The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/Dublin Letter

by William Kirkpatrick Magee

DUBLIN LETTER

July, 1923

I SOMETIMES think that it is very nice of American readers to be interested in Irish literature. The volume of that literature is not great, especially when we do not reckon some big-selling Irish authors as contributors to it. If mingled with a group of the writers of other nations, Irish writers would not at once be recognized by their towering stature and noble appearance. Nevertheless, Mr Yeats, A. E., Mr James Stephens, Mr Colum, even Mr Joyce, and some others, if their countenances be closely scrutinized, betray a certain proud consciousness of belonging to a secret order, with incommunicable beliefs and traditions. A general air of distinction may be claimed for Irish literature, so consciously maintained that when any of its writers, however fresh and vigorous, shows signs of popularity on railway book-stalls, he begins to lose caste and ceases to be spoken of in that inner circle from which proceeds his true reward of recognition. An Irish R. L. Stevenson, for example, or Sir James Barrie, would have been of little account in Ireland. And the strong point of Irish literature has hitherto been that this distinction was not due to the jealousy of a small clique, such as is found in other literary centres, but to the exacting requirement of the Irish public itself that Irish authors should be true and disinterested interpreters of Irish nationality. But this was perhaps only while literature was the outlet to which Irish nationality was restricted for its manifestation. O fortunati nimium, sua si bona norint! What would the poets and artists of other lands not give to belong to a country in which literature and art are the instrument of national expression? It is true that this privileged status of the poet in Ireland rested on the supposition of a grievous political wrong, namely the subordination of the political interests of Ireland to those of Great Britain; just as the awful dignity of the Hebrew prophets and poets rested on the fact of expatriation and oppression. But this was in itself a powerful advantage, inasmuch as the very squalors of Irish politics were redeemed under the strong light—one might almost say the lime-light—of idealism which irradiated them, and attracted the sympathetic attention of all the world. What the future held for a literature so circumstanced it would now be idle to speculate. History presents one illustrous instance of a sacred symbolism founded on the historical fact of expatriation and oppression. Would Irish literature thus have become symbolic and in a manner sacred? Such a development was certainly not uncongenial to the literary speculations of A. E. and Mr W. B. Yeats, who have more than once dwelt on the saying that it is the problem of literature to produce a sacred book. As it turned out, however, Mr Yeats and A. E. had not yet more than reached middle age when minatory murmurs began to be heard in that new Ireland which had begun to tread their generation down. The disturbances in the Abbey Theatre during the first performances of Synge's Playboy of the Western World were a warning of the arrival of a new generation which rejected symbolism, both in politics and poetry; and in the Easter week of 1916, a little band of poets, armed with guns, inaugurated that movement for the immediate realization of all ideals which has since been crowned with a success almost disconcerting to those who have inherited responsibility for it.

Irish literature, then, appears to have forfeited the enjoyment of those conditions in which it might have dreamed of producing a sacred book—unless, indeed, it has inadvertently produced one in Mr Joyce's Ulysses. The ironic mood in which that work is conceived might seem a little unholy, but for the matter of that, irony is now the very accent of prophecy. Mr Joyce's irony, however—unlike that of the humorous hot-gospellers Shaw and Chesterton—conveys no prophetic burthen: the coin of his wit has the same stamp on both sides. Even his master Rabelais ranks among the "pioneers of education," but Mr Joyce has achieved a work so purged of all philanthropic intention and so purely Mephistophelean, that one may almost say of it that it has every characteristic of a masterpiece except a raison d' être. Conflagration is the order of the day in Ireland; and perhaps Mr Joyce, after all, has some spiritual kinship with the late destroyer of our archives, Roderic O'Connor; for Ulysses is a bonfire, glorious while it lasts, of all the pious illusions of provincial and Catholic Ireland. . . . But I am by no means sure that it is the function of literature to produce a sacred book, or that any nation need envy the Hebrews those circumstances which gave to all their history a unique symbolic value. Ireland, at all events, is not the nation to make a martyr of itself.

Quite independently of its experiences as an oppressed nationality, however, mediaeval Ireland, or more correctly Gaeldom, did conceive one fruitful idea which might have led, if not to a sacred book, at least to the formulation in imaginative literature of a permanent human problem. This was the idea—which arose apparently by accident in the popular mind—of impersonating the spirit of paganism and the spirit of Christianity in the figures of Oisin and Saint Patrick, and of engaging them in dramatic dialogue. If Ireland, later on, had admitted the spirit of the Renaissance, we can hardly doubt that some literary or dramatic elaboration of this theme would have been attempted: it is one which might have attracted Marlowe or Calderon if they had heard of it. Or dare we compare the setting of this dialogue—which contains the rudiments of a profound philosophical inquiry—amid the wild adventures of the Fenians, with that of the sacred episode of the Mahābhārata, in which Arjuna and Krishna hold converse in the space between the hosts drawn up for battle? A. E. always insists that there is a likeness between the Hindu and the Irish mythologies, but I am afraid the Irish temperament was always "out for fun," and one shrinks from trying to conceive what would have become of the theme of the Bhagavad Gita in the world of Gaelic imagination. What could Krishna himself have thought of by way of reply to the old Gaelic hero?—

"O Patrick of the crooked crozier, who makest me that impertinent answer, thy crozier would be in atoms were Oscar present.

"Were my son Oscar and God hand to hand on Knock na-veen, if I saw my son down, it is then I would say that God was a strong man.

"How could it be that God and his clerics could be better men than Finn, the chief king of the Fenians, the generous one who was without blemish?"

In these dramatic dialogues it was clearly Oisin who had the good will of the Irish auditors, and the poets of the Celtic Renaissance are now even disposed to make Saint Patrick the burlesque figure. Probably the most notable attempt to treat the subject in terms of modern art and thought is a book which has just broken the silence of Irish literature, The Return of the Hero, by "Michael Ireland." The name of the author somehow sets one thinking of "Anatole France," and one is in fact reminded of Anatole France by certain characteristics of the book, as well as of Algernon Blackwood, Mark Twain, and the Bhagavad Gita: finally, however, one settles down to thinking of no one else but Mr James Stephens. A writer of the modern Irish school was bound to reverse the intention of the legend—in which it was understood that the future, both in this world and the next, belonged to Saint Patrick—and to make Oisin even dialectically the conqueror; and this was permissible, so long as the issue lay in dialectic. But one begins at last to find it a little unfair that while the Saint is restricted to the theological formulae of his own period, his antagonist is free to range far into the future, and to confound Saint Patrick with the oracles of Blake and Nietzsche. If the book is by Mr Stephens—I must not assume this—it seems almost regrettable that this debate was not left as an inconclusive episode in his rendering of the whole cycle of Irish mythology, and that he was tempted to convert it into a story, with an appropriate ending secured by magical transformations akin to those practised by Mr Algernon Blackwood.

When Irish literature, in Miltonic language, "reassembles its afflicted powers," it will find a good many gaps in its ranks: not so much that our poets, in any considerable number, have been executed, assassinated, or banished, as that a fell disillusionment has seized upon many Irishmen with respect to the realization of long-cherished ideals, and in particular the ideal of a Gaelic-speaking Ireland. Ireland being no longer a country in which it is permitted to dream dreams, but one in which it is pre-eminently necessary to circumvent British trade-competition by hard work, the Gaelic idealists, who really flourished best under provincial conditions, are looking for a way of escape, and some of them, if they are allowed to emigrate, may even nurse the old ideals in other lands. The legitimate outlet of this dissatisfaction will no doubt be in the formation of a constitutional party representing these ideals, and it remains to be seen whether this party will represent an Ireland which is still the main source of literature. Meanwhile that manner of life which seemed threatened with extinction by Sinn Fein appears likely enough to reassert itself and to continue under transformed conditions: the life of the "gentry," represented by a series of conscientious novelists from Miss Edgeworth to Miss Somerville. In certain districts of the West of England, in France, Italy, Germany, are gathered little groups of Anglo-Irish émigrés, most of them longing to come back, and already indeed beginning to do so. They are attracted back to Ireland, partly by patriotism, partly by a belief prevalent amongst them that Ireland is socially a conservative community.

We await a portent—the transformation of Irish literature. In 1913 Mr Yeats wrote a poem with the burden "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone," in which he was generally understood to take leave of Irish nationalism; but in 1916 Romantic Ireland had reasserted itself with a vengeance, and Mr Yeats published a kind of palinode with the refrain, "A terrible beauty is born!" Mr Yeats has not taken anything like A. E.'s share in bringing into being the Free State, but he has done what he could for it—and that is a good deal—by coming over to live in it and by serving in the Senate; and the other day he made a speech in which he urged the need of building up, in place of the old idealism, the "idealism of labour and of thought." Can we conceive Mr Yeats, like an Irish d'Annunzio, casting away his dreamer's cloak and chanting the songs of labour? Does a loftier destiny await Ireland than to be the dreamer amongst the nations? The intense Italian temperament, which reduces social and spiritual problems to clear alternatives, is certainly not ours. There is a dimness and indistinctness of outline in all our prospects, and we have perhaps secured the form of nationality before we have made quite sure of the reality.

John Eglinton