The Gaelocentric tradition of cultural nationalism, which we can trace from [Lady Sydney] Morgan through the nineteenth century, was not the product or even the specific outlook of Ireland’s Gaelic population. For Gaelocentric or Gaelophile cultural nationalism is, is the final analysis, an Anglo-Irish projection or invention - or at best an Anglo-Irish transmogrification of Gaelic raw materials. It is largely motivated by an exotic fascination with an alien culture: the fascination of the eighteenth-century antiquarians and of the travellers, the fascination of the actor’s daughter two generations removed from native, Gaelic-speaking roots and married to a knighted Ascendancy physician [i.e., Sir William Wilde]. In that respect, too, Irish cultural nationalism, grown as it has out of a culturally and politically divided country, is to a large extent an interiorized form of exoticism, auto-exoticism. The fascination with things Gaelic is a nostalgic and an exoticist one. Gaelic [67] antiquity proves to have unsuspected riches, to have mysterious links with other ancient civilizations like the Greek (constantly invoked by Glorvina), it is interesting in that it is completely different from familiar culture. The fascination the Gaelic past and with the Gaelic language is a fascination with the unknown. For authors like Edgeworth and Yeats, who see Ireland in terms of its inner divisions between Gaels and Anglo-Irish, this exoticism remains vested in what is the alien alterity of the native Gaels. But when Moigan consecrates a marriage between the two traditions in the persons of Horatio and Glorvina, thus uniting the Gaelic and the Anglo-Irish poles, English-language discourse can begin to identify with that exotic culture, can begin to see itself as somehow belonging to it.

[Here ensue remarks on the marriage of Horatio and Glorvina and its benefits to each of the partners in terms of the cultural transaction involved - see full paragraph under Lady Morgan - as infra.]

As I have pointed out, there are two attitudes to discourse in the character of Glorvina. There is the Glorvina who holds forth, who garrulously vindicates the accomplishments of her country, who is as loquacious as an enthusiastic tourist guide; and there is the Glorvina whose communication is non-verbal: song at best, and otherwise mere sighs and glances. Similarly, there is that Gaelic Ireland which needs to vindicate its case, to claim understanding and sympathy, to make its accomplishments and grievances known to the world; and there is the Gaelic Ireland which remains mysterious, exotic, hidden, other and unknowable. The former sets out to convince us, the latter allures us; the former speaks the discourse of nationalism, the latter hushes the silence of exoticism. The importance of Morgan in the literary iconography of Ireland is that she is the first to fuse these two elements, the ideological and the idyllic, and that she enshrines, as an adopted national identity, the fascination value of Gaelic exoticism within the discourse of Anglo-Irish literature. (End chap.; ibid., p.67.)

A scientific world-view, unlike a magical or mythical one, progresses: new generations are not content to follow in the footsteps of earlier masters and to emulate their example, but attempt to improve upon what they see as the short­ comings of earlier practice. This notion comes close to what Karl Popper sees as a central defining characteristic of scientific discovery: falsification, the exposure of insufficiencies in previous models to accurately account for the processes of empirical reality. Although history-writing is not a technical, empirical science, it is certainly a scientific endeavour to the extent that its academic praxis follows this pattern of falsification-driven progress. Ann Rigney analysed a generic tendency towards intertextual antagonism, the ‘agonistic drive’ in historians* relations with their forerunners and rivals: unlike fiction-writers and storytellers, historians are in a position to express this agonistic drive by way of mutual falsification, i.e., prov­ ing that another’s version of historical events is inadequate or deficient. (Ann Rigney, Rhetorical of Historical Representation [of] the French Revolution, Cambridge UP 1991.]

The popular, often illustrated stories/histories of Ireland which were published in great number in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, were, by this definition, all of them stories and none of them histories proper. In contrast io professional debates like the one between Lecky and Froude, Sullivan-style popular histories are not concerned with correcting the shortcomings or blind spots of other histories; they echo them, even recycle them, taking up Keating’s myth as much as eighteenth-century historians such as Sylvester O’Halloran or abbé MacGeoghegan’s (continued in sequel by, respectively, Sullivan and John Mitchel). Each of them, time after time, sets out again to tell, once more, in fresh words, the Story of Ireland, her glorious antiquity and manifold wrongs. It is like the obsessive workings and reworkings of the Deirdre story: each sets forth the same familiar tale in different words. And much of this was done, Griffin-style, in a sub-Walter-Scott register of historical romance, often aimed at juvenile audiences, crammed with historical detail and driven by an educational, nationalist purpose. (p.153.)

The development of cultural nationalism, in which historical debates and historical literature played such an important role, was also deeply influenced by an interest in living Irish culture, traced in the Gaelic language, folklore and song. It should be remembered that that, although those cultural concerns span most of the century, they were, until the 1870s, marginal to parliamentary politics and to great national questions: the constitutional status of Ireland, the ascendancy of the Church of Ireland, landlordism. [...; 157] In all the succession of antiquarian and revivalist Gaelic initiatives in the course of the nineteenth century the common injunction is always that ‘politics is to be kept out of our business’.

This is all the more understandable as, for most of the century, learned societies (which formed the most important institutional filiation of cultural interest between Vallancey and Hyde) were constituted largely of an elite membership. Unlike the members of O’Flanagan’s Gaelic Society, who had published cheap grammars and primers of Irish with one foot in the hedge­ school, the later societies were composed of peers, baronets, the liberal professions and gentlemen scholars, with a sprinkling of some native-speaking interest embodied in names such as O’Donovan, O’Curry and Archbishop MacHale. Witness, not only O’Reilly’s Iberno-Celtic Society of 1818, but also the Irish Archaeological Society, established in 1840 for the scholarly publication of ancient manuscript material. Ils membership included, under the patronage of the prince consort, two archbishops, eight bishops, three dukes and thirty other peers, as well as O’Curry, O’Donovan, Petrie, Hardiman, Thomas Moore, Daniel O’Connell, William Smith O’Brien, Charles Gavan Duffy, Sir Robert Peel, and four peerage-endorsed clan chiefs with ‘The’ before their name. Drawing as they did on such a high-powered mix of public personalities, it becomes easy to see why these societies should wish to keep political debate at bay.2 (p158.)

In this light, it becomes understandable both why Douglas Hyde should have been so emphatic in his refusal to see language revival as a political issue, and why his refusal should have been so singularly out of touch. He was echoing a hallowed stance in Irish cultural pursuit, but the stance had become untenable by 1890, when living Irish culture was becoming the badge of nationality and nationalism. Hyde’s anti-political disclaimers in On the necessity for de-Anglicising Ireland appear either naive or disingenuous; but Hyde stood by them, to the point of stepping down as president of the Gaelic League when it became clear that he could not stem the tide of politicization.7 (p.159.)
]
[...] In the course of the nineteenth century, statements of apolitical intent had been made, not only in linguistics but also in folklore, in an attempt to define a neutral common ground for all sections of Irish society, untroubled by history or politics. In the event, these attempts turned into a debate over the ‘middle ground’ of Ireland’s popular tradition, and over the right lo speak on behalf of the illiterate peasantry of the country. Who is to be the spokesman for the Plain People of Ireland, and who can authenticate his Irish cultural nationality by a recourse to a demotic constituency of unquestioned Irishness?

Popular tradition becomes, next to a quest for the authentic past, the main ideal of Irish cultural pursuits and debates. It is defined by its orality and perfor­ mance, in contrast to literature proper, which is defined by its written character. That basic distinction between low oral culture and high written culture feeds into a whole set of similarly aligned oppositions: between spontaneous effusion and polished reflection, between transience and permanence, between the emotional and the cerebral, between the timelessness of primitive customs and [159] a filiation between the post-union, indeed post-ramine present aim me ancient roots of Irishness. It is also a reservoir of raw material to be mined and cultivated: to be retrieved from its illiterate repository, the peasantry, who hoard this cultural heritage with spontaneous and unreflective naivety, without the necessary intellectual refinement to appreciate its higher interest.

Many aspects of nineteenth-century cultural history in Europe have been studied by social historians in terms of a civilizing offensive. There is very little of that sort of thing happening in Ireland; there was very little caring, pater­ nalistic improvement attempted apart from the quixotic Bible missions and the interesting case of the National School system, which was treated with some mistrust in the very quarters it was supposed to benefit.9 Rather, what is much more prominent in nineteenth-century cultural relations is quite the opposite of a top-down civilizing offensive: the high culture of the Anglo-Irish elite seeks to rejuvenate and energize itself through an osmosis with the unspoilt, primitive energy and ebullience of native low culture.

The Anglo-Irish cultivation of popular tradition takes on three forms: that of song and verse, of folklore and of the Gaelic language. Much of it starts off as an attempt to avoid the pitfails of political-historical research, as we can gather from the trail-blazing worker in this field, Thomas Crofton Croker. (p.160.)

Croker’s forerunners in this vein of learning are the antiquarians of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century - men like Vallancey, O’Conor, O’Halloran, Walker, Ledwich, Campbell and O’Flanagan, who, whatever their scholarly and political differences, were united in their belief that Irelands Gaelic antiquity was a treasure-house of historical or anthropological interest. The first half of Croker’s title follows in the footsteps of these his predecessors, the older generation of scholars, amateurs, enthusiasts and autodidacts (it recalls, for example, Thomas Campbell’s Philosophical Survey of the south of Ireland (1777), and also follows the contemporary trend towards a regional interest. Indeed, Croker himself became a member of the Society of Antiquaries, of the Camden Society and the Percy Society; his role in English antiquarianism was a prominent one. But the odd phraseological shift in the title, from ‘architectural remains’ to the ‘manners and superstitions of the peasantry’ indicates a deliberate break liway from received practice; in his first chapter, the author states in effect that he has no time for the bygone glories of Gaelic antiquity and instead has chosen to investigate the surviving traditions of the peasantry. [...] (p.161.)

[...] the penchant for tales and stories did much to de-historicize and de-politicize the image of the Irish peasant. The peasantry is not a social group whose lives and actions, sympathyies and aspirations take shape in a politically and historically distwinct moment, but rather the timeless repository of a primeval, timeless life, primitive in the root sense of that term, aboriginal and untouched by modernizing influences from outside. The peasant's way of reflecting on life is not by way of discursive reference but by the rehearsing of old stories; his intelligence is not that of analysis but of intuitive insight, soothsayings and proverbs. It is not surprise to find the commonplace that this peasantry-as-forklore-reservoir is always on the very of diminution or extinction (witness the fact that Carleton's mother Mary Kelly has taken valuable (!) old songs into the grave with her); this puts [164] the folklore researcher into what has aptly been termed a ‘salvage paradigm’. Raymond Williams has famously pointed out, in the opening pages of The county and the city, that each generation believes it witnesses the final disso­lution of traditional country life, until then apparently unspoilt and pristine; a commonplace evidently inspired by the notion that country, the peasantry, extra-historical as it is, has no regenerative or expansive energy and, passively retentive as it is confined to be, can only lose, never regain, in the changes of historical time. The peasantry for Irish folklorists is taken out of the realm of political conflict, and translated into the realm of the timeless superstitition, the folktale, the otherworld and the living past. It is a striking fact that of all the elements in Irish popular culture, the notion of fairies and leprechauns came to dominate everything else; and that this ‘fairification’ of Irish popular culture was cultivated most assiduously by Protestant, conservative, unionist writers. Fairies are not found in The nation, whose frame of cultural reference is historical and ancient-Gaelic; the fairy-stuff of popular culture is found in the Dublin University magazine and similar conservative reviews, and tends to be penned by authors such as Croker, Maginn, Carleton, Lover, and later Ailingham, the early pre­ Maud Gonne Yeats, Larminie and Alfred Perceval Graves.

The attitude as outlined here is idyllic; and the idyllic imagination of country life was widespread all over Europe in the mid-century. We find it in the rural novels of Mrs Gaskell and Geoige Eliot (specifically in the quaint characters who make up the background), in the rustic novels of George Sand, and in Germany in the widespread Biedermeier genre of the Dorfsidylle or Dorfgeschichte (village idyll). This mode of imagining traditional country life is usually, and plausibly, interpreted as a nostalgic reaction against the technological modernization brought by steam engines, railways and mass production. The readership catered for by such nostalgic tales were usually middle-class, second- or third- generation city-dwellers. What is more, there is in such idylls a radical division between the subject-matter and the intended readership: such idylls are about country folk but rarely intended to be read by them.18 The German case offers also the best theoretical reflection upon this social opposition: Ferdinand Tonnies’ classic sociological treatise Gemeinschafi und Gesellschaft (‘Community and Society’), which defined two types of social structure, one, the community. traditional, with ingrained hierarchical bonds, exerting social control through familial and peer-group pressure, with intense mutual solidarity but little individual freedom; the other, society, loose-knit, modem, with social control effected through a professional apparatus of administration and law enforce­ ment, with more individual freedom but less solidarity and greater anonymity. Tonnies’ analysis is redolent with a nostalgia for a pre-Bismarck, pre-industrial Germany of romantic villages and traditional harmony; his contradistinction between the idyllic community and the faceless, modem society captured more than any other work a mood that in similar nostalgic vein was operative all over Europe; including Ireland. In Ireland, however, there was an additional, cultural factor playing into the opposition between society and community: the former was [165] Anglo-Irish, the latter Gaelic-Irish, and more than in other countries, the opposition between high and low society still echoed an originary contrast between conquerors and conquered, colonizers and colonized.

[Here quotes Village-communities, East and West (1871) by Sir Henry Sumner Maine - whose asst. was Whitley Stokes - on the 'tension between tradition and progress, exoticism and supremacism, nostalgia and hegemony [Leerrsen's summary terms].

Such overtones make the idyllic appreciation of the rustic community in Ireland particularly resonant. The habitual way of seeing the Irish cultural landscape was one of layers of conquests, beginning with the Firbolg and ending with the English presence; even the fairies themselves were representative of earlier strata in Ireland^ settlement, in that they were seen as the remnants of the Tuatha Danann. Fairies in Ireland appealed to the imagination for more reasons than were immediately obvious; they were representatives of a golden Otherworld for which the Irish peasantry was the privileged intermediary, having been half­ ousted themselves from the quotidian reality of the here and now.