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

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СКАЧАТЬ href="#litres_trial_promo">² But the present could not contain him.

      As the heroic strain in Anglo-Irish writing, which Yeats had employed for the purposes of high art as well as potent propaganda, and lesser poets had found appropriate to patriotic utterance began to dissipate in the drab unadventurous atmosphere of the 1920s, serious poets and writers like Yeats and his younger contemporaries began to turn to new ways of interpreting their experience. The heroic images and symbols drawn from the sagas that had earlier vitalized genuine art and political action began to achieve a ceremonial status in the public mind, became mere icons of received political and historical wisdom, were discharged of their energizing currents in anniversary and collected editions of various poets’ work and in the schoolroom textbook.

      In August 1924 the efforts to revive the Tailteann Games in Dublin, initiated, legend bore witness, by the Irish mythical hero Lugh Lamh Fada (Lugh of the Long Hand) around 1600 B.C. and continued until the twelfth century, were not entirely successful, for they did not manage to command universal support in the bitter aftermath of the Civil War. In 1929 Æ sadly bore witness to the declining power of the heroic vision in Irish life. Reflecting on the work of Standish O’Grady, while declaring “the figure of Cuchulain amid his companions of the Red Branch which he discovered and refashioned for us is, I think, the greatest spiritual gift any Irishman for centuries has given to Ireland,” he admitted ruefully, “I know it will be said that this is a scientific age, the world so full of necessitous life that it is a waste of time for young Ireland to brood upon tales of legendary heroes.”³ By 1935, when a statue by Oliver Sheppard, which portrays the figure of Cuchulain, was erected in the General Post Office, scene of the Easter Rising in Dublin, this process was almost complete, provoking from Yeats in his poem “The Statues,” not a simple celebration of the heroic energy of the Celtic past and of the Easter Rising but a troubled question and an ambiguous affirmation:

      When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side,

      What stalked through the Post Office? What intellect,

      What calculation, number, measurement, replied?

      We Irish, born into that ancient sect

      But thrown upon this filthy modern tide

      And by its formless spawning fury wrecked,

      Climb to our proper dark, that we may trace

      The lineaments of a plummet-measured face.

      If the heroic vision of an Ireland the poet imagined “terrible and gay” was wrecked, as Yeats thought, by the “formless spawning fury” of the modern world or more probably by the mediocre dullness of the new democratic Irish State, the image of Ireland as a rural, almost pastoral nation, which had also preoccupied the writers of the Literary Revival, maintained its hold. In the 1920s it was the notion of the virtuous countryman that writers, artists, and commentators accepted as the legacy of the Literary Revival period, rather than the heroic aristocratic figures of the mythological cycles. A vision of rustic dignity and rural virtue was popularized in speeches, poems, plays and paintings. In the writings of Yeats and Synge rural figures had been employed as images of wildness, pagan exuberance, earthy intuitive knowledge of deep-rooted things, but for many years less imaginative, more piously patriotic writers had produced countless poems in which peasants and farmers had appeared not to reveal human possibility but to exhibit the unspoiled simplicity of the essential Irish, who had for many violent centuries endured the ravages of climate and oppression. Poems of this kind had exploited conventional properties, such as the bog, hazel trees, streams, currachs, the hearth, primitive cooking utensils, ploughing, sowing, and rough weather, employing a verse technique that owed its simple repetitions and structure to folk song and its assonance and internal rhyme to the native Gaelic poetic tradition. They remained popular in the 1920s, and new poets took up the tradition, ready to exploit the prevailing literary fashion. They celebrated a version of Irish pastoral, where rural life was a condition of virtue inasmuch as it remained an expression of an ancient civilization, uncontaminated by commercialism and progress. In so doing they helped to confirm Irish society in a belief that rural life constituted an essential element of an unchanging Irish identity.

      The social reality of the countryside was more dynamic; unheroic, hardly bucolic, and involved with change in ways which were eventually to disrupt it entirely. Indeed any study of the social profile of Irish society in the 1920s as the new state began to exercise its authority must impress upon the student the overwhelming nature of the problems that a government would have faced if it had attempted real social reorganization in the countryside. For example, overcrowding in housing was not simply confined to urban areas but was endemic in many rural counties as well, particularly in the west of the country. Most of the rural population lived in three-room dwellings, and this was true for each size of family from two to eleven persons. The three-room dwellings referred to in the census of 1926, from which these facts were adduced, were most frequently the whitewashed Irish thatched cottages, single-storey dwellings, seldom more than one room deep, with a kitchen, where a family ate, entertained themselves, met for gossip and talk with neighbours, a sleeping area, and a parlour for important family occasions. This form of dwelling, much loved of poets and playwrights as the heart of Irish pastoral with its permanently burning turf fire as image of its primeval vitality, was the setting throughout much of the country for a scarcely idyllic way of life in which thousands of Irish parents sought to raise their children in dignity despite the difficult circumstances. In 1926 (reckoning on current estimates in other European countries that defined families having more than two persons per room as living in overcrowded conditions) County Mayo had 43 percent of its population in such conditions, Donegal 40.8 percent, Kerry 38.9 percent, Galway 31.4 percent, and Sligo 30 percent, revealing that rural Ireland as well as urban was faced by a serious housing problem.

      Between 1911 and 1926 the housing of the rural population had, however, improved somewhat, though clearly emigration had played its part in ameliorating the problem in a cruel way. There had been a decrease of 42 percent in one-room dwellings, a decrease of 33.9 percent in two-room dwellings, a decrease of 5.8 percent in three-room dwellings, and an increase of 34.1 percent in four-room dwellings. Despite such improvements, the overcrowding in Irish housing was aggravated by the high fertility rate of those Irishmen and women who did marry. As outlined in chapter one, Irish social patterns were characterized both by late marriage and by the large numbers of men and women who chose to remain single or to emigrate. What seems remarkable by contrast with this evidence of Irish inhibition and repression is the fact that the practice of raising large families also characterized Irish social life, particularly in the west of Ireland. The reasons for this apparent anomaly in the Irish character have troubled demographers, and the explanations are necessarily complex.⁴ Be that as it may, in 1926 the figures for Irish fertility showed that married women under forty-five years of age in the state reared on an average 18 percent more children under five years of age than in Northern Ireland, 36 percent more than in Canada, 41 percent more than in Denmark, 44 percent more than in Australia, 70 percent more than in the United States, and 85 percent more than in England and Wales.

      Implicit in idealized literary portraits of Irish rural life in the early decades of the twentieth century was the assumption that a traditional culture still intact, inherited from a rich past, would surely compensate the Irish countryman for any discomforts he might be forced to endure in his humble but heroic condition. Again, the social reality was less exhilarating than the writers presumed. Certainly Irish rural life, particularly in the west of the country, retained aspects of the traditional Irish civilization that predated the Famine and the fairly general loss of the Irish language in the nineteenth century.⁵ The old tales and legends were still remembered by seanachais (storytellers) in parts of the west, a repository of ballad, song, and historical legend had been handed down, the people still observed ancient pre-Christian shibboleths about СКАЧАТЬ