Inventing Ireland (30 page)

It has become fashionable to portray the rebels as Catholic militants, because of the use of Easter symbolism. However, this is to read into their texts and actions a sectarianism which emerged only some time later, after the foundation of the Free State. The poetic imagery employed by Pearse and Plunkett was that of a generalized
mystical Christianity rather than something specifically Catholic in overtone. In many ways, it took its cue from the Protestant notion of the "life-task" which informed so much of the writing by soldiers of imperial Britain in the Great War. "We cannot but be thankful that we were chosen, and not another generation, to do this work and pay this price"
³³
was a refrain on the lips of the young volunteers who stood in line at recruiting offices with all the innocence of youths awaiting a great cricket match: and it was also the dominant idea of the Easter rebels. Such an attitude was possible only to a generation which had no firsthand experience of modern warfare with its mass graves.

Though British soldier-poets would soon know the hard realities and write anthems for doomed youth led to slaughter by callous age, the Irish case was different: the rebellion was short, its leaders (apart from de Valera) were shot, and so there was time for them to be glamorized in the long lull before the guerrilla war of independence began. Instead of a fearful revolution linked in the popular mind to a terror that devoured the revolutionary children, the Irish case was invoked by Pearse as an example of children devouring their own mother:

Mise Éire
Sine mé ná an Cailleach Béarra.

Mór mo ghlóire
Is mé do rug Cuchulain cróga.

Mór mo náire,
Mo chlann féin do dhíol a máthair.

Mise Éire
Uaigní mé ná an Cailleach Béarra.

I am
Ireland
I am older than the old Woman of Beare.

Great my glory
I that bore Cuchulain the valiant.

Great my shame.
My own children that sold their mother.

I am Ireland.
I am older than the Old Woman of Beare.
³⁴

It was the death of the rebels, rather than that of their enemies, which would make a right rose tree, as Yeats retold:

"But where can we draw water",
Said Pearse to Connolly,
"When all the wells are parched away?
O plain as plain can be
There's nothing but our own red blood
Can make a right Rose Tree".
³⁵

The imagery here is of the Liberty Tree, more Protestant than Catholic, with its roots in radical millenarian sects; and the notion that republican revolt is simply the political application of Protestant principles found sanction in the demeanour of the rebels. In the face of ecclesiastical condemnation, many simply bypassed the mandatory consultation with their confessors before rising: hence the prolonged sessions within the Post Office during which Pearse, Plunkett and Desmond FitzGerald filled lulls in combat with complex theological justifications of what they had done.
³⁶
(The recital of rosaries might also be seen as a way of repudiating those ecclesiastics who said that the rebels were no longer Catholics.) Pearse was a prototype of the revolutionary ascetic who renounces love, family ties and all sensual gratification: and it is this power over himself which gives the ascetic authority over others:

Fornocht a chonac thú,
a áille na háille,
is dhallas mo shúil
ar eagla go stánfainn.

Chualas do cheol,
a bhinne na binne,
is dhúnas mo chluas
ar eagla go gclisfinn.

Bhlaiseas do bhéal,
a mhilse na milse,
is chruas mo chroí
ar eagla mo mhillte.

Dhallas mo shúil,
is mo chluas do dhúnas;
chruas mo chroí
is mo mhian do mhúchas.

Thugas mo chúl
ar an aisling a chumas,
is ar an ród seo romham
m'aghaidh do thugas.

Thugas mo ghnúis
ar an ród seo romham,
ar an ngníomh a chím,
is ar an mbás a gheobhad.

Naked I saw thee,
O beauty of beauty,
And I blinded my eyes
For fear I should fail.

I heard thy music,
O melody of melody,
And I closed my ears
For fear I should falter.

I tasted thy mouth,
O sweetness of sweetness,
And I hardened my heart
And I smothered my desire.

I turned my back
On the vision I had shaped
And to this road before me
I turned my face.

I have turned my face
To this road before me,
To the deed that I see
And the death I shall die.
³⁷

In the
aisling
poems the gallant liberated the captive woman: in this instance, however, the hero-poet turns away from her. Like Plunkett, he will paradoxically liberate her only by dying,
to
prove his "excess of love" (a phrase Pearse actually used, and which was repeated with an implication of moral accusation against the rebels in "Easter 1916"). Such cold, marmoreal love is all that is possible to an ascetic who holds out to his followers something even better than victory – salvation. Pearse took Irish asceticism out of the monasteries and made it active in the political world: and his followers were repeatedly told that they were the elect, chosen for this redemptive task. The "unprecedented inner loneliness" which assails all who wait for signs of divine election was endured by the rebel leaders in their theological debates.
³⁸
Pearse, Plunkett, FitzGerald (and countless others, no doubt) were fast becoming their own priests.

None of this should seem in the least surprising. Modern
revolutions have often been carried out by intellectuals who transmute the images and ideas of
Christianity into a secular code.
Marxism, insofar as it was a state religion, achieved much: but as a scientific theory of society, it would never have gone far. When Pearse called the people "its own Messiah", he was simply repeating
Rousseau's insistence that "the voice of the people is, in fact, the voice of God".
³⁹
What made Pearse and his comrades rather different from other modern revolutionaries was that, in their utterances, the religious rhetoric was never occluded or buried, but remained visible and audible on the textual surface.

It will never be fully clear whether the resort to such language by insurrectionists is sincere or tactical: each case must be weighed on its merits. Christian imagery certainly helped to reassure hesitant well-wishers of the morality of the Irish rebels' actions: and, yet again, it allowed the materially-subordinate culture of Ireland to express its conviction of its spiritual superiority to England. Most of all, however, it permitted the rebels to embody the unknown in a language which had a high voltage for most Irish people, especially for the poor. Conservative clericalist intellectuals were not slow to denounce such usage as blasphemous and distressing to ordinary Christians. The lawyer
J. J. Horgan bluntly declared that the Rising was a sin and Pearse a heretic.
⁴⁰
Yet what Pearse did was no different from what had been done by men like Yeats and Synge: he moved from faith in "the kingdom of God" to faith in "the kingdom of Ireland", employing the language of the former to launch his crusade for the latter. In effect, he equated patriotism with holiness. The revisionist historian and Jesuit,
Francis Shaw, chose the fiftieth anniversary of the Rising to remark that "objectively this equation of the patriot with Christ is in conflict with the whole Christian tradition, and, indeed, with the explicit teaching of Christ".
⁴¹
It may indeed conflict with orthodox Catholicism: that, however, is not to say that it conflicts with Christianity as such, and many Protestant sects would have perfectly understood Pearse's equation of "the people labouring, scourged, crowned with thorns, agonizing and dying, to rise again immortal and impassable"
⁴²
with the mystical body of Christ. If there is any substantive difference between the English revolutionaries of 1640 and the Irish insurgents of 1916, it is merely this: the English relied mainly on the
Old Testament for their language, and the Irish on the New.

What troubled Hogan and Father Shaw in the 1916 writings was their unapologetic invocation of Wolfe Tone and, by extension, the "godless" anti-Catholic rebels of the
French Revolution. Father Shaw, citing
clerical law, objected to Pearse's description of the Jacobin Tone
as a prophet. There may indeed have been a calculated snub to ecclesiastical authority when Pearse wrote of being "rebaptized in the Fenian faith", an organization which was itself under interdiction by the Catholic church. However, most modern movements rapidly develop what has been called "a secular equivalent of the church", often the primary system of education in decolonizing states, "imbued with revolutionary and republican principles and content, and conducted by the secular equivalent of the priesthood",
⁴³
i.e., teachers like Pearse.

Going even further back in history, a study of the art of the French Revolution would demonstrate a set of effects similar to those achieved by Pearse.
David's famous painting of "Marat Murdered in his Bath" explicitly linked the image to that of Christ in a
Pietà,
with the implication that the new martyr could fittingly replace the old.
⁴⁴
There are two ways of viewing this manoeuvre. It might be seen as an attempt to extend and update a vibrant Christian tradition, to take a somewhat jaded form and animate it with real contemporary feeling; or it could be viewed as a subversive tactic, which converted the preceding Christian cult into an echo or parody of the more urgent and authentic contemporary image. With his synthesizing mind, Pearse saw an unbroken continuity from Cuchulain through Christ to Tone, and he would surely have preferred the first explanation, but there may have been among his comrades some – Connolly and
MacDiarmada spring to mind – who favoured the second. The former usage could have been defended as retrieving Christian language from recent debased applications (as when English bishops blessed guns that went off to fight imperial wars); the latter might be seen as discrediting it entirely, once the latent content had emerged. The phase of self-invention followed hard upon the antiquarian phase, as the latent content of the revolution (a welfare state, a native republic) emerged from beneath its manifest symbols (Cuchulain,
Jesus Christ).

The Edmund Burke who regarded revolution as a "dramatic performance" and "stage
effect"
⁴⁵
would have had little difficulty in making such a separation. Nor would he have been overly surprised at the difficulty which many students of 1916 have in separating the event from its mesh of defining texts. Many literary works, especially plays, had far greater an
influence on the Rising than the event itself had on those like Sean O'Casey who came to write of it afterwards. There is a real sense in which
The Plough and the Stars
(1926) derives more from
On Baile's Strand
(1903, 1906) than from the Dublin streets: the notorious scene where Pearse's speechifying is juxtaposed against the
prostitute Rosie Redmond plying her trade in a pub seems a deliberate reworking of Yeats's play, in which a posturing Cuchulain, at war with the waves, proves utterly irrelevant to the needs of a hungry fool and a blind beggar. But, no sooner has that been said than one is reminded that
On Baile's Strand
may have had far more effect on the Rising itself: after all, its scene where the proletarians mimic the antics of a self-defeating royalty seems an anticipatory version of the revolution (as well as a clear borrowing of the by-play of Hal and Falstaff in Shakespeare's
Henriad
). What is at issue here is a dialectical tension between an action and its representation, a tension most wittily captured in lines from a recent novel of the Northern Ireland conflict:

"But it is not like 1916".
"It wasn't like 1916 in 1916".
There was a long silence.
⁴⁶

The whole event has been remorselessly textualized: for it – more than any of its individual protagonists – became an instantaneous martyr to literature.

That process was foretold by Yeats in his poem
"Easter 1916", which brought his waverings in the role of national bard to crisis-point. It enacts the quarrel within his own mind between his public, textual duty (to name and praise the warrior dead) and his more personal urge (to question the wisdom of their sacrifice). The poem speaks, correspondingly, with two voices, and sometimes enacts in single phrases ("terrible beauty") their contestation. The sanction for the first voice from bardic tradition was strong: but the force of the second was becoming more apparent to Yeats who increasingly defined freedom in terms of self-expression. He was abandoning the rather programmatic nationalism of his youth for a more personal version of Irish identity.

Now young men had re-enacted Cuchulain's sacrifice in Dublin's streets and Yeats felt compelled to confront his growing scruples about such heroism. The power of his poem derives from the honesty with which he debates the issue, in the process postponing until the very last moment his dutiful naming of the dead warriors: this had been, of course, the practice of bards after a battle, in which they invariably claimed that the land had been redeemed by the sacrifice. Yeats's entire lyric is a sequence of strategies for delaying such naming: and the expectations deliberately aroused by the tide, which suggests unqualified encomium, are sharply contested, and disappointed, and then finally honoured in the text.

The "them" of the opening line are not identified, being nameless butts of past Yeatsian jokes who inhabited with this poet a world of casual comedy, where motley was the sign of a hopeless national buffoonery. The constipated repetition of "polite meaningless words" evokes a place seemingly incapable of change, of comic characters who, in Aristotelian terms, must go on repeating the same mechanical errors. However, these unpromising souls do manage to rise to the mythical out of their matter-of-fact beginnings, achieving the tragic transformation of pity and terror:

All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
⁴⁷

What is evoked is the moment when the fragmented comic world of individuals at cross purposes is replaced by a lyric solidarity of tragic oneness, and individual attributes are subsumed into myth. "The persons on the stage, let us say, greaten", observes Yeats in an essay on the tragic theatre, "till they are humanity itself".
⁴⁸