• [as ‘Historicus’,] Best 100 Irish Books, in Freeman’s Journal (q.d.).
• Souls For Gold! Pseudo-Celtic Drama in Dublin (London: Nassau Press, 1899); Do., rep. as Appendix VIII in Lady Gregory, Our Irish Theatre (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1972).
• The Ruin of Education in Ireland and the Irish Fanar (London: David Nutt 1902), 202pp.
  
• The Stage-Irishman of the Pseudo-Celtic Drama (London: John Long 1904), 47pp. [see details].
• Paraguay on the Shannon: The Price of Political Priesthood (London: King; Dublin: Hodges Figgis 1908)
• The History of the Irish Parliamentary Party, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green & Co 1910) [see Vol. I - contents; Vol. II - contents]
• The Lost Hat, The Clergy, the Collection, the Hidden Life (London: Murray 1914 [var. 1886]).

See also ‘The Cause of Irish Depopulation’, in The Leader (23 March 1901) [q.pp.].

Introduction

[...] Unfortunately Mr W. B. Yeats has not been content with expressing his own visions. In his plentiful innocence of ancient and modern history and literature, some impish fate drew him to select his innocence of Irish history and letters as the special sphere of his advertisements. He sought to make the legends of f the Gael and the ancient heroes and heroines of Gaelic Ireland the vehicles, or the pretexts, of the most un-Gaelic and un- Irish conceptions which it is possible to conceive. He proclaimed to the British public that he had a message to deliver from the Celtic Past, and too often his Celtic Past never existed anywhere outside his own productions, except, perhaps, somewhere between the Theatre Libre and the Chat Noir. His occult mission, it seemed, was to celebrate the wedding of Madame Blavatsky and Finn MacCumhail. A sort of witch’s cauldron of aboriginal superstition and Ibsenite neo-paganism was declared to be the permanent spring of Celtic genius and Celtic religion. Sometimes [10] he soiled a Gaelic Saga. Sometimes he caricatured it. [...]

Mr W. B. Yeats has himself, in his affecting sketch, Kathleen-Ni-Houlahan, shown what he can do when he follows nature and history. I wish him success in that ambition. I condemn only what I feel to be condemnable.

As for the scheme of an “Irish Literary Theatre” in itself, even in my criticisms of the [11] crudity of that nauseous Countess Cathleen, I wrote of the great field that lay before the true Irish dramatist. “Literature racy of the Irish soil” has not waited for Ibsen-cum-Blavatsky to be an ideal of Irish Nationalism, and some closing lines from my former condemnation of Mr W. B. Yeats’s pseudo-Celtic treatment of a pseudo-Celtic story will illustrate quite sufficiently to-day my standpoint from the commencement in this matter:—

”There is rich material, there is a noble mission, for a Celtic Theatre in Ireland. The story of our race is full of themes the most tender, the most tragic, the most heroic, the most divine. From the waters that heard the lament of the Swan Children, to the legend-haunted Glens of Kerry; — from the mead where fell the Dane, to the shores whence the Wild Geese flew away; — our land is full of memories such as were never outrivalled in the dramatic poetry of any country of the world. If the mind has not arisen which could be the Æschylus or Sophocles of such a history, at least there is no reason for tolerating the preposterous absurdity — “made in Germany” it is now explained — which would degrade Ancient Ireland into this sort of witch’s cavern of ghouls and vampires, and abject men and women, and blaspheming shapes from hell. I am sorry to have to say this, but it must be said.” (p.11.)

Mr. Yeats’s Offensiveness on Irish Religion.

[...] The astounding offensiveness of Mr Yeats’s productions towards Irish Catholic Religion can be explained in this way. He is merely constructing an impossible country, with impossible priests and people, out of his own head, as the children say; and when he labels them Irish, he commits the most insulting things conceivable, while he is merely achieving what he thinks “a poetic creation.”

Take the repulsive description of the killing a priest, while reading his breviary too, by the Demon Merchant in the “ Countess Cathleen,” that ridiculous and offensive absurdity, which even Mr Stephen Gwynn, in 1901, called “ exotic” and “ alien,” the work of a man “ whose artistic sympathies had been moulded away from Ireland.” But, though the precious drama was “ exotic “and “ alien,” and abominable in idea and execution, still it was actually presented upon a Dublin stage, with Mr Yeats in full feather as “the Irish Shakespeare,” as Mr George Moore intimated, and with a whole claque of highly-genteel patrons come to applaud him as vehemently as Mr Stephen [14] Gwynn does in 1904. The scene, remember, is an Ancient Ireland of Mr Yeats ’s gentle fancy, with “five score baronies” of apostate Catholics selling their souls to fill their hunger; and the priest to be killed so ignominiously by the Demon is a priest of this famine-struck and apostate flock. Now we all of us can be judges here. Now, we all of us, Protestant and Catholic, know how Irish Catholic priests behaved in times of hunger and famine in Ireland. Did it ever occur to anybody except a Symbolic Pseudo-Celt to intimate that precisely such a time made them apt slaves of hell ? The thing is really too funny, but we must try to be serious. Mr Yeats makes the Catholic priest the ready prey of the demons, who shove his soul into their black bag — even though the poor clergyman was actually reading his breviary ! We could understand a priest being snapt up in an act of sin, but in an act of prayer ! I quote the precious stuff:

This was one of the extracts on which Cardinal Logue founded his indignant condemnation of the Yeatsite production. To the Irish Catholic, to the cultivated Protestant, it will probably appear that a more offensive and disgusting outrage on the Catholic’s veneration for the priestly mission can hardly be imagined.

In my protest published at the time I wrote: —

”Good old Father John, in spite of his prayers and his breviary, killed by the devil in the shape of a brown pig! How Irish! How exquisitely Celtic!”

I repeat that I do not touch Mr Yeats’s intentions. He intends probably nothing more than to employ any material he finds handy for his poetico-dramatic muse. But there must be limits to the Minor Poet, and the Major Poet too, in such matters. Dead paganisms and living Christianity must be treated with very different measures of licence. Calvary is not Olympus. Besides, there is a question of [16] sheer ignorance of Irish Catholic belief. It is sheer silliness to talk of a demon having the power, according to Irish faith, to kill a priest in the midst of “many prayers” and stick his soul in a bag!

Unfortunately Mr W. B. Yeats often shows this amazing ignorance of the faith of the Celts he pretends to reveal to the British Public. I remember a miniature drama of his, The Land of Heart’s Desire, turns on another revolting burlesque of Irish Catholic religion. Still more than the Countess Cathleen, this playlet appears to be instinct with dechristianisation, conscious or unconscious.

[...]

I have elsewhere, in my original protests against Mr Yeats’s handling of the Irish Past and the Christian Faith, expressed my sense of his most offensive caricature of Catholic Ireland and the Catholic Church. As I said then : —

”The Catholic Church only appears in Shrines of the Virgin that are “kicked to pieces” [n] by Celtic peasants, and in priests who are killed by devils in the shape of pigs. We are told that the land is full of famine, and that it is the Ireland of old days. Where was the aid of friendly and generous chiefs and clansmen to the suffering district? Where was the charitable hospitality of a hundred monastic foundations, which were afterwards to be “kicked to pieces,” not by Celtic peasants, but by the reformed chivalry of England? Mr W. B. Yeats seems to see nothing in the Ireland of old days but an unmanly, an impious and renegade people, crouched in degraded awe before demons, and goblins, and sprites, and sowlths, and thivishes, — just like a sordid tribe of black devil-worshippers [15] and fetish-worshippers on the Congo or the Niger.”

Note: “kicked to pieces” alludes to the stage directing in in Land of Heart’s Desire where Shemus is seen “kicking it [a shrine] to pieces” (here p.22.)

[Conclusion:]

[...] I find, in the last edition of the Cyclopædia of English Literature, published by [44] Messrs Chambers, a very kindly notice of our pseudo-Celtic Bard, which contains a telling exposure of two fundamental falsities of his assumed position. The first falsity is his fundamental contention that Ireland is a special land of mysticism and demonism, sowlths, thivishes, fairies, warlocks, and the rest. The second falsity is that Mr William Butler Yeats is distinctively Irish or Celtic in any sense ancient or modern.

After admitting Mr Yeats’s assumed or innate “delight in the vague, the mystical, and the unreal,” the writer in the Cyclopædia unkindly, but accurately, adds that “these qualities are not the peculiar characteristic of Irish folklore any more than they are the peculiar characteristic of the Scandinavian sagas. In every race and in every literature, if you go back to the primitive myth and the unrecorded tradition, you go back to the vague, the mystical, and the unreal.”

[...] Will Mr W. B. Yeats at long last take the hint from such admirers and henceforth advertise himself as strictly non-Irish and non-Celtic? A mere change in the nomenclature of his poems and dramas will suffice. He need not rewrite anything. Let him delete the Cathleens and Maurteens and Granias and Diarmuids, [46] and write in Blanchefleur and Ganelon and Hildegard and Parsival; and, presto ! the transformation is complete. The Council of the Irish Literary Society will proudly hail an original genius among the Sons of Erin in the walk of the Minnesingers or the Troubadours. The callow youths who form his choir will exult at the avatar of their Orpheus in the far domain of them who sang Gudrun and Childe Roland and Charlemaine. Or, best of all, let him take his literary gear to the land of the Arabian Nights Entertainments. The associations of Djinn and Afreet will suit his occultist genius to a hair. The briefest rebaptizing will be ample to furnish forth his Oisin or Forgael as the most perfect Sinbad the Sailor ! The further from Ireland, anyhow, Mr Yeats is kind enough to transplant his translated Cathleens and Granias the better for Irish sentiment and for Celtic tradition.

Nor need anybody apprehend a national catastrophe in consequence. Without saying that he “never will be missed,” the sober fact is that Mr Yeats does not bulk very large in the vision of the Irish Nation. Take from him the Chief Secretary’s Lodge and a section of congenial spirits on a section of the London [47] press, and his Celtic Revivalism assumes modest dimensions. As one of the keenest as well as most erudite of Celtic scholars, Mr Alfred Nutt, has remarked of the very limited popularity of the Yeatsite School in Ireland, “ In so far as they are popular in Ireland, that popularity is a reflex of English opinion.” The Stage Irishman of Pseudo-Celtic Drama may have many gifts and graces. Only he is not Irish. And one consequence of this peregrinitas and this alienation has been that the Cardinal Primate of Ireland declared that he could not conceive an Irish audience so dead to religion and patriotism as to listen to Mr Yeats’s principal contribution. [End.]

F. HUGH O’DONNELL

“But for the English, Ireland would be a nation.” I may fairly class this statement as familiar to all who have heard of Irish politics. “Ireland would be a nation, but for the Irish.” This truth, as fundamental as the former, is at any rate less popular west of the Irish Sea. Yet at no epoch of Irish history since first the Normans and Welshmen of the Plantagenet landed on the shores of Leinster has it ceased for a moment to dominate the situation. The princes of the McCarthys and O’Briens who rushed to fling themselves on their knees before Henry II of England and Anjou, the Irish bishops and abbots who met in council to ratify the Pope’s concession of His Holiness’s Irish island to His Hohness’s Filius Dilectus at Westminster, have had an unbroken succession of similar spirits. Our generation has added a variation or amplification to the eternal verities of the past. “But for the Irish Americans, Ireland would be a nation.” The part which the dollars of the comfortable multitudes, oratorically known to Dublin audiences as Our Exiled Brethern, have played in the demoralisation and denationalisation of Irish Ireland — much more than in disaffection anywhere — is apparently unsuspected by the profoundest critics of Irish events who hail from any country outside of Ireland. In Ireland itself the operation of the American dollars has naturally not tended to invite independent criticism, which would mean personal exposures. Yet nothing is more certain than the fact that it has been the American money which destroyed the Home Rule of Isaac Butt, just as it has filled, or partially filled, the collecting carpet-bags of [vi] every emissary of the mechanical majorities that have misrepresented Ireland since a quarter of a century.

The chapters descriptive of the origins of the Home Rule movement had to summarise causes and the working of causes far before the times of the actual supporters of Mr. Butt’s programme of policy. Remembering that this book is addressed to English readers at least as much as to Irish ones, the careful study of these historical preludes of the modern history of the Irish ParUamentary party will assist in facilitating correct judgments on subsequent persons and events. The Disfranchisement Act of 1829 which stopped the grant of leases to tenants was the source of the worst of later evils in the rural districts. Men of to-day, bred in the belief that Irish landowners were a cross between fools and demons, will hardly understand O’Connell’s testimony, that “on the whole, the Irish landowners did their duty by their countrymen during the famine,” unless it be realised that the famine evictions were not the work of the Irish landlords, but of the Quarter-Acre Clause of the Parliament at Westminster.

The connexion of Mr. Butt’s Home Rule with the independent parliamentarianism of Grattan and the patriots before the Act of Union, and the absolute dissimilarity of both Grattan’s and Butt’s policies from what is called Gladstonian Home Rule, may be a recommendation for the latter, but forms a fundamental consideration in any case. Gladstonian Home Rule, which began in the tame submission of Parnell to Mr. Gladstone’s ascendancy over Mr. Parnell’s party, subsequently involved the piteous destruction of the superseded figure-head, but earned no promise of vitality from that repulsive tragedy of feebleness and baseness. The history of the Parliamentary party from Ireland since the extinction of Parnell was contained in germ in the acceptance of Mr. Gladstone’s ultimatum by the majority in Committee-room No. 15.

The true origins of the Active Policy, which sank to [vii] Obstruction, but which was founded as Intervention and something more, will be as new as they are incontrovertible. The revelations in the pages concerned with the narrative of what occurred behind the scenes of Parnellism and Crime should provoke serious inquiries and the rejection of some astute falsehoods.

From the very first intimately associated with, or advantageously placed to observe, all the most important leaders and leading adherents of the parties and movements between 1870 and 1895 in particular; long resident in the great capitals of Europe and acquainted with their poHticians and diplomatists; I had opportunities of exact information, which have never been enjoyed by any previous writer on recent Irish affairs. Unaccustomed to disguise my convictions and incapable of disrespecting the honest opinions of others, I write as a Nationalist who maintains the whole of the rights of my country; but who equally recognises that Englishmen are patriots, and that, through causes that can hardly be called Irish, freedom of speech and opinion is more frequently found outside of Ireland than within it.

With regard to much of this history, as I am addressing a new generation, it may be well to remind or inform the public that in the height of my political influence and popularity in Ireland, I deliberately rejected that position rather than accept the programme of the Land League and the dishonour of the American money. I abandoned the double distinction to advisers and allies of Ministers of the Crown.

F. HUGH O’DONNELL.
London, March 1910.

On Irish-language revival - Chapter X: ‘it was into this unpromising condition of affairs that Dr Douglas Hyde, some dozen years ago, brought his enthusiastic advocacy and his untiring resolution [...] The unenthusiastic attitude of the hierarchy in face of the Gaelic League has been naturally reflected in the aloofness of the parliamentarians, which has been bitterly deplored by official organs of Dr Douglas Hyde’s association ... it cannot be concealed that there are many zealots of Gaelic today who would wipe out for young Irishmen the records of European culture, and confine their studies to the fragments of an undeveloped form of speech with no practical connexion with modern or ancient civilisation.. a Gaelic wigwam ... The Sinn Fein movement as it is called, has come with the professed mission to realise in politics and society the ideal in letters of the forementioned braves of the Gaelic wigwam. ..a theory of strict abstention from representation in the Imperial parliament ... It is, in fact, a selfish-sounding and undignified equivalent for patriotism or nationalism, and can accordingly be decribed as novel in appearance and antiquated in fact.’ (History, Chap. X; rep. in Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Derry: Field Day Co. pp.333-39.