Another ‘Poor Things’ is Possible by David Archibald
11th March 2024
HE is Paul and she IS Orlando: review of Paul Preciado’s ‘Orlando’ by Johnny Rodger
1st September 2024What has been the scope of bigotry, racism, oppression and prejudice? Owen Dudley Edwards telescopes a whole history of the entanglement of those evils with the struggle for freedom, justice and truth into a compassionate and humane reading (and most importantly, an Irish reading) of the cornering and silencing of Diane Abbott, who was the first ever black woman elected to the Westminster Parliament.
EX-HUMING THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
Dr Cornel West began one the finest series of Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh in our time with a graceful, melodic tribute to many of his predecessors, above all to William James’s sublimely fairminded performance eventuating in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1907), Dr West illuminating every name on which he paused. But in extending the scope of his pleasure and honour as oracle hosted by the University of Edinburgh he also paused on David Hume, recently degraded by his name’s removal from the Tower originally inflicted on George Square 1960-63 under the somewhat absentee Principalship of the Nobel Prizewinner and atomic scientist Sir Edward Appleton (himself commemorated by the even more repulsive Appleton Tower also perched on the eighteenth-century ruins of the Square). Dr West’s blackness radiated from his physique, from his intonation of jazz measurement of philosophy and theology to the cadences dear to audiences of preachers symbolised by Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and triumphing in the Inaugurals of Barack Obama. Fifty years ago the Hume Tower was renamed the Doom Tower in the columns of Student cartoons by Jonathan Wills when he and Gordon Brown were successive Rectors leading Revolution, but itself was originally an indelicate proclamation of academic ignorance since David Hume’s only honour from the University had been denial of a Chair. But however questionable the baptism, the self-seeking protest and resultant capitulation reducing the Tower to anonymity stands as insult to the genius added to injury to the environment.
Cornel West merely flickered the University’s blasphemies of protest and pusillanimity, far too graceful a guest to indict us for the shame obviously within our breasts. Like all else his oratorical work was supreme black evangelism, knowing our unspoken sins are framework within which he confronted and cleansed us. As Goldsmith said of Burke in ‘Retaliation’ he was born for the universe, but unlike Burke does not give up to party what is meant for mankind. He sends his audience forth to go tell it on the mountain and amidst all else reconciles the great folk hymn with James Baldwin’s tortured variations. His message on Hume was simple enough. Hume left much of extraordinary value for us to question including his perversely reactionary History. But instead of reducing him in silent censorship where he talked nonsense about slavery or profited by it, we must confront him in intellectual battle and slug it out. We are not here to censor or silence, in grievance or fear.
PALEFACES AND PALE PEOPLE
As an Irish Catholic in the USA I saw prejudice against non-whites where I and my compatriots and co-religionists walked unassailed while black faces drew hostility without opening their mouths. Our own alienation is old enough: we are the people first defined as ‘Beyond the Pale’. We discovered the manufacture, reportage and deployment of grievance were fitting revenge on our wealthier, more powerful, and more authoritarian oppressors, all the better when you can get money, power and moral superiority from it, the way an Irish witness might vanquish an English judge. ‘In your country’ snapped Mr Justice Darling a hundred years ago ‘what happens if a witness does not tell the truth?’ ‘Begor, me Lord’, said the witness, ‘I think his side usually wins.’
But do we always hold the right end of the stick in grievance-mongering? I remember as a Dublin boy around 1949 hearing Agatha Christie denounced for saying the Irish were liars. The passage proved to be in Sad Cypress (1940) when Nurse O’Brien is giving evidence and the judge gratuitously asks isn’t she Irish and don’t the Irish have vivid imaginations?, to which she indignantly replies that every word she has spoken is the truth. In fact, it is a characteristic Christie red herring, fixing the audience’s attention on grievance, injustice, or indictment, thus diverting attention from the evidence of the other nurse the actual murderer in the case for which the heroine is standing trial. But it is also fine observation satirising the social abuses of the day. Racial generalisations and calumnies were seriously propounded from UK judicial benches as though they were proven points of law scientifically docketing ‘national character’. The Common Serjeant, Sir F. A. Bosanquet, presiding over one trial declared that Yiddish was a language in which it was impossible to tell the truth.
Diane Abbott MP, a shrewd observer of common social prejudice, remarked that persons of visible colour probably encountered deeper and more blatant prejudice than do Irish, Jews, Catholics, Muslims &c. For this she suffered gross discrimination by Sir Keir Starmer who doesn’t seem to like black women and seems to think nobody else should like them either. Sir Keir has given first-class evidence showing the truth of the sociological observation for which he and his minions dishonoured Diane Abbott. Then the Right Hon. Jeremy Hunt complains that Sir Keir has dithered in determining the fate of Diane Abbott in place of immediate execution, as though he were a Venetian ambassador deploring Henry VIII’s procrastination in killing his latest wife.
STATUARY RAPE — WHICH SIDE ARE WE ON?
On 7 June 2020 the statue of the late seventeenth-century Bristol slavedealer and massive profiteer Edward Colston was thrown into Bristol Harbour whence the ships of his Royal African Company had made their way to the African coasts to kidnap inhabitants and market them in the Americas, overcrowding beyond limits of survival to increase the profit with the fittest for sale. The sculptor, John Cassidy, was, like myself, an Irish Catholic reared in North Leinster. He was trained and practiced in Manchester from 1883, commissioned there in 1895 by Enriquata — third wife and widow of Manchester’s first multi-millionaire the cotton magnate John Rylands — to create the Colston statue then being envisioned by Bristol worthies to pump up and prettify their invention of local tradition. The widow Rylands next commissioned a Cassidy statue of her late husband so that if nothing else the Colston creation proved an acceptable dress rehearsal. Her patronage (not too well supported by Bristol businessmen) had a logic in Rylands’s wealth having come from the slave-labour American cotton plantations originally built up from the African slave trade (carried on well into the nineteenth century after being made formally illegal — see George MacDonald Fraser’s invaluable novel Flash for Freedom). She also had been born a Catholic but had converted to her husband’s Congregationalism. Whether either of them knew it or not, the Royal African Company mushroomed in days of anti-Catholic persecution but proved a lucrative investment for Catholics presided over by the Duke of York and future king James II and VII, whose Atlantic knowhow in the 1660s had resulted in the English capture of New Netherlands and New Amsterdam to become New York and New York City: his crypto-Catholic brother King Charles II was a profiteering patron, and so was the cabinet minister Anthony Ashley Cooper first Earl of Shaftesbury, later the most unscrupulous and bloodthirsty anti-Catholic statesman of his time (Dryden’s ‘Achitophel’), also the most aware of the leading geopolitical possibilities of an English Atlantic. Colston in the monopolist Royal African Company from 1680 to 1692 rose to Deputy Governor. James was its nominal Governor whose ouster as King when the Dutch captured England in 1688 resulted in Colston’s transferring many shares to the new King William III with consequent benefits for himself. During Colston’s control some 84,000 Africans were enslaved, about 19.000 dying en route. After the Protestant triumph in 1688 the exiled Irish Catholic Jacobites became leading slave-shippers from Nantes and Bordeaux, with sideshows such as running Bonnie Prince Charlie to and from Scotland in 1745-46 (he still being a Catholic then). Colston as a resourceful if rapacious businessman was only developing century-old traditions. The Elizabethan Plymouth-born Admiral Sir John Hawkins, famous sidekick of Sir Francis Drake in the defence against the Spanish Armada, pioneered Atlantic slavery as thoroughly efficient business forcing his kidnap victims on the New World Spaniards. A Cornish tradition existed that Hawkins has been forced forever to sail his ship which pioneered the African slave trade, a more logical curse than that inflicted on Wagner’s Dutchman.
Before the UK forces in Dublin bombarded and demolished as much of Dublin as they could in Easter Week 1916, its place as the UK capital of Ireland had been firmly asserted by nineteenth-century statues proclaiming its subjugation to the empire whose sun was never permitted to set. After twentieth-century independence private enterprise against the surviving sculpture might claim national self-expression with small danger from the authorities. The removal of the slave-profiteer Colston’s statue was prompted by the police murder on 25 May 2020 of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The Floyd death inspired global liberation unequalled in human history clearing innumerable invisible barriers to non-white advancement, but Colston’s fate had its Irish precedents. A statue on the NE corner of St Stephen’s Green of the Irish nationalist leader and ultimate officer in French Revolutionary service Theobald Wolfe Tone was erected, demolished, and restored in 1971. Tone is one of the most likeable of all Irish historical heroes leaving hard-hitting and self-mocking memoirs, and dying under capture by the Irish/British authorities in 1798, but nobody in James Joyce’s town is immune from Dublin wit, and the statue initially destroyed by Ulster Protestant secret militants first surviving only in its boots was temporarily rebaptised as ‘Tonehenge’ or else as ‘the Wellington Monument’. The Tone memorial had been desecrated in retaliation for IRA murder campaigns in the 1970s, partly because the IRA itself continually claimed his legacy but sometimes found it easier to blow up Protestant statues in Dublin than to annihilate the Protestant population of Northern Ireland. The Colston removal had a genuine reality of its own: eradicating the thing from human sight meant that Bristol no longer faced the shrine of the city magnate enlarged by the exploitation and eradication of non-white peoples. Nelson’s Pillar blown up in Dublin in 1966 commemorated a brave if flamboyant sailor whose naval victories kept Napoleon’s troops from the UK, many of his fellow-victims in lower ranks from the Nile to Trafalgar being hungry Irish emigrants themselves. Around the same time, the IRA blew up the 1866 statue (erected in 1866) of the late Archibald Montgomerie 13th Earl of Eglinton and 1st of Wintoun (also in Stephen’s Green), a Tory Irish Viceroy in 1852 and 1858-59 whose overwhelming generosity with funds squeezed from taxpayer and tenantry delighted the greedy sycophants thronging his Court. It sat for a century meaningless to almost all who saw it. A student Rag in the mid-1950s deluged it in Orange, White and Green paint which immensely improved its aesthetics, but the authorities cleaned it in time for the IRA to destroy it. Eglinton had opposed the admission of Jews to Parliament, but thereby would have won the approval of the IRA’s recent ally Adolf Hitler.
THE DYNAMICS OF IRISH NATIONAL SANCTITY
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 1051 had noted Bristol as a port extensively trading with Ireland, Somerset and North Devon. St Patrick’s Confession (written 500 years earlier) is one of the most valuable slave narratives, disgracefully neglected by international historians of slavery and by civic celebrants of his Day alike. He was of Romanized origin but where exactly he was reared and kidnapped is unknown: modern scholarship now suggests Somerset or North Devon. Irish enslavement of Britons ranging over 700 years presumably played its part in the economic growth of Bristol: one can imagine early Bristol politicians assuring themselves of its importance.
Irish nationalism did play a great part in the struggle against slavery, with two of its greatest ideologues and icons at opposite poles: Daniel O’Connell and John Mitchel. Patrick was the foremost Irish evangelist against slavery as ferociously preached in his Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus (edited (2019) by Bishop Joseph Duffy). O’Connell was Patrick’s greatest successor in this regard. He was the liberal Catholic who transformed public opinion from poetic Jacobite sentiment to vocal pressure groups working by organizations and mass meetings, himself personally forcing capitulation from Prime Minister the Duke of Wellington in 1829 to open Parliament to Catholics hitherto denied despite promise from the younger Pitt when enacting the Union of Parliaments in 1800. O’Connell worked pragmatic alliance with the Whig governments of the 1830s to achieve equality among all Irish in government administration. The return of Tories to power in 1841 led to the revival of O’Connell’s movement for Repeal of the Union and his links with the world antislavery movement brought him publicly to reject proslavery donations from the USA. Once elected he also demanded admission of Jews to Parliament, but that had to wait for another thirty years. He was passionately non-violent and declared his followers must renounce violence as a weapon in Irish nationalism. He was himself of native Catholic aristocracy, one of the few chieftains still landholding. He died in 1847 in agony as his country lost thousands of its population during the Great Famine. He was the last Catholic mass leader of Irish nationalism until 1900.
Irish Catholicism advanced itself in prose as in speech, O’Connell after election becoming the greatest orator in the Commons which had so reluctantly admitted him. Its poetic language had been Gaelic. It was Irish Protestantism which produced sublime English poetry and drama from Swift, Sheridan and Goldsmith to Wilde, Shaw, Yeats and O’Casey. But across the sectarian divide they transformed nineteenth-century journalism across the world. In 1842 the Protestant Thomas Davis and the Catholics John Blake Dillon and Charles Gavan Duffy founded the Nation which proved a best-selling weekly redolent of Irish studies and intoxicating patriotic verse.
They were enthusiastic supporters of O’Connell and his Repeal movement. But below the surface were differences breaking open after the Government closed down the mass meetings in 1843, O’Connell stopped their continuation to prevent bloodshed, and then he was prosecuted and imprisoned, at 70 broken by it. The Nation’s livewire journalists known as Young Ireland exulted in the idealism of romantic nationalism and disliked bargaining with UK governments. Young Irelanders idealised Gaelic, but few of them could speak or read it; O’Connell learned it as a first language when fostered out in Gaelic custom to a poor family but cautioned that it weakened economic dealing with Anglophones. All of them including O’Connell enjoyed bellicose songs and verse of Irish heroism, but the Nation’s writers and readers took them more seriously, preaching uncompromising integrity. They were manufacturing Irish identity, he was Irish identity. They wanted Catholicism to assert its Irishness; O’Connell’s Catholicism was catholic. He expected it to oppose slave traffic and ownership on which the conservative Pope Gregory XVI agreed with him. Young Ireland grew unhappy about proslavery dollars being rejected.
There emerged in 1845 as the foremost enemy of O’Connell alive and dead the Ulster Presbyterian John Mitchel. He developed into the greatest polemicist in Irish history — and of Irish history — since Jonathan Swift, and as such needs different artistic measurement, in this case Section III of W. B. Yeats’s self-epitaph dated 4 September 1938, ‘Under Ben Bulben’, ominously intended to lead off a posthumous volume:
You that Mitchel’s prayer have heard,
‘Send war in our time, O Lord!’
Know that when all words are said
And a man is fighting mad,
Something drops from eyes long blind,
He completes his partial mind,
For an instance stands at ease,
Laughs aloud, his heart at peace.
Even the wisest man grows tense
With some sort of violence
Before he can accomplish fate,
Know his work or choose his mate.
(Singularly enough, the next Section’s first line is: ‘Poet and sculptor, do the work’.)
Over to Mitchel himself, witness to the Great Famine from 1845 until transported from it to Tasmania as convict in Summer 1848, publishing in 1861 his vision of it in The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps):
A calm, still horror was over all the land. Go where you would, in the heart of the town or in the church, on the mountain side or on the level plain, there was the stillness and heavy pall-like feeling of the chamber of death. You stood in the presence of a dread, silent, vast dissolution. An unseen ruin was creeping round you. You saw no war of classes, no open Janissary war of foreigners, no human agency of destruction. You could weep, but the rising curse died unspoken within your heart, like a profanity. Human passion there was none, but inhuman and unearthly quiet. Children met you, toiling heavily on stone-heaps, but their burning eyes were senseless, and their faces camped and weasened like stunted old men. Gangs worked, but without a murmur, or a whistle, or a laugh, ghostly, like voiceless shadows to the eye. Even womanhood had ceased to be womanly. The birds of the air carolled no more, and the crow and raven dropped dead upon the wing. The very dogs, hairless, with the hair down, and the vertebrae of the back protruding like the saw of a bone, glared at you from the ditchside with a wolfish avid eye, and then slunk away scowling and cowardly. Nay, the sky of heaven, the blue mountains, the still lake stretching far away westward, looked not as their wont. Between them and you rose a steaming agony, a film of suffering, impervious and dim. It seemed as if the anima mundi, the soul of the land, was faint and dying, and that the faintness and the death had crept into all thing of earth and heaven. You stood there, too, in the presence of something unseen and terrible.
The great twentieth-century Irish short-story writer Frank O’Connor made this his choice of Mitchel for his A Book of Ireland (1959), perhaps deliberately avoiding Mitchel’s charges that his jailers the UK government had perpetrated a genocide of the Irish peasantry. Mitchel becoming assistant editor of the Nation after Davis’s death in 1845 began moderately, seeing the need for land reform with so little landlord response, but as the famine worsened and evictions of tenant-farmers became numerous he advised passive resistance and if that failed take up arms, including the use of vitriol against soldiers. By 1848 he saw it as a war of property against the poor, and was demanding that food destined for export under contract should be kept in Ireland for famine relief. But by August 1847 Mitchel’s disciple, his fellow-Ulsterman Thomas Devin Reilly, was telling Nation readers that government action including schemes of relief was to exterminate the Irish people ‘which once numbered nine millions may be checked in the growth and coolly, gradually murdered’. Mitchel adopted this, declaring famine the greatest act of vengeance ever perpetrated against the Irish nation by its enemies internal and external. The revolution for which they were hoping amounted to very little, but the sentiments ate into the hearts of survivors, especially after Mitchel was arrested, tried, and sent to Bermuda, thence to South Africa, thence to Tasmania, and escaped to the USA all of which he wrote up with its famine background and later published in his searing yet ironic Jail Journal from 1854.
From his Nation days the leading human object of Mitchel’s hatred had been Daniel O’Connell whom he swore had led the Irish Catholic people wrong for 40 years. Reilly and he abominated O’Connell’s detestation of violence. O’Connell had died at 71 in May 1847. Mitchel’s posthumous denunciations increased as he crossed the globe. He denounced O’Connell as ‘vulgar’, certainly essential for mob appeal, and mass political agitation. But Mitchel did not believe in democracy however ready to claim the championship of the Irish people. At the heart of their divergence was O’Connell’s universalism and Mitchel’s reduction of Irish nationalism to Ireland itself. He became a passionate defender of slavery as did Devin Reilly, to be summed up as
Two, two, the lily-white boys,
Clothed all in green — o!
A characteristic editorial credo in Mitchel’s New York newspaper days told his readers:
We deny that it is a crime or wrong or even a peccadillo to hold slaves, or buy slaves, to sell slaves, to keep slaves to their work by flogging or other needful coercion.
As an Irish patriot, hero, martyr, refugee, intercontinental count of Monte-Cristo wielding heart-striking prose ethnically Ulster Protestant, evangelically pro-Catholic, Anglophobe at every turn — his impact on his American audience however small must have been terrific and like the original Nation would have been quoted and read from woman to woman and man to man. It was the heyday of American romanticism. It openly played with the same images heightening slavery controversy: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had been sweeping the North and West since 1852 as novel, as source-book and as one of a hundred staged versions. Like her, Mitchel told a tale of tyrannical law, brutal state power, imprisonment, escape, flight, pursuit, and personal freedom. It told famine fugitives and survivors of decimated families that the dead Irish thousands had been victims of genocide. Coincidentally if exceptionally the UK at that point (1852-55) had an antislavery Prime Minister, Lord Aberdeen, who as Foreign Secretary 1841-46 had upheld search of foreign ships potentially and illegally carrying slaves, whence Mitchel claimed the British empire had orchestrated the world antislavery movement for its own profit. Mitchel’s prose was frequently hoarded far beyond its time of publication, and lingered in memory available to some New York Irish hungry for jobs, resentful of free black competition, and hence tinder to explode in the New York draft riots of 1863 convulsing the city for days.
Mitchel even acquired property and slaves in Tennessee before the outbreak of the Civil War, in which he supported the Confederate States of America for which two of his sons died in arms and to which he contributed moral support in appeals to Irish-Americans. He died in Ireland in 1875 standing for Parliament with success answered by government veto as he remained an unredeemed convict. He became a cult on the fringes of Irish nationalism dabbling in constitutionalism while abstentionist from Parliament but rejecting any causes except Irish self-advancement by slavery or otherwise. The twentieth-century polemicist Arthur Griffith aptly summed up Mitchel’s philosophy in calling his new political party Sinn Fein (‘we ourselves’ popularised as ‘ourselves alone’). It was officially non-violent but dropped that when it became a useful label for the heirs of the Easter Rising. Griffith edited and revived Mitchel’s sharpest writing, proslavery vociferation and all. If anyone had thought of it, the doctrine of Ireland First while rejecting universal human freedom was that of the mob demanding release of the homicidal national rebel Barabbas and condemning Jesus Christ to be crucified. However unintentionally Patrick Pearse did, since he canonised Mitchel as Irish ideological exemplar in the months before the Rising.
I’LL TAKE YOU HOME AGAIN, CATHLEEN
Yeats as a youth used to read and re-read Mitchel with his father, as well as their reading Scott and Macaulay. In his Autobiography (1938) he mused that ‘Mitchel’s influence comes mainly, though not altogether, from style, that also a form of power, an energy of life.’ By 1892 having fallen in love with the Hibernophile Englishwoman Maud Gonne, Yeats paid her the supreme compliment of identification with Mitchel in an essay in the Boston Pilot and in United Ireland:
England has indeed, as Mitchel phrased it, gained the ear of the world, and knows well to tell foreign nations what tale of Ireland pleases her best. … But now Miss Maud Gonne, as eloquent with her tongue as was ‘Speranza’ with her pen, has made her voice heard where so many have failed. Every speech has been a triumph, and every triumph greater than the one that went before it.
Thousands who come to see this new wonder —a beautiful woman who makes speeches — remain to listen with delight to her sincere and simple eloquence.
Last week at Bordeaux, an audience of twelve hundred persons rose to its feet, when she had finished, to applaud her with wild enthusiasm. The papers of Russia, France, Germany and even Egypt quote her speeches, and the tale of Irish wrongs has found its way hither and thither to lie stored up, perhaps, in many a memory against the day of need.
Ten years later their legacies from Mitchell were immortalised in early April 1902 with the production of Yeats’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan, Gonne in the title-role. In 1899 Yeats choosing one of several poetic identities for his collection The Wind Among the Reeds
wrote as ‘Aedh’ ‘He Wishes for the Cloth of Heaven’ much quoted by Dublin students to one another fifty years after, ending:
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Mitchel’s first book had been Aedh O’Neill (1845) a romantic biography of the Ulster chieftain and Earl of Tyrone exceptionally, if not finally, victorious against the Elizabethan conquistadores; he is usually called ‘Hugh’ in English but neither Mitchel nor Yeats were proficient Gaelicists and so made the most of what they could. Mitchel thus exhumed Ulster leadership for Irish Catholics, and Yeats became his honorary godson, and Lady Gregory wrote most of the play until the moment created when Gonne stepped onstage as an old woman symbolising Ireland. As with so much of Gregory’s rich command of folk tradition the plot derived from her native Connacht, in this case pitched in 1798 when French troops invaded Mayo in the wake of insurrections already crushed in eastern Ulster and southeastern Leinster: in the midst of preparations for a wedding the old lady appears, calling in words symbolic and infectious for young men to vindicate her national pretensions, expel the British, follow the French and sacrifice all for Ireland. In cold blood it may remind us of the Irish novelist Bram Stoker’s famous Dracula (1897) to whose fictional world of the occult Yeats’s Anglo-Irish cultural peers had made such rich contributions. Dracula the vampire is rejuvenated by the blood of those he seduces, and Cathleen Ni Houlihan departs as the bridegroom abandons home, beauty and economic advancement, and in the play’s last lines a newcomer is asked:
Did you see an old woman going down the path?
No, but I saw a young girl, and she had the walk of a queen.
Yeats (or Aedh or Mitchel) had spread his dreams under Gonne’s feet. In the words of Yeats’s master biographer R. F. Foster, ‘her stage presence and her fiery reputation elevated the part of Cathleen from polemic to dramatic grandeur’. Stephen Gwynn ‘went home asking myself if such plays should be produced unless one was prepared for people to go out to shoot or be shot’.
But at the end of his life, a few weeks before ‘Under Ben Bulben’ Yeats wrote ‘The Man and the Echo’ facing what few of us might admit aloud:
… All that I have said and done,
Now that I am old and ill,
Turns into a question till
I lie awake night after night
And never get the answers right.
Did that play of mine send out
Certain men the English shot? …
Cathleen was the play, and the answer in one specific case was certainly ‘yes’ for whatever about thoughts shared b y the first audience with Stephen Gwynn, it was in revival rehearsal the week before the Easter Rising to open when the production like everything else in Dublin on Easter Monday was cancelled, and if it hadn’t been one member of the cast would have needed replacement: Sean or Seumas Connolly (follower but no relation of James Connolly). Yeats in these dying months wrote ‘Three Songs to the One Burden’:
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 horseman.
Some had no thought of victory
But had gone out to die
That Ireland’s mind be greater,
Her heart mount up on high;
And yet who knows what’s yet to come?
For Patrick Pearse had said
That in every generation
Must Ireland’s blood be shed.
From mountain to mountain ride the fierce horsemen.
He was dying only a little faster than the Europe between world wars. As a poet he was far greater than most observers, far less predictable or even classifiable, he advanced the English language however stimulated by the reality of his French and the proximity of Irish, he made the most of Irish difference from the ruling English, weaned it somewhat from its derivation from English roots, yearned for what control he and his fellow-Protestants once possessed in their rich eighteenth century ruling what he preferred to forget had been degraded and exiled Catholics. As an observer and commentator he was frequently as bewildered as anyone, had the integrity to question himself, responding sometimes more uneasily to old magnets. He treasured his vision of that lost Protestant ascendancy, unlike his fellow-giant artistic craftsmen of Protestant origin Wilde (whose mother ‘Speranza’ had guided him in folklore), Shaw whose ruthless drama of Irish realities John Bull’s Other Island (1904) he had commissioned and regretted, Synge (whose scientific mastery of post-Gaelic speech he courageously defended before self-disgracing audiences), O’Casey (whom he staged and exiled). Like all cultured Irish Protestants (many of whom still sought refuge in disdain) he was perpetually aware of the growing menace of Catholic control but followed Mitchel in making Anglophobia a form of salvation instead of confronting of self-enrichment of Protestant elites before the Union. To identify Gonne with Speranza was contradiction. The searing verse with which Speranza wrote the Great Famine fundamentally attacked her own order, the Anglican clergy, landlords and local magistracy, which contrasted from Gonne in 1900 recruiting Yeats to mock Victoria’s last visit to Ireland portraying her in black as the Famine Queen while Yeats himself proclaimed Mitchel’s pin-pointing 2 April 1800 as crucial date in ending the (purely Protestant) Irish Parliament the centenary now conspiratorially selected as Victoria’s final arrival. The popular comic song writer Percy French (Protestant) gave a much more representative Irish voice in response, supposedly a servant in the Viceregal Court reporting Victoria:
…
‘That Maud Gonne’ sez she
‘Dhressin in black’ sez she
‘To welcome me back’ sez she
‘Though I don’t care’ sez she
‘What they wear’ sez she
‘Now Maud’ll write’ sez she
‘That I brought the blight’ sez she
‘Or altered the saysons’ sez she
‘For some private raysins’ says she
‘An’ I think there’s a slate’ sez she
‘Off Willie Yeats’ sez she
‘He should be at home’ sez she
‘French polishin’ a pome’ sez she
‘An’ not writin’ letters’ sez she
‘About his betters’ sez she
‘Paradin’ me crimes’ sez she
‘In the Irish Times’ sez she
…
A PATRIOT FOR YOU
Wilde died a Roman Catholic having transmitted his mother’s Famine poetry into his ‘The Young King’ (A House of Pomegranates (1891)) and the imagery of The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), Shaw in John Bull’s Other Island made the priest Father Keegan his supreme intellectual and mystical hero other than Saint Joan (1923), Synge in his love for the actress Maire O’Neill was ready to become a Catholic, O’Casey achieved the supreme stage embodiment of genuine Irish Catholic piety in Juno and the Paycock (1924). Yeats’s ‘The Ballad of Father Gilligan’ (Poems (1895)) drawn from folklore is a good prayer for priest exhausted by visiting the dying, but it is his closest proximity. Having played its part in the destruction of the Protestant leader of Irish Catholics Parnell, Irish Catholic puritanism intended to keep Protestant culture in descendancy.
Maud Gonne’s marriage to a Roman Catholic and conversion herself disgusted him twice over.
Whether Yeats knew or would admit it, he was O’Connell’s heir in one respect, as indeed were Parnell and ultimately Gladstone: the nobility of the Irish Parliament. Critics might ask what else was there in it but nobility, a nobility to be strengthened and enlarged every time more payment and patronage was necessary.
The Irish Parliament had died in the Act of Union of 1800 having been founded by Edward I but where no Catholic could sit in its last decades, although 7 times the number of the ruling Anglicans.. During the eighteenth century some of the most brutal anti-Catholic Acts passed by the Irish Parliament were vetoed by Whitehall and Westminster, who forced the greatest Catholic emancipation on the Irish Parliament in 1793. But the promised admission of Catholics to the UK parliament only followed in 1829 because of O’Connell’s mass agitation. It was no mere elite triumphs. Of 2062 jobs ensuring and enforcing administration of justice in Ireland in 1828, Catholics held 37 and the resulting partisan justice was more efficiently enforced than before the Union, many registrates holding office because they were Orangemen. In place of the old popular impotent Jacobitism vainly promising restored Catholic land and power O’Connell set Catholic eyes on political goals and democratic enlargement with Repeal of the Union as the ultimate goal, popular imagination replacing its sectarian oligarchy with something nearer Utopia. It was not republican, as proved by the fulsome toasts to the young and mildly liberal Victoria at Repeal dinners before the Famine. Its mild variant of Home Rule did not become a cause for many Anglicans until Westminster disestablished the Anglican state Church of Ireland.
Yeats summed up the age of O’Connell as one ‘when national feeling was losing itself in a religious feud over tithes and emancipation’. In 1904 Yeats addressed 4000 in February 1904 at a New York meeting honouring the memory of Robert Emmet executed in September 1803 for leading a bloody and botched insurrection, yet making a long-remembered speech from the dock stating no man should write his epitaph until Ireland took her place among the nations of the earth. The gathering was organised by Clan na Gael, nominally pledged to the independence of Ireland by insurrection if necessary. Yeats told it:
I sometimes think that O’Connell was the contrary principle to Emmet. He taught the people to lay aside the pike and the musket, the song and the story, and to do their work now by wheedling and now by bullying. He won certain necessary laws for Ireland. He gave her a few laws, but he did not give her patriots. He was the successful politician, but it was the unsuccessful Emmet who has given her patriots.
Yeats was wrong about the song and the story: the Nation was born of the folktales — some about O’Connell grafted on ancient heroic tales — and ballads exchanged at his followers’ firesides and retailed at Repeal reading-rooms. Unspoken was the thought that patriots were Protestants and that Parnell, destroyed in 1891 by mutinous political subordinates and bullying Catholic clergy was the Emmet of his time. The next stage might perhaps be physical force as inspired by Cathleen Ni Houlihan. Meanwhile a brilliant journalist Richard Barry O’Brien had produced a Life of Charles Stewart Parnell in 1899. Yeats had given Parnell little support in his years of constitutional success but when he was ousted by then party and Catholic clerics and fought that terrible final year of adverse by-elections, the Protestant Parnell became his hero. Barry O’Brien’s book was one of the finest (if not the most accurate) of Victorian political biographies. But its very last words (other than a final chapter embodying Gladstone’s assessment) described Parnell’s funeral ending — correctly — by saying that his body was laid at the foot of the tower ‘where the greatest Irishman of the century — O’Connell — sleeps’. Yeats brooded furiously on this for decades publishing its ultimate response in 1934 entitled ‘Parnell’s Funeral’ and beginning ‘Under the great Comedian’s tomb the crowd’.
The poem mourns Parnell as tragedy, O’Connell thrown at the beginning as comedy like some despised prisoner butchered at the opening the more fittingly to commence the final obsequies for a patriot. Mitchel’s sneer that O’Connell was vulgar was right: he knew that entertainment was an essential in his stock-in-trade in enchanting those great crowds working their way from Gaelic to English, from bloodshed towards democracy. But a standard comedian in Yeats’s lifetime was the back-and-white minstrel, bogus in his patently false claim of blackness yet inviting contempt for the blackness he falsely proclaimed. Yeats following Mitchel would assert of O’Connell ‘His personal influence had been almost entirely evil … His violent nature, his invective, his unscrupulousness, are the chief cause of our social and political divisions.’ He was once again remembering the Barry O’Brien biography, where the Liberal Unionist leader Joe Chamberlain describes Parnell as ‘unscrupulous’ while having his own reputation to maintain adding that there was nothing wrong in being unscrupulous. But to Yeats there was, and all else in Parnell he disliked was to be shovelled on to O’Connell. He needed financial support for the Abbey Theatre from the 4000 and so continued:
O’Connell was a great man, but there is too much of his spirit in the practical politics of Ireland. That great Parnellite movement tried now to bully England by loud words and now to wheedle England by soft words, and Ireland herself, her civilization and her ideals, were forgotten in the midst of it all. She was ceasing to have her own thoughts, to speak her own language, to live her own life.
O’Connell, the antislavery Irish nationalist, had acquired a curious resemblance to black leaders. Many American white opponents of slavery, of segregation, and of discrimination would show themselves all in favour of black spokespersons under their sponsorship showing their talents, but would sharply resent anything that looked like independence from established (and courageous) abolitionists. Frederick Douglass was rebuked for seeking to build up Haiti with immigration from escaped slaves, since this savoured of the old fraud, colonization, much favoured by exploiters of antislavery sentiments thirty years previously. It was good to have him show his human equality oratory, but what of his evident superiority in oratory to his patrons? It was so with O’Connell as he progressed from mass meetings to superiority over the Commons.
The same pattern continued in the twentieth century. Major black political, and/or civil rights leaders were constant objects of criticism from otherwise philanthropic observers otherwise perpetually ready to preach their own benevolence to the world. Marcus Garvey, Adam Clayton Powell, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Diane Abbott, widely differing in so many respects received almost similar comments for their latest step outside the permissible white norm. Similarly O’Connell fell foul of Liberal Protestant supporters of Catholic emancipation who counselled greater moderation. Byron is in a different category, rebuking O’Connell for being too polite to George IV on the state visit to Ireland, proving correct in seeing George would remain anti-Catholic regardless of his oleaginous condescension; O’Connell took the point and when later campaigning among the Irish peasantry spoke from a cart festooned with quotation from Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Canto II, verse 76):
Hereditary bondsmen! Know ye not
Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?
(O’Connell’s leading historian Oliver MacDonagh made ‘The Hereditary Bondsman’ the subtitle of the first volume of his biography.)
Mitchel’s attitude to O’Connell is that of the white man who knows better than what later would be styled the ‘uppity nigger’, a loathsome term frequently in use as preliminary to a lynching . The Protestant patriot knows what is morally, spiritually and socially best for Catholics. All Mitchel had to offer was a style, self-obsession, and slavery either to declare our lives slavery or to practice it on others. Yeats at the end of his life saw the varieties open to Mitchel disciples. The rejection of O’Connell’s non-violence meant participation in war and engulfment by new slavemasters from Jefferson Davis to Hitler. The first requirement from our new overseers will be censorship of speech, writing, meeting. Yeats had already seen it under the successive rival children of Sinn Fein who warred against one another in 1922 and personated, assassinated and expelled one another up to 1932. Ireland in a neocolonial situation had little difficulty in adapting: the British Empire had trained the new princelings well.
The weapons of protest become those of repression. Just execration of a statue lording over current citizens of all colours probably including the descendants of its original’s first victims is taken up by persons in quest of lucrative rewards as friends of the people. Today’s fighters for freedom become tomorrow/’s tyrants. Inquisitors of the past become Joe McCarthys pledging their vigilance for the liberties they will eventually destroy. Pots of paint over a forgotten gluttonous proconsul give way to explosions, and disintegrated stone targets are followed by disintegrating human flesh and blood.
And Mitchel’s prayer is answered all the way to World War 2 — or 3.
The greater the scope, the lesser the hope.