Inventing Ireland (4 page)

... mar ba ghnáth leisean agus le na samhail eile iomad finnsgéal filíochta a chumadh agus a chóiriú le briathra blasta, do bhréagadh an léitheora.

(as it was usual with him and with others like him, to frame and arrange many poetic romances with sweet-sounding words to deceive the reader.)
¹⁰

This is, of course, a tongue-in-cheek rebuttal of the very terms in which Spenser castigated the native poets as practised liars, embellishing
truth for their own self-interest. By rights Céitinn could have enjoyed the traditional status of a "saoi re héigse" (a man of learning): it was the collapse of the Gaelic order in 1601 which had prevented this. But he was acute enough to sense in Spenser his own mirror-image: a court poet deprived of a court, a learned man who had somehow lost his full entitlements. If
history
is what gets written in books by life's winners and
tradition
is what gets remembered and told among the common people, then Spenser must finally be rated an historian and Céitinn a traditionalist. Lacking a printing press, Céitinn had no opportunity to publish
Boras Feasa
on its completion in 1640; but hundreds of copies circulated in manuscript, and the book became much admired for its lucid style and for the feelings of self-worth which it instilled in Irish speakers. Throughout the same period, after its publication in an abbreviated version in 1633, Spenser's
View
was widely available in Ireland and in England in printed form.

A major part of Céitinn's project was his demonstration that the Irish were not foils to the English so much as mirrors. Against the view of them as hot-headed, rude and uncivil, Céitinn offered a portrait of the ancient Irish as disciplined, slow to anger but steadfast thereafter in pursuit of their rights, urbane and spare of utterance, and so on ... to all intents, the very model of an English knight or squire. To scant avail. In centuries to come, English colonizers in India or Africa would impute to the "Gunga Dins" and "Fuzzi-Wuzzies" those same traits already attributed to the Irish. The fact that the Irish, like the Indians, can on occasion be extremely cold, polite and calculating was of no great moment, for their official image before the world had been created and consolidated by a far greater power. The occupiers also projected many of their own flaws onto the Irish and then, like parents who are dismayed to find their weaknesses repeated in their own children, felt nonetheless quite at liberty to criticize the Irish for these failings. English understanding of Ireland based itself on a limited number of ideas; as Céitinn feared, such ideas fed off one another far more than they drew sustenance from actual life.

Eventually, Irish intellectuals deduced that the intent of English policy was straightforward: to create a "Sacsa nua darb anim Éire" (a new England called Ireland). This was undeniably true: but, because it remained an open space in which all kinds of desires and loathings might find their embodiment, Ireland also began to appear to English persons in the guise of their Unconscious. In that covert sense, the
effect
of official policy was the creation of
a secret England called Ireland
The notion had obvious dangers, especially if Ireland were to be imagined as
a feminine landscape, whose contours needed only to be laid bare: but as the seventeenth century gave way to the eighteenth, it also revealed its positive literary uses. In
George Farquhar's and
Richard Brinsley Sheridan's plays, Anglo-Irish gentlemen returned in dishevelled desperation to remind the London smart-set of the cultural price being paid for empire by its sponsors on the periphery, a place often repressed from official consciousness.
Oliver Goldsmith in
The Deserted Village
could, in a somewhat ironic manner, bring the consequences of rural clearances to the attention of his more sensitive metropolitan readers; and
Jonathan Swift could write of Ireland as a laboratory in which the discrepancies between official pretence and raw underlying realities were starkly posed. In the
Drapier's Letters
Swift asked how a free man in England could lose his autonomy simply by crossing the Irish Sea. His
Modest Proposal
that Irish children under six be roasted as meat for English tables, though seriously discussed by some myopic readers, was for many a sharp reminder of the way in which English policy was viewed in Ireland. For here was a land where the difference between latent and manifest content had to be constantly negotiated by all writers.

Throughout the eighteenth century, this gap exercised the framers of legislation as well as the authors of literature. On the ascendancy side, the
Penal Laws implemented against Catholics who refused to work on their church holidays were somewhat undercut by a rider, to the effect that justices and constables who refused to implement the law would be jailed. The verbal harshness of the statutes was a reflection of their inoperability in a country lacking a comprehensive police force or a system of prisons. The very edict which repressed the Catholics into the official
unconscious, supposing such persons not to exist, seemed to concede the impossibility of its own consistent application. It implicitly acknowledged that it afforded only one perspective and that another, contrary view would be taken by many.
¹¹

On the native side, poets writing in Irish showed a penchant for covert statement. They praised the beauty of
Cathleen Ní Houlihan when they really meant to celebrate Ireland. In what seemed like harmless love songs, they besought girls to shelter gallants from the storm, gallants who turned out on inspection to be rebels on the run from English guns. They decried the felling of the woods, but in this they were actually bemoaning the fall of the Gaelic aristocracy, whose evicted leaders often took refuge in the woods from which they launched revenge attacks. In both Irish and English writings of the period, the woods appear increasingly often as the unconscious, sheltering kerns, rebels and exponents of those desires punished by the
Puritans (many of whom came to Ireland with
Cromwell in the 1640s and later). In the settlers' texts, the clearing represented the daylight world of civilization and the conscious: and so the native who stumbled into the settlement and was promptly lulled off became a metaphor for the occupiers need to negate all illicit desires.

In no set of writings is the notion of Ireland as England's unconscious more deeply or more sustained!/ explored than in those of
Edmund Burke.
¹²
He contended that what happened to the native aristocracy in Ireland under Cromwell and the Penal Laws befell the nobility of France in the revolution of 1789: an overturning of a decent moral order. He believed that the same sickness lay not far beneath the composed surface of English civil society, and that it was his duty to warn people of its likely long-term effects. Under the Penal Laws in Ireland a son, simply by convening to
Protestantism, could usurp his father's prerogatives, or a wife her husbands, and this Burke saw as a blueprint for revolution. Within the Irish Anglican minority, for whom all the better postings were reserved, something like a career open to talents was possible: hence a coachmaker's son like
Wolfe Tone, the Jacobin and rebel, could become a barrister-at-law. Burke was profoundly unimpressed by all this, seeing the Protestant ascendancy as nothing more than "a junto of robbers", a mercantile class which displayed the
hauteur
and ruthlessness of a fake aristocracy.

Burke's empathy with India under occupation was also expressed in terms which vividly recalled the extirpation of
Gaelic traditions by adventurers and planters. Few people were as rooted in custom as the Indians, but Burke complained that all this had been callously swept aside by
Warren Hastings and the East India Company. "The first men of that country", "eminent in situation"
¹³
were insulted and humiliated by "obscure young men", pushing upstarts who "tore to pieces the most established rights, and the most ancient and most revered institutions of ages and nations".
¹⁴
It was the same humiliation known by the princely Gaelic poets-turned-beggars; and Burke saw in Hastings the kind of profiteer who ripped a social fabric. Affecting aristocratic style, those expropriators were
homo economicus
hell-bent on breaking Brah-minism. To those who worried that he might be overstating the case, Burke replied in 1786 "I know what I am doing, whether the white people like it or not".
¹⁵

What Burke had to say against the "junto of robbers" in Dublin could have been said also of Hastings' men in India: they built no schools or public services, being motivated only by the love of quick profit; and so they had the boldness of obscure young men who "drink
the intoxicating draughts of authority and dominion before their heads are able to bear it".
¹⁶
Burke was shocked by the complicity in all this of Indian middle-men, who prospered as stewards in much the same fashion as the bailiffs denounced so wearily by the Gaelic poets. But it was for the fallen nobles of India that Burke offered his plangent
caoineadh ar chéim síos na nuasal
(lament for fallen nobility). To the House of Lords in 1794 he declared: "I do not know a greater insult that can be offered to a man born to command than to find himself made a tool of a set of obscure men, come from an unknown country, without anything to distinguish them but an usurped power . .
"
¹⁷

Whether the subject was England, India or France, the threat to traditional sanctity and loveliness was evoked by Burke in the image of a ravaged womanhood. In the
Reflections,
Marie Antoinette was described rather colourfully as fleeing from a royal palace in which no chivalric hand was raised to defend her:

I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.
¹⁸

The Gaelic poets usually imagined their monarch wedded to the land, which was emblematized by a beautiful woman: if she was happy and fertile, his rule was righteous, but if she grew sad and sorrowful, that must have been because of some unworthiness in the ruler. The artist was the fittest interpreter of the state of this relationship. So it was not hard for Burke to cast himself in the role made familiar by a hundred
aisling
(vision) poems, which evoked a willing, defenceless
spéirbhean
or "sky-woman", who would only recover her happiness when a young liberator would come to her defence. Where natural laws were transgressed, however, there could only be pain and strife. So it was, also, in Hastings' India, where Burke imagined that the Hindu womanhood stood defiled by an East India Company whose officials "ravage at pleasure".
¹⁹
Like Ireland, India appeared to him as a theatre of the unconscious, a place where unbridled instincts ran riot, while the constraints of civilization were abandoned by those very people who pretended to sponsor them.

In his later years, Burke chose to imagine the return of the repressed in the figure of an animal from the colonies now unleashed on the mother of parliaments:

I can contemplate without dread a royal or a national tiger on the borders of Pegu. I can look at him with an easy curiosity, as a prisoner within bars in the menagerie of the tower. But if, by habeas corpus or otherwise, he was to come into the lobby of the House of Commons while your door was open, any of you would be more stout than wise, who would not gladly make your escape out of the back windows. I certainly should dread more from a wild cat in my bed-chamber, than from all the lions in the desert behind Algiers. But in this parallel it is the cat that is at a distance, and the lions and tigers that are in our chambers and lobbies.
²⁰

His disillusionment with policies in Ireland and India led him to prophesy the end of empire (even before it had fully formed). That makes him the somewhat surprising precursor of today's "Third World" theorists, who offer critiques of cultural imperialism in the years of its slow decline. Ireland provided him, as it would provide many others, with a metaphor for the world beyond Dover, affording points of comparison which helped to explain events in places as far-flung as India or the Americas. The French terror, which he was quite sure no English audiences would willingly contemplate, he made available to his readers in a transposed account of life in post-Crom-wellian Ireland, a hell in the grip of "demoniacs possessed with a spirit of fallen pride and inverted ambition".
²¹
The consequent suffering was as visible and tangible on the streets of rural Cork as in the suburbs of revolutionary Paris.

Burke was, of course, no Irish
separatist. He believed that the link with England, though the cause of many woes, would be Ireland's only salvation. Nevertheless, as the product of an Irish
hedge-school he had a natural sympathy, if not for revolution, then at least for those caught up in the stresses of a revolutionary situation.
Conor Cruise O'Brien has inferred from this a conflict at the centre of Burke's writings between outer Whig and inner Jacobite: while the "English" Burke may on the surface be saying one thing, the "Irish" Burke may be implying quite another.
²²
Thus, he questioned the common English view of the Irish as rebellious and emotional children, praising his people's self-restraint in the face of persecution. Taking up where Céitinn had left off, he attacked misrepresentations by more recent English historians: "But there is an interior History of Ireland – the genuine voice of its records and monuments – , which speaks a very different language from these histories from Temple and from Clarendon . . . [and says] that these rebellions were not produced by toleration but by persecution".
²³
Burke contested English stereotypes of the Irish, because he saw in them
projections onto a neighbouring people of those elements which the English denied or despised in themselves: but he believed that, taken together, the English and Irish had the makings of a whole person. This would prove an attractive proposition for many nineteenth-century theorists, and was the psychological rationale which underlay the Act of Union.