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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, СКАЧАТЬ