Inventing Ireland (29 page)

The challenge of using the known to hint at the unknowable would eventually strike Yeats, the most articulate of all the poets of the nineties, as the artistic problem posed by revolution. It is the question broached in his play
The
Resurrection
: "What if there is always something that lies outside knowledge, outside order? What if at the moment when knowledge and order seem complete that something appears?"
¹⁹
That question, or a version of it, is embedded in many of Yeats's most visionary poems and plays: he is at his bravest and most vulnerable whenever he seeks to welcome the "rough beast" of the unknowable future, without recourse to the props of the past for help or support.

The Easter rebels are sometimes depicted as martyrs to a text like
Cathleen ní Houlihan,
but rather than reduce the living to a dead textuality, Yeats at his most daring asserts the power of texts to come to life. As a poet, he invents an ideal Ireland in his imagination, falls deeply in love with its form and proceeds to breathe it, Pygmalion-like, into being. It is hard, even now, to do full justice to the audacity of that enterprise.

The odds against it were massive.
Karl Marx had complained of the lamentable tendency of persons on the brink of some innovation to reduce history to costume drama by modelling themselves on some ancient Roman or
Greek analogy, with the result that ghosts invariably appeared and stole their revolution. This was the mistake of all previous uprisings: to have presented themselves as
revivals,
so that the gesture of revolt could not be seen as such. Oscar Wildes theatre, as has been seen, had suggested that the self was plastic and that it could show a people how to refuse their assigned place and instead assume a better one. Its ultimate lesson, however, was that the imitation of any model, no matter how exalted, was slavery: the real challenge was to create a new, unprecedented self. One historian of culture has stated the problem very well:

Rebellions in
moeurs,
in manners broadly conceived, fail because they are insufficiently radical in terms of culture. It is still the creation of a believable personality which is the object of a cultural revolt, and, as such, the revolt is still enchained to the bourgeois culture it seeks to overturn.
²⁰

The adoption of a pose was one step: what the second was might soon become more clear. The first stage demanded the violation of propricties
and the wearing of exotic clothes, but the second would move beyond that reactive affectation to an account of how a renovated consciousness might live. Such freedom had no precedent, except perhaps in the
Thermidorean first years of revolutionary France, where the streets "were to be places without masks" and where "liberty was no longer expressed concretely in uniforms: now there appeared an idea of liberty in dress which would give the body free movement". In the century after Thermidor, that barely-glimpsed freedom had been lost, but the experimental
theatre of the 1890s, led by Wilde and Yeats, "created an expression for the body that went beyond the terms of deviance and conformity" and which contrasted utterly with the restrictive costume of the streets. "People turned toward the theatre to solve the problematics of the street", writes
Richard Sennett, "to find images of spontaneity".
²¹
Ordinary people, having lost belief in their own expressive powers, turned to artists and actors to do what they could not, and to teach them accordingly how to repossess their own emotions.

Whereas O'Connell's rapport with the people had offered a model for artists to emulate, now the artists were to be heroic exemplars for the politicians: but this was to involve no slavish imitation of external qualities. Yeats sought not to inspire imitation in others, preferring to teach them to become themselves: "we move others not because we have understood or thought about those others, but because all life has the same root".
²²
He saw that every Irish life was a ruin among whose debris might be discovered what this or that person ought to have been. His plays do not tell onlookers to be like Cuchulain, but to invent themselves: "The greatest art symbolizes not those things that we have observed so much as those things that we have experienced, and when the imaginary saint or lover or hero moves us most deeply, it is the moment when he awakens within us for an instant our own heroism, our own sanctity, our own desire".
²³

This was exactly the achievement of the 1916 rebels, who staged the Rising as street theatre and were justly celebrated in metaphors of drama by Yeats. All the mirrors for magistrates of ancient England had taught that "to be fit to govern others we must be able to govern ourselves": and the rebels had done just that. During Easter Week's performance, they were enabled both to show feeling and to control it: and so, in the eyes of their audience, both Irish and international, they had literally governed themselves. This ultimately invested them with a power far greater than their power to shock. Yeats had always equated heroism with self-conquest, that ability of great ones under pressure to
express some emotions while battening down still others held in reserve. This was the same tragic dignity admired in the rebel leaders by the English officer who presided over their execution. By such example, these leaders and their men urged all Ireland to do likewise, to conquer and so to express selves, to recover the literal meaning of the words
sinn féin.

If there was an element of play-acting involved in the Rising, men that is best understood in existential terms. "As soon as man conceives himself free, and determines to use that freedom", wrote Jean-Paul Sartre decades later, "men his work takes on the character of play".
²⁴
The rebels' play was staged to gather an Irish audience and challenge an English one. In that sense, the Rising was a continuation of what had begun in the national theatre, which had among its audience "almost everybody who was making opinion in Ireland".
²⁵
The early plays of the Abbey Theatre had taught that the conditions of life are open: the theatre can indeed be a place frequented by the "low" as they study alternative possibilities for themselves, including ways in which they might usurp their masters. Though it seemed to conspire with carni-valesque disorder, the playhouse also provided the necessary antidote, for it encouraged a randomly-gathered crowd to sense its growing, cohesive power. Yeats often liked to quote Victor Hugo: "in the theatre a mob becomes a people". Indeed, the theory of tragedy propounded by Yeats – as the moment when casual differences between individuals are put aside for a communal solidarity of feeling – well captures that moment. So it was fitting that the printing press on which the Proclamation of the Republic was done should have been hidden in the Abbey Theatre. Many of the Risings leaders had been initiated in theatrical methods by the Abbey: no previous Irish insurrection had been mounted in such avowedly theatrical terms. One of the first to fall was
Seán Connolly, an actor with the company whom Yeats would recall in a late poem:

Come gather round me, players all:
Come praise Nineteen-Sixteen,
Those from the pit and gallery
Or from the painted scene
That fought in the Post Office
Or round the City Hall,
Praise every man that came again,
Praise every man that fell.

From mountain to mountain ride the fierce horsemen.

Who was the first man shot that day?
The player Connolly.
Close to the City Hall he died;
Carriage and voice had he;
He lacked those years that go with skill,
But later might have been
A famous, a brilliant figure
Before the painted scene.

From mountain to mountain ride the fierce horsemen.
²⁶

Every
man and woman had been assigned a part in life: for Yeats, the question was not whether it was a good or bad one – rather it was whether he or she played it well. The actor could choose to resign the part, or to improvise as best he could in the absence of a clear set of instructions: however creative that improvisation, it would be based on a life-script appropriate to the actor's time and condition. Yeats, like Pearse, believed that each
generation was set its own task and that theirs must fulfil a mission to renovate Irish consciousness. This destiny weighed all the more heavily on men and women who were still young when the century turned. To have embarked on life as the twentieth century began must have filled them with a sense of a divinely-ordained task. Pearse's own philosophy of Irish history was cyclical: the 1916 Proclamation noted that six times in the previous three centuries national rights had been asserted in arms. Some generations had surpassed others and carried out their life-task, but a generation which shirked the task would condemn itself to a shameful old age.

This complex of ideas – close enough to those propagated by
Ortega Y Gasset in Spain at that period
²⁷
– reflected a sharpened notion of
generation,
which emerged among European intellectuals after the turn of the century. This was partly a result of Freud's influential Oedipai theories, and even more a consequence of the pace of social change which was leaving the old and young no common ground on which to meet. Writers no longer seemed to address society as a whole: instead they fastened onto immediate contemporaries. It would be hard to find a better explanation of the styles of address adopted by Pearse, who repeatedly spoke to and for "this generation", men and women in their twenties and thirties who had been to school in the Gaelic League. Left all but leaderless after the fall of Parnell, that generation had no choice
but to father itself. It set out to define a new code, in the knowledge that if it did not achieve freedom, it would at least have provided its basis, and have left to successors a philosophy and a set of actions against which the next generation could define itself. Only if such were not done could the men and women of 1916 be deemed to have failed.

Such a view of history, though often denounced as fatalistic has much in common with the Marxist definition of freedom as the conscious recognition of necessity, and it was dramatized, with his usual brilliance, by Yeats in
The
Dreaming of the Bones.
Here, a rebel soldier escapes from the Post Office in 1916 and flees to the west, where he encounters the ghosts of Diarmuid and Dervorgilla who, it is alleged, brought the Norman occupiers to Ireland. They wish to consummate their illicit love in a kiss. Unfortunately, they cannot until they are forgiven by the soldier, and this is something which (despite the wishes of the audience) he cannot do. They are dead, of course, and he is living: though he might wish to set their troubled spirits free, he must accept his appointed part. There is no freedom but the freedom to weave the cloth of necessity unfolded by the musicians (the real protagonists) at the outset.
²⁸

Men may make their own histories, said Marx, but not under the circumstances which they might ideally have chosen: instead, they are confronted with the tradition of dead generations which weighs like a nightmare upon the brain of the living. How this works is interesting: when a crisis becomes absolute and a desperate man is compelled to choose the unknown, his act can never be his alone, for "it takes place in circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past".
²⁹
The new act joins itself to the ghostly event: and the actors discover that their stage is filled with the spirits of buried men and dead heroes. These spectral appearances are conjured out of the anxieties which attend all acts of innovation: they offer themselves as known vessels into which the unknown quantities of the future may be poured. For it is a fact that every disruption of routine living for the sake of a new ideal is traumatic: "every definite break with the past at once invites others and increases the strain upon everybody".
³⁰
To allay the fear of the unknown, even the most innovative may have to present it as the restoration of some past glory. As the French businessmen of 1789 portrayed themselves in the role of ancient Romans recovering democratic rights, so Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side to validate his ideal of a welfare state which would, so said the
Proclamation, "cherish all the children of the nation equally". In reading out the Proclamation, as he stood before the Ionic pillars of the Post Office, to
"a few thin, perfunctory cheers",
³¹
Pearse was knowingly enforcing the classical analogies. He saw that in a traditionalist society, it is vitally necessary to gift-wrap the gospel of the future in the packaging of the past. This Connolly also did when he presented socialism as a return to the Celtic system whereby a chief held land in the common name of all the people. Joyce adopted a similar tactic when he concealed the subversive narrative of
Ulysses
beneath the cover of one of Europe's oldest stories,
The
Odyssey.

This is a further justification of the theatricality of the Easter rebellion: alas, it was ill-understood at the time, even by some of its more pragmatically-minded participants. Complaining that the events had "the air of a Greek tragedy", Michael Collins sourly added: "I do not think the Rising week was an appropriate time for the issue of memoranda couched in poetic phrases, nor of actions worked out in a similar fashion".
³²
Doubtless, as a volunteer, he was unimpressed by the choice of the Post Office as a military centre, since it left soldiers like himself exposed on all sides. As an act of dramatic symbolism, however, it was an inspired choice, since it cut across the main street of the capital city, paralyzing communications and forcing everyone to take notice. The selection of Easter Monday – when most British soldiers were on furlough at Fairyhouse Races – was not just a sound tactic, but another brilliant symbolization, since it reinforced Pearse's idea of the
cyclical nature of history. Easter brought renewal, spring-time, new life to a dead landscape: and so it helped to justify and explain all previous abortive uprisings, for it wove them into a wider narrative, a myth of fall, death and glorious redemption.