’s grave – memorable only because he died for his country – impressing themselves as the living pieties of life must impress themselves, upon the imagination, growing into it, dominating it, all this poetry becomes after a time little else than an impertinence.²⁶

      Key words here are “must impress themselves,” “growing into it, dominating it.” The truly national imagination will, in Corkery’s sense of things, be consciously or unconsciously submissive to the great forces of the Irish being, will be dominated by them. His criticism of much Anglo-Irish writing is that the great forces “that work their will in the consciousness of the Irish people have found little or no expression in it.”²⁷ “Work their will” is a telling phrase, and it does not surprise that when Corkery casts about in his book for a representative Irish Ireland moment he chooses not some individual activity, nor some occasion of personal expression but a crowd of 30,000 people at a hurling match in Munster, comprising a body of sentiment that he feels Anglo-Irish writers could not comprehend. In such passages Corkery exhibits how easy it is for a sensitive humanist with a proper appreciation of the individual to allow himself the gratification afforded in the contemplation and veneration of the national will and of the people imagined as a mass movement.

      D. P. Moran had, as we noted, assured his fellow countrymen in The Philosophy of Irish Ireland that the nation he envisaged would stimulate “the free and full development of every individual.” At revealing moments in his writings Corkery made evident that he was unwilling in the country’s abnormal state to allow such liberty to writers. Rather, they must obey a national imperative, must in the interests of a truly Irish identity allow the nation to work its will on them, must serve as the seedbeds of the future. Such thinking has an authoritarian ring to it. It is the intellectual equivalent of Irish Ireland’s propagandist dogmatism coexisting uneasily with the educationalist’s vision of humane fulfilment that also stirs Corkery’s imagination.

      Furthermore Corkery was sure, like most of his fellows in the movement, what Irish identity would be like if it was allowed a fertile soil in which to flower. Various supporters of the movement differed about this, but they shared the conviction that they knew. D. P. Moran was vigorously certain that to be truly Irish would be to cultivate masculinity, in a “racy Irish atmosphere” where the Celtic note of melancholy would be derided as an alien absurdity. He aspired to “making the people sober, moderate, masculine and thereby paving the way for industrial advancement and economic reform.”²⁸ Eoin MacNeill, by contrast, made more of the noble, natural piety of the people and was disinclined to venerate the masculine virtues or berate weakness. But his sense of Irish identity was no less developed. His vision was of a historic Irish rural Christian civilization, chaste and learned, which must be allowed to express its rich life in the present. Corkery felt able to identify with even greater precision the forces which preoccupy a properly Irish racial mind. They are, as he defines them in Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature, (1) religion, (2) nationalism, (3) the land. Unless, his exclusive creed asserts, a writer is imaginatively absorbed by at least one of these preoccupations he is, Corkery assures us, not to be considered an Irish writer; he does not express the reality of Irish life. Irish identity, therefore, poses no problems for Corkery. His conception of an essential Irish mind, as of an authentic Irish literature, is equally categorical – it must express a clear-sighted sanity, an intellectual order where wit controls intensity of feeling, realism tempers imagination, intelligence the affections; the truly Irish mind must exhibit the virtues of classicism:

      This core of hardness is scarcely ever lacking to the Gaelic poet; track him right down the centuries, and one never finds it missing. It is intellectual in its nature: hard-headed and clear-sighted, witty at its best, prosaic when not eager; and to its universality in the truly Gaelic world is due the fact that one can turn over the pages of the Gaelic book of poetry, century after century, without coming on any set of verses that one could speak of as sentimental.²⁹

      Such intellectual assurance with its implicit prescriptive zeal is a characteristic of Irish Ireland’s writings, and it suggests the degree to which in desiring a flowering of the Irish intellect the writers knew what to expect. That individual blooms of creativity are unlikely to obey such prescriptive imperatives is a signally salutary fact that Irish Ireland weighed rather too little.

      I have argued that a genuinely radical and attractive humanism had fired much of the pre-revolutionary enthusiasm for the Irish language and its revival and that some of this feeling survived into the post-independence period. I have argued further that in the early years of the Irish Free State the proponents of Gaelic revival and the supporters of Irish Ireland, in general possessing no real social programme, tended to express the need for language revival in terms of conservation and of a despairingly authoritarian control of a society that was becoming increasingly anglicized. The revival attempt, therefore, despite its apparent radicalism, can be seen as rather more a reactionary expression of the deep conservatism of mind that governed public attitudes in the period than as a revolutionary movement. This, I think, becomes even clearer when we consider the relationship between the Irish Ireland ideology and the exclusivist cultural and social pressures which bore fruit in the enactment of the Censorship Bill of 1929.

      A recurrent intellectual motif in the writings of Irish Ireland’s thinkers is the provision of historical accounts of Ireland’s European uniqueness. The authentic Gaelic life which must be the basis of an Irish resurgence in the twentieth century, the argument runs, is a way of life that has traditionally escaped the universalizing forces that have disturbed local life throughout most of the rest of Europe. Ireland, it seems, escaped the imperial, legalistic dominance of Rome and the essentially artificial cosmopolitanism of the Renaissance. It is true that Gaelic Ireland was threatened by the inheritors of Renaissance and Enlightenment civilization, by the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, but Ireland, driven underground, did not absorb the alien values. The hidden Ireland survived beyond the power of the Protestant Ascendancy’s Big Houses and the British government official, maintaining its essential character and a brotherhood of feeling with the local life of pre-Renaissance, pre-Reformation Catholic Europe.

      There was, therefore, in the Irish Ireland movement a cultural equivalent of the political doctrine of Sinn Féin (Ourselves) in an imaginative attachment to the local and a belief that history had allowed that local life a protracted protection from alien influences. It was a short step from such thinking to the belief that cultural protectionism might enable Ireland to sustain her unique identity and to a draconian censorship as means of providing that protection.

      Of course, not all those associated with the Irish Ireland movement took that step, and it would be quite wrong to identify the Irish Censorship of Publications Act of 1929 solely with cultural exclusivism. Many countries in the early twentieth century felt that the accelerating pace of publications, particularly of cheap newspapers and magazines, created a social problem that they could not ignore. A Committee of Enquiry on Evil Literature set up by the Free State Minister for Justice in 1926, which prepared the way for СКАЧАТЬ