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

and upbringing could have, and did have, a place in Ireland and could help to shape the new Irish State. His presence in the Dáil and his power there gave the lie to the pedants in the Kildare Street and Stephen’s Green Clubs and gave the lie to the Protestant Bishops and rural Deans²³

      one also suspects that Cooper’s genial and attractive personality made smooth his way in an assembly that might not have proved so welcoming to others less happily endowed.

      Some few Anglo-Irishmen and individuals who identified with Anglo-Ireland’s fate were prepared in the face of isolation, impotence, and the difficulties militating against political participation to contemplate defiance and intellectual defence as proper responses to their predicament. In 1926, in his play The Big House, Lennox Robinson nicely caught this mood. The play, which was presented by the Abbey in September of that year at what one reviewer called “one of the most enthusiastic first performances that I can remember at the Abbey Theatre,”²⁴ offered four scenes from the recent life of a Big House which has sent its sons to their deaths in the Great War and is finally destroyed in the flames of the Civil War. The heroine, Kate Alcock, is perhaps the most interesting character in the play. Daughter of the house, she has sought to identify with the Ireland she has seen developing about her, but at a crucial moment in the play she senses her absolute separation from those with whom she seeks acceptance. A young woman in the village has perished at the hands of the Black and Tans, and Kate visits the bereaved family:

      Oh yes, I threw a bridge across the gulf and ran across it and called Pat, Mick and Larry by their Christian names, and hobnobbed with priests and creamery managers and Gaelic teachers – but it was only a bridge, the gulf remained and when the moment came they instinctively forced me to stand on the farther side. Oh, it wasn’t only tonight I’ve felt it. I’ve been conscious of it ever since I’ve been conscious of anything, but I thought it could be broken down.²⁵

      The play ends with Kate accepting her Anglo-Irish distinctiveness, defiantly determining to rebuild the gutted family house, convinced that “Ireland is not more theirs than ours.”²⁶ Now she glories in her Anglo-Irish difference, rejecting the “democratic snobbishness we went in for:”

      Now I don’t want to give up the “they” and “us,” I glory in it. I was wrong, we were all wrong, in trying to find a common platform, in pretending we weren’t different from every Pat and Mick in the village…We were ashamed of everything, ashamed of our birth, ashamed of our good education, ashamed of our religion, ashamed that we dined in the evenings and that we dressed for dinner, and after all, our shame didn’t save us or we wouldn’t be sitting here on the remnants of our furniture.²⁷

      It was inevitable that some would find this kind of speech offensive. One correspondent wrote to the Irish Statesman pointedly inquiring why the daughters of the Big Houses “grow flat-footed and thin haired, and the sons degenerate, often a little strange in the head,” opining that in his view it was because the Ascendancy “barred its windows against the native vitality” until “gradually its teeth grew longer and its feet flatter and its viscera more withered.”²⁸ The Statesman’s editor, George Russell (Æ), however, greeted the play with enthusiasm, recognizing it as an energetic salvo in a battle he had been fighting on behalf of Anglo-Ireland in his journal for several years:

      We do not want uniformity in our culture or our ideals, but the balancing of our diversities in a wide tolerance. The moment we had complete uniformity, our national life would be stagnant. We are glad to think we shall never achieve that uniformity which is the dream of commonplace minds and we imagine that many who saw The Big House felt a liberating thrill at the last outburst of Kate Alcock.²⁹

      The Irish Statesman had been revived in 1923, when Æ accepted the editorship at the request of Sir Horace Plunkett who was keen that the new state should have a journalistic organ of a high literary and intellectual calibre to act as a leaven in its life. And for the rest of the decade Russell showed that Plunkett had chosen his editor wisely, for the Statesman proved to be one of the most remarkable cultural organs modern Ireland has known – humane, politically engaged, and broadly literate. In its early years the periodical threw its weight behind the Cosgrave administration, berating the Republicans who still hoped that the Treaty might be dismantled, for their obdurate fantasizing. Almost from the beginning, however, the Statesman was alert to those aspects of Irish intellectual and cultural life that tended to national exclusivism, xenophobia, and cultural imposition. From the first Æ was determined that Irish life should be open to diverse influences from abroad: Ireland should be attentive to contemporary historical developments. Writing in November 1923 on “National Culture”, he declared:

      We say we cannot merely out of Irish traditions find solutions to all our modern problems. It is no use reading Wolfe Tone or John Mitchel or Thomas Davis in the belief that they had a clairvoyance which pierced into our times with their complexities, or that by going back to Gaelic Ireland we shall find images upon which we can build anew. We shall find much inspiration and beauty in our own past but we have to ransack world literature, world history, world science and study our national contemporaries and graft what we learn into our own national tradition, if we are not to fade out of the list of civilized nations.³⁰

      Accordingly, throughout the 1920s Æ filled the columns of his periodical with international as well as national news and comment, with reviews of most of the major writers writing in the English language, with comparisons of Ireland with such countries as Sweden and Denmark, allowing a sense to emerge of Ireland as one small country among many in an effort to counteract what he felt was a prevailing national narcissism. Æ waged strenuous war against the Irish Irelanders’ conception of Gaelic civilization with the Irish language as the matrix of Irish life. He preferred a vision of the national synthesis, believing that the majority of the Irish people were culturally mixed, whatever the polemicist might wish. He certainly approved “the determination to give every Irish child access to the language in which is locked up the history of their race for two thousand years,”³¹ but he objected both to “the precise methods by which Irish youth is being rushed back into the Gaelic world”³² and to the exclusive dogmas of Irish Ireland. “We do not believe,” he wrote, “that the Irish people will ever allow their knowledge of English to lapse.”³³ Instead of the Irish Irelanders’ vision of an absorbent Gaelic reality, Æ vigorously preached a doctrine of national synthesis in which no ethnic group is predominant, no culture the assimilative one. Ireland is a fertile creation of the historic fusion of races, culture, and language.

      We wish the Irish mind to develop to the utmost of which it is capable, and we have always believed that the people now inhabiting Ireland, a new race made up of Gael, Dane, Norman and Saxon, has infinitely greater intellectual possibilities in it than the old race which existed before the stranger came. The union of races has brought a more complex mentality. We can no more get rid of these new elements in our blood and culture than we can get rid of the Gaelic blood.³⁴

      Crucial to the force of Æ’s argument here is the distinctiveness and distinction of Anglo-Ireland’s contribution to Irish civilization, and it is to this that he frequently turns in his columns, opening them also to writers and critics who could extol the Irish quality of such figures as Swift, Burke, and Berkeley, highlighting too the remarkable achievements of the Anglo-Irish Literary Revival of the preceding four decades. Anglo-Ireland, through its openness to fertilizing ideas from abroad was, and would remain, vital to Irish cultural health. It could fill a crucial social and cultural role, even though its political power was no more. Ireland, he argues,

      …has