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

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СКАЧАТЬ politics and social analysis give way before an apprehension of the west as a place of fundamental natural forces, of human figures set passively or heroically against landscapes of stone, rock, and sea in a way that makes their works less radical than they perhaps thought they were. There is implicit therefore in their writings a sense that Gaelic Ireland in the west is the authentic heroic Ireland in a way that confirms rather than contradicts the conventional image of the west as “certain set apart.” The power of this conventional image was perhaps so great that it affected as intelligent a social commentator as Peadar O’Donnell and overwhelmed the turbulent anger of Liam O’Flaherty’s social criticism.

      So in the 1920s the sense of the western island and of the west as specially significant in Irish life became a cultural commonplace. Even an English visitor in 1924 fell under its spell:

      The West is different. Its spirit was used by the intellectuals in the late struggle but it was never theirs. It seems to come from some primitive elemental force which smoulders on, like a turf fire, long after such movements have spent themselves. It is a permanent factor to the existence of which no Irish statesman can safely shut his eyes.¹⁴

      The Northern Protestant naturalist R. Lloyd Praeger could declare:

      If I wished to show anyone the best thing in Ireland I would take him to Aran. Those grey ledges of limestone, rain-beaten and storm-swept, are different from anything else. The strangeness of the scene, the charm of the people (I don’t refer to the rabble that meets the steamer), the beauty of the sea and sky, the wealth of both pagan and Christian antiquities…all these help to make a sojourn in Aran a thing never to be forgotten.¹⁵

      When in November 1927, forty fishermen were drowned in a storm off the west coast, even the Irish Statesman which had, as we shall see, its own reasons to reject the primacy of Gaelic civilization in Irish life, responded to the disaster in elegiac terms, aligning the journal uneasily with all those who thought the west the cradle of Irish civilization:

      But the trawlers in which modern fishermen elsewhere go out to sea seem safe almost as the land compared with these frail curraghs which visitors to the west of Ireland see dancing on the waters. As one watched these curraghs and the fishermen on that rocky coast seemed almost like contemporaries of the first men who adventured on the seas, their Gaelic language and their curraghs alike survivals from ancient centuries. These western fishermen are a very fine type, full of character and vitality, and Gaelic enthusiasts from contact with these vestiges of the Gaelic past have tried to conjure up an image of the Gaelic world when the tide of life was high in its heart.¹⁶

      The vision of the western island as the primal source of the nation’s being received further confirmation in 1929 with the publication of Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s work An tOileánach (The Islandman). Works of this kind, in which an islander’s reminiscences were recorded in written form by researchers and literary men and are then translated, came in a few brief years to comprise almost a modern Irish subgenre. The Islandman (the English translation) is one of the finest examples of this type of work, exhibiting a strong narrative sense and swift economy of style and discourse. A sense of an almost Homeric, heroically charged zest emerges from a keenly objective record of island life.¹⁷ For any who might be inclined to doubt the primal rural superiority of the western world in Irish reality these accounts of work, feasting, death, play, fighting, and drinking could be proffered as ready proof. For in the pages of The Islandman it seems we are seeing island life not through the eyes of literary discovery or nationalist wish-fulfilment but from the cottages and currachs of the islands themselves. The work has an exhilarating freshness about it, an impression of fundamental things, a sense of origins.

      In the difficult years of reconstruction after the Civil War, in the 1920s and early 1930s, the Free State government made few conscious attempts other than the encouragement of Gaelic revival to project a cultural image of the nation despite the resources they had inherited and might have exploited systematically. A direct espousal of rural civilization was to be the cultural contribution of Mr. de Valera in the following decade. The government granted an annual subsidy to the Abbey Theatre in 1925, to an Irish-language theatre, An Taibhdhearc, in Galway in 1928, and established a publishing venture named An Gúm in 1926 for the publication of books in Irish. Apart from these fairly minimal gestures the government seemed content to approve, where it did not simply ignore, the work of writers who dwelt in a conservative and nationalistic fashion on rural aspects of the country’s life, while establishing a Censorship Board which would, it transpired, repress writings which might disturb conventional moral sensitivities.

      But almost as if to confirm the symbolic significance of rural images in the cultural life of the state, in 1927 the Minister for Finance received the recommendation of the Irish Coinage Committee, established to help implement the Coinage Act of 1926 under the chairmanship of W. B. Yeats. Those recommendations were that the Irish coinage, which was first issued in 1928, should bear the images of Irish animals and wildlife rather than the traditional hackneyed symbols of Ireland, round towers, the shamrock, and sunbursts. There were some objections to this decision from individuals who suggested that animal imagery was insufficiently Christian for the Irish nation’s coinage. The choice of birds and beasts as the basis of an Irish coinage’s iconography was in part dictated by the committee’s desire that the coinage should be a unified series of images, but individual members of the committee were firmly persuaded that the images selected bore intimately on the rural nature of Irish life. “What better symbols could we find for this horse-riding, salmon-fishing, cattle-raising country?”¹⁸ wrote the chairman, W. B. Yeats, and Thomas Bodkin, a governor of the National Gallery of Ireland and a subsequent director, concurred with his chairman:

      Coins are the tangible tokens of a people’s wealth. Wealth in the earliest times was always calculated in terms of cattle. Thence comes the word pecunia, money, derived from pecus, the beast. The wealth of Ireland is still derived in overwhelming proportion from the products of her soil. What, therefore, could be more appropriate than the depiction upon our coinage of those products?¹⁹

      And so Percy Metcalfe’s beautiful designs were issued in 1928, giving Ireland a coinage that depicted her agricultural, rural, and sporting life in the images of a woodcock, a chicken, a pig with piglets, a hare, a wolfhound, a bull, a hunter, and a salmon.

      Irish painters of the period were also touched by the prevailing rural understanding of Irish identity. As Bruce Arnold has remarked, there is in the work of painters in the 1920s and 1930s, such as Paul Henry, William Conor, Sean O’Sullivan, and Maurice MacGonigal, “often an uncomfortable feeling of strain, a self-consciousness about what ‘being Irish’ meant.”²⁰ From the painters of this period, whom Arnold has broadly defined as comprising a school of “Irish academic realism,” come those pictures of countrymen and women, fishermen, small farmers, turf stacks against cloudy skies, and cottages in secluded places, which seem so representative of the early years of independence. Paul Henry was probably the most popular of these artists, and his simple, often unpeopled landscapes seemed to express for many Irish men and women a sense of essential Irish realities. He was almost the official artist of the Free State – a painting entitled “Errigal Co. Donegal” was used as the frontispiece to the Irish Free State Official Handbook published in 1932. It pictures a small Irish village huddling beneath an austere mountain and a clouded sky. This official handbook, in fact, draws heavily for its illustrations on the work of Henry, Seán O’Sullivan, and Maurice MacGonigal, all artists absorbed by the Irish landscape.

      So cultural life in the new state was dominated by a vision of Ireland, inherited from the period СКАЧАТЬ