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

familiar symbols of Irish identity had become hackneyed and vulgar. A new literary and cultural enthusiasm had sought what were thought to be more appropriately heroic emblems for a nascent nationalism. The new state inherited therefore both the more traditional symbols of national identity and the modes and motifs that were the fruit of the Literary Revival which had come to vigorous life when, from the 1880s onward, scholars, poets, playwrights, historians, and folklorists rescued much from the Gaelic past and reinterpreted that past in the interests of a raised national consciousness. It had indeed been that literary and cultural activity which, as the critic Ernest Boyd noted in 1922, had done “more then anything else to draw the attention of the outside world to the separate national existence of Ireland.”¹

      The new literature that began to be produced in the eighties and nineties of the nineteenth century primarily affirmed the heroic traditions of the Irish people, directing their attention to the mythological tales of their past, to the heroes and noble deeds of a vanished age. When such literary antiquarianism had managed to suggest a continuity of experience between past and present, a powerful propagandist weapon had been forged. Such occurred most notably in the poems and plays of W. B. Yeats, where the figure of Cuchulain, the mythological hero of the eighth-century epic, the Táin Bó Cuailnge, and the figure of Cathleen ni Houlihan became associated with contemporary possibilities in a manner that suggested that the heroic could yet again dominate the Irish world. The heroic ideal, as presented in Yeats’s poems and plays, in Standish O’Grady’s versions of the mythological literature, in the translations of Lady Gregory, and in the many poems by minor poets of the Celtic Movement, entered the consciousness of twentieth-century Ireland as a metaphor of political hope. When, indeed, such heroic aspiration was allied with Catholic notions of sacrificial chivalry, which as Paul Fussell shows in his stimulating study The Great War and Modern Memory were prevalent in Europe before and during the 1914–18 war, the result was the fervent patriotic religiosity of Pearse’s writings and his self-immolating political passion.

      The 1920s saw a reduction in such heroic imagining. The business of reconstruction following civil war apparently lacked the exhilaration of a liberation struggle and could not be conceived of in such resonant terms. The dominant literary modes of the most adventurous writers became realistic if not indeed satiric. The efforts to write a modern Irish epic in English based on the matter of Ireland, which had absorbed many poets since Samuel Ferguson first set his hand to the task with the composition of Congal (published in 1872), seemed no longer likely to prove fruitful. In 1925 the young poet Austin Clarke published the last of his three attempts to write an epic based on mythological materials and subsequently abandoned the mythological past for a more personal, lyrical relationship with the Hiberno-Romanesque period in Irish history which received expression in his volume Pilgrimage in 1929. In such a transition, undoubtedly rooted in Clarke’s own personality, one may perhaps detect a more general intimation of the failing powers of the mythological and heroic vision of the 1920s in the depressed aftermath of the Civil War. While the struggle against England continued, the image of Cuchulain as the Hound of Ulster and the Fenian heroes as an exemplary Irish militia bore on contemporary experience with a striking pertinence, charging the work of even minor writers with national significance. In the wake of the Civil War, in a period of prudent recovery, images of heroic life began to seem like Irish stage properties, employed in literature when ceremony demanded. There was a general sense that the heroic age had passed. So P. S. O’Hegarty could review a biography of the patriot and freedom fighter Michael Collins in 1926 with a certainty that Ireland would not see his like again. Collins had embodied for O’Hegarty the energy of the mythic past, which the poet Alice Milligan had recreated in her poem “The Return of Lugh Lamh Fada”: “That comes nearer than anything I know, than any words I can pen, to rendering how Michael Collins. came to Ireland in the post-1916 years and what he meant to her…He stands out in the red years a veritable Lugh, outstanding, gigantic, efficient.”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,