Inventing Ireland (21 page)

As a movement, the League was opposed to the antiquarianism of previous groups like the Gaelic Union, only six of whose members could speak Irish properly: it was, in fact, modern in its view of tradition as a yet-to-be-completed agenda, and in its insistence on combining ancient custom and contemporary method.

Some cynics accused Hyde of confusing Anglicization with modernization. Joyce's
Stephen Hero, noting the willingness of the Catholic clergy to support the League, said that the priests hoped to find in Irish a bulwark against modern ideas, keeping "the wolves of unbelief" at bay and the people frozen in a past of "implicit faith".
¹⁸
This was a rather sour response from a Joyce whose experience of the League had been fatally narrowed by his attendance at the Irish classes of Patrick Pearse. (Pearse in his youthful days found it impossible to praise Irish without virulent denunciations of English, an approach much less
ecumenical than Hyde's.) In the 1892 lecture, Hyde feared that people, ceasing to be Irish without becoming English, were falling into the vacuum between two admirable civilizations, as one nullified the other. His disgust was not caused by a baffling modernity or a difficult
hybridity, so much as by the anomalous English element in every self-defeating document of Irish nationalism. He pointed to "the illogical position of men who drop their own language to speak English, of men who translate their euphonious Irish names into English monosyllables, of men who read English books and know nothing about Gaelic literature, nevertheless protesting as a matter of sentiment that they hate the country which at every hand's turn they rush to imitate".
¹⁹

This was a subtle probing of Irish psychology: patriotic
Anglophobia it attributed not to a troublesome difference with England so much as an abject similarity, leading like poles to repel one another with scientific predictability. Anglophobia seemed most extreme in those areas of maximum deference to English ways, while in the
Gaeltacht
itself physical-force nationalism made little headway. Hyde was merciless on the mentality which "continues to apparently hate the English, and at the same time continues to imitate them". Since people absolutely refused to become English, he concluded, they might as well resolve to be Irish.

This analysis had many salutary effects. Most important, it was the signal for a rebirth of cultural and literary criticism. Before the end of the decade,
D. P. Moran could remark that "much the perpetual flow of ridicule and largely unreasonable denunciation of England was turned from its course and directed back – where it was badly wanted – upon Irishmen themselves".
²⁰
Moran went on: "From the great error that nationality is politics, a sea of corruption has sprung. Ireland was practically left unsubjected to wholesome native criticism, without which any collection of humanity will corrupt ... To find fault with your countryman was to play into the hands of England and act the traitor". For most of the previous century, a kind of national narcissism had pervaded debates: ever since O'Connell had told his followers that they were the finest
peasantry in the world, even constructive criticism had been treated as sacrilege. Such a high-minded allergy to critique has' been found in the early phases of most movements for cultural resistance – but this sentimentality had to be transcended. D. P. Moran suggested that an Ireland content to continue as a not-England would be indescribably boring: "Will a few soldiers dressed in green, and a republic, absolutely foreign to the genius of the Irish people, the
humiliation of England, a hundred thousand English corpses with Irish bullets or pikes through them, satisfy the instinct within us that says 'Thou shalt be Irish'?"
²¹
It was Irish strength, rather than English weakness, which would count in the end.

What shocked Hyde about contemporary England was the apparent ease with which its people had endured the loss of so many of their traditions for the sake of material advancement. For English folk traditions he had, like Yeats, much respect and tenderness. When he spoke of "this awful idea of complete Anglicization", the phrase, if taken literally, could only offend unionists: if it were taken as a reference to the pollution and greyness of an environment despoiled by unplanned industrialism, it might win many over. Hyde insisted that the English would not finally be to blame if the Irish decided to abort their own traditions: "what the battleaxe of the Dane, the sword of the Norman, the wile of the Saxon were unable to perform, we have accomplished ourselves".
²²
This was true in the sense that Irish declined in the nineteenth century only when large numbers of the people opted to learn English, as a prelude to emigration or to a more prosperous life at home. The
tally-stick, later to be cited by chauvinist historians as a weapon of British cultural terror, had actually been devised for the schoolroom by Irish people themselves, as Sir William Wilde (father of Oscar) observed with dismay in a Galway schoolhouse of the mid-century:

The man called the child to him, said nothing, but drawing form from its dress a little stick, commonly called a scoreen or tally, which was suspended by a string round the neck, put an additional notch in it with his pen-knife. Upon our enquiring into the cause of their proceeding, we were told that it was done to prevent the child speaking Irish; for every time he attempted to do so a new nick was put in his tally, and, when these amounted to a certain number, summary punishment was inflicted on him by the schoolmaster.
²³

Hyde sensed that a purely economic or political freedom would be hollow, if the country was by the time of its attainment "despoiled of the bricks of nationality". The listless condition of dozens of post-colonies in the twentieth century was astutely anticipated by Hyde: "just at the moment when the Celtic race is presumably about to largely recover possession of its own country, it finds itself deprived and stript of its Celtic characteristics, cut off from its past, yet scarcely in touch with its present".
²⁴
Equally familiar in the emergent states of Africa and Asia would be accounts of how young men and women were
found to blush with shame when overheard speaking their own language. As would happen in some of these societies too, many children were not even aware of the existence in their culture of two languages: in the Connacht known to Hyde, parents often spoke Irish only to children who answered in English only, and when Hyde asked some children "Nach labhrann tú Gaeilge?" (Don't you speak Irish?), the answer was "And isn't it Irish that I'm speaking?" This domestic situation was repeated in
Gaeltacht
classrooms where schoolteachers spoke only English to children who spoke only Irish: Hyde wondered if there was any other country in the world where schoolteachers taught children who could not understand them, and children learned from instructors whose language they could not really follow.
²⁵
There were many indeed.

His holistic method led Hyde to emphasize the intimate link between clothing and language. As Yeats could bewail the ways in which Irish sentiment looked ungainly in English garb, so Hyde regretted that men of the midland counties had grown "too proud" to wear homespun tweeds. The analysis anticipated by decades the strictures of
Antonio Gramsci and
John Berger on the crumpled, ill-fitting suits worn in photographs by peasants and labourers early this century: their vigorous actions simply spoiled the suits which were quite inappropriate to the lives they led, being designed for the sedentary administrators of the ruling class, but the suits signalled their acceptance of being "always, and recognizably to the classes above them, second-rate, clumsy, uncouth, defensive".
²⁶

The rhetorical guile of Hyde has been insufficiently recognized: the deanglicization lecture which began with an appeal to unionist-imperialists could nonetheless be brought to a climax with the Fenian trope of a call for a house-to-house visitation, "something – though with a very different purpose – analogous to the procedure that
James Stephens adopted throughout Ireland when he found her like a corpse on a dissecting table".
²⁷
Though he might steal some of these Phoenix fires and might use
"west-Britonizing" as a term of jocular abuse, Hyde was no narrow-gauge nationalist: for he encouraged the "use of Anglo-Irish literature instead of English books, especially instead of English periodicals. We must set our face firmly against penny dreadfuls, shilling shockers, and, still more, the garbage of vulgar weeklies like
Bow Bells
and the
Police Intelligence".
This diagnosis has more in common with the future strictures of
F. R. Leavis or, for that matter,
Theodor Adorno, than might at first seem the case. The alleged anti-modern element in Irish revivalism, of which revisionist historians have
made so much, turns out on inspection to be a prophetic critique of
mass-culture and of the vulgarization of popular taste. The Gaelic League, acting on Hyde's precepts, became in effect one of the earliest examples of a
Workers' Education Movement, at a time of limited opportunity for many. It was also, in some respects, a precursor of the movement for
multiculturalism which, in later decades, would seek to revise and expand syllabi, with the introduction of subaltern cultures and oral literatures. In other respects, of course, its leaders were dismissive of many popular publications and magazines which current exponents of
Cultural Studies find worthy of attention.

There were only six
books in print in Irish at the founding of the League in 1893, and most Irish speakers in the countryside were still illiterate. Yet much was achieved very rapidly: in one year alone, according to Yeats, the League sold 50,000 textbooks.
²⁸
Thousands registered in language classes, and, in a decade which saw
Fabian cyclists and suffragists take to the countryside for summer schools, the League was an interesting Irish version
of
the phenomenon. A civil rights agitation was mounted. Letters and parcels were addressed in Irish, much to the confusion of the postal authorities; and when a Donegal trader was prosecuted for inscribing his name in Irish on his wagon, he was defended in court by the young Patrick Pearse (his only appearance as a barrister, in what he called the ignoblest of professions).

Questions were raised in the House of Commons about such issues, but the crucial controversy arose in 1899, when evidence was taken by the Committee of Intermediate Education on whether or not it should ratify Irish as a valid school subject. The professors of Trinity College Dublin had taken fright at the Leagues success and warned
Dublin Castle that it was a movement infiltrated by "separatists". Now they made a massive effort to remove Irish altogether from the secondary school system.
John Pentland Mahaffy, a former tutor of Oscar Wilde and a Professor of Ancient History at Trinity, told the committee that, although it was sometimes useful to a man fishing for salmon or shooting game, it would be an unconscionable waste of time to teach it in schools, since it was "almost impossible to get hold of a text in Irish which is not religious or that is not silly or indecent".
²⁹
Quite reasonably, Hyde asked how Mahaffy, a man ignorant of the Irish language, could make such sweeping claims: and he adduced evidence from a range of Celtic scholars to establish the value and scope of ancient Irish literature. Citations came from
Windisch in Leipzig,
Zimmer in Greifswald, Stern in Berlin, Meyer in Liverpool, Pedersen in Copenhagen, Dottin in Rennes; and
York Powell of Oxford, a
historian, wrote of the advantages to children of
bilingualism. At this point in the controversy, Mahaffy revealed the source of his claims:
Robert Atkinson, the Professor of Old Irish at Trinity who – in a remarkable anticipation of the line taken by prosecuting counsel in the 1960 trial of
Lady Chatterley's Lover –
declared that many Irish-language texts were unfit to have in the house alongside his daughters: if perused, they might cause a shock from which the young ladies might not recover for the rest of their lives.

Atkinson testified that the study of
Diarmuid and Gráinne,
then on the Intermediate course, was quite unsuitable for children: and he attacked one of Hyde's published stories as the doings of a common lout who never washed. He went on – with a tactic which would also be used by conservative academics in many emerging states – to denounce the native language for its alleged lack of a standard
grammar and spelling. All in all, his evidence was a graphic illustration of the covert hatred among many exponents of Celticism for the peoples whose study made their professional reputations. Stung by Atkinson's strictures on grammar and syntax,
Fr. Peter O'Leary embarked, in the League's weekly paper
An Claidheamh Soluis
(The Sword of Light), on a detailed examination of Atkinson's own treatment of the copula
is
in his scholarly edition of
Trí Biorghaoithe an Bháis,
which he found so faulty that a couplet soon spread across the land:

Atkinson of TCD
Doesn't know the verb
to be.

In later exposures, O'Leary showed that Atkinson's Irish was so shaky that "he had not the grasp of it that a gossoon in a Connemara bog has".
³⁰

For all its offence and inadvertent hilarity, this controversy was useful, for the battle with the Trinity dons brought public opinion solidly behind the
Gaelic League. Yeats played a leading part in this: in February 1900, he called upon members of parliament to use the old Parnellite methods of obstruction to insert the teaching of Irish into the Education Bill. He condemned Trinity College as provincial, "which the Literary Society is not, and the Gaelic League is not; we must fight against provincialism and die fighting".
³¹
In
Beltaine,
the theoretical journal of the
Irish Literary Theatre, the dramatist Edward Martyn wrote sardonically of "the efforts of certain persons and institutions whose aim seems to be to create in Ireland a sort of shabby England".
³²
By 1906, the League had secured the use of Irish in Gaeltacht schools,
as a subject in itself and, in addition, as the usual language of instruction, a campaign significantly assisted by the writings of J. M. Synge.
³³
By 1909, Irish had been made compulsory for matriculation at the
National University, just a year after Hyde's appointment to a professorship there.