‘The Great Gods Die’ [‘If we turn to early Irish literature, as we naturally may, to see what sort of people the Irish were in the infancy of the race, we find ourselves wandering in delighted bewilderment through a darkness shot with lightning and purple flame. One expects the beginnings of any people to be dark; the darkness at the beginning of the story of the Irish mind is an unnatural darkness. There is somewhat too much of the supernatural about it. Alternatively we may feel that here a racial imagination has, from the start, got out of control; or we may simply say that early Irish literature is wildly romantic; or that the popular idea of the Celt as a romantic is correct; or that the nineteenth century, in exploiting this romantic quality, committed only the fault of piling on top of something already sufficiently embroidered by nature a lot of superfluous William Morris trappings. But the impression of a supernatural infusion is, I think, far and away the most important one.

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The Celt’s sense of the Otherworld has dominated his imagination and affected his literature from the beginning. So I see him at any rate struggling, through century after century, with this imaginative domination, seeking for a synthesis between dream and reality, aspiration and experience, a shrewd knowledge of the world and a strange reluctance to cope with it, and tending always to find the balance not in an intellectual synthesis but in the rhythm of a perpetual emotional oscillation. (p.11)

[...] All wonder had gone out of such Saxon pieces as The Fight at Maldon; what remains is an eroded human interest. A choking superabundance of wonder dims the human figures in the Celtic sagas. The scribes who tried to humanise Gods into credible heroes, were, in so far, moving towards intellectual freedom; when they turned them into incredible saints, they were moving backwards again into intellectual slavery; when the scribes were ficto-historians they were, quite simply, selling their mythology for a mess of patriotic pottage. [22].

To sum up, the Celt never formulated a religion. The very extravagance with which his imagination peopled this life with glorious, half-mortal beings tells us that though he could sublimate this world he could not transcend it. His idea of Heaven is free of Time but it is rooted in Place. He never passed out of the animistic stage of belief in what we may call devils or angels, and Christianity was therefore easily able to push aside a paganism so sparse of thought that we may say it was without thought. imagination alone cannot formulate a religion; it can scarcely even aspire to it. Something was, perhaps is, missing in the Celt of whose presence we are at once aware in the Greeks, the Hebrews and the Oriental peoples. Was it that they had an inadequate ethical sense? Was it that they loved life too well, so that one may think, for example, that the concept of the Fall of Man, the greatest contribution made by the Jews to modern religious thought, could never have come from a people so imaginatively in love with Man himself? (p.24)

[Note that O’Faolain cites the ‘old West Cork woman who was recently and, “Do you really believe in the fairies?”, and who replied, “I do not, but they’re there!”, p.23].

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[‘... I think one can tell safely that they were, whatever they professed to be, pure pagans. There is not the slightest trace of even a pantheistic belief in their Nature verse; Nature was, and nothing more’, p.29].

[‘In fact no recognised legal system ... existed at all. The so-called Brehon Laws ... were ... quite simply, a highly idealised picture ... of what popular practices and habits and traditions would be like ... in terms of law if legalists were asked by some dictator to codify these habits ...’, p.38; The patriotic Irish view of the conquest of Ireland by colonising Britain is that her civilisation was finally destroyed by a more efficient and ruthless military organisation. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that the consolidated Tudor state was too strong an opponent for Irish regionalism ... there lay in the Irish mind, and still may lie, atavistically indestructible, an ineradicable love of individual liberty’, p.39-40]

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‘Asceticism and Classicism’ [apropos comments in Kenney’s Sources, ‘... in the later medieval texts ... this pagan survival is most marked; as if Christianity, in becoming more and more widely accepted, became debased accordingly’ [p.46]

‘[I]t is above all necessary that a strong parent church should keep a careful watch lest these [monastic] out-liers should be exploited by the secular forces about them. In Ireland there was no organised parent church to do this. The old Irish passion for blood and place, and other passions as well, ran riot until the Norman reformation established central church government’, pp.47-48].

‘The Norman Gift’

[‘It was the Normans who first introduced the Irish mind to politics. ... They initiated politics as the word was to be understood in Ireland to the end of the Irish Parliamentary Party in 1922’, p.61; ‘they brought into the landlocked lagoon of Gaelic literature welcome gushes from the world’s seas’, p.64; note ftn., ‘Is it necessary to remind ourselves that the Norman invasion, under the Tudor invasion, was carried out by Catholics?’, p.56; note the usage, ‘paramount chiefs’, p.63].

‘1579 [being date of Desmond Rebellion] is the operative date for the effective beginning of a new, and thenceforth indissoluble merger of two ideas whose slogan has ever since powerfully dominated the Irish mind - Faith and Fatherland’, p.70; Of the Reformation: ‘Religion has thus, at the end of along and tangled period, made Norman and Irish comrades in distress if in nothing else’, p.71].

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The New Peasantry [‘.. his virtues are always passive virtues, not the active virtues of initiative, direction, or invention. He will never, for example, contribute generative or revolutionary ideas. These come from elsewhere’, p.78; ‘the folk-mind is the repository of its own riches. It was not to the rich big farmers but to the poor little men that Yeats went ...’, [p.79]; ‘no physical continuity in Ireland like to the physical continuity in Britain, i.e., no ancient villages [&c.] ... we have, that is, a peasantry in an unfurnished countryside. Britain has a well-furnished countryside but no peasantry’, p.81].

The Anglo-Irish [‘Berkeley, whose family had only been one generation in Ireland, could write at the close of his polemic against Newton, “We Irish think otherwise”’ and that the two great Protestant defenders of Irish political rights in the eighteenth century, Swift and Molyneux, were sympathetic to many purely native traditions, the one praising the Catholic gentry defeated at the Boyne, the other taking a living interest in the Irish language’, p.87; ‘The Patriot Party gave the native Irish some alleviations but their real gift was a great political lesson which was to dominate the popular imagination for the next hundred and forty years. they seized on the foreign troubles of England ... to found an armed force of Volunteers ...’, p.[8]9]; ‘The Rebels’ [‘The masses, then, had no other fighting leaders but Tone and The United Irishmen in the 1790s; and these were trying to build up a new mentality, a new kind, against every opposition’, [p.98]

‘The Rebel probably never cared. He was devoted to failure. He was a professional or vocational failure ... laughing cheerfully at his possible, indeed probable, fate.’, p.100; ‘What was it that the Irish Rebel always sacrificed? The better part of his life? Far worse, far more exhausting, harder far to bear, he sacrificed the better part of his mind. Men like Tone, Mitchel, Doheny, all of of them had smothered talents ...It was a drudge to them to “go down to the cabins of the people”’ [ p.104]; ‘All these men deprived themselves, and Ireland, of as much as they gave: they choked the critical side of their minds, they were good rebels in proportion as they were bad revolutionaries, so that their passion for change and their vision of change never pierced to organic change, halted dead at the purely modal and circumstantial’ [p.105]; ‘the whole of Irish patriotic literature ever since has either concerned itself with matters of sentiment rather than thought; or with interim solutions ...’, p.106.)

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[‘The eighteenth century elevated the priest spiritually in proportion as it debased him socially’, 109; ... does not occupy a central position in that picture until the nineteenth century’; ‘The cold, disapproving attitude of the clergy to rebellion ... fostered by Gallicanism of Maynooth’, p.107; ‘the priest in a country about 90 per cent Catholic is a barometer of the political emancipation of the majority’, p.111; ‘Each one makes a sacrifice of hs personality, in order to achieve the enlargement of power tha comes with membership of a great professional caste ... Because of this sacrifice one can never see the priest exclusively as a priest: his human personality is dedicated but not supressed; nor can we see him exclusively as a man: he has risen superior to normal human values, intercourse and sympathies, apart altogether from the fact that he is cut off from the lay-world by celibacy’, p.114; ‘... the Catholic Church in Ireland, as such, does not - with in the broadest limits of human justice, and indeed often tolerating human and clerical persecution to a degree astonishing to the layman - care a rap about the political Nation. It watches and waits and bargains all the time’, p.116; ‘walls of censorship have been raised to keep out books and films that raise awkward questions. Pracically every Irish writer of note has at one time or another been thrown to the lambs, i.e., in the interests of the most unspophisticated banned in his own country, some over and over again. But the air is uncensorable.’, p.126].

[‘In the Literary Revival we get the summary of the whole of this transformation of an ancient race, first deffeated, then depresssed, then virtually stripped of its traditions, into a modern people ... The new literature did more than summarise, it was itself an active agent. ... more ... than a number of isolated writers “expressing themselves”. It was a whole people giving tongue, and by that self-articulation approaching nearer than ever before to “intellectual imaginative freedom”’, p.129; ‘The Irish language has thus become the runic language of modern Ireland’, p.130; deals with Irish poetry of J. J. Callanan; ‘Without the national thing - at least up to own day - an Irish writer was always in danger of becoming a provincial by becoming an imitator’, p.135; ‘the national thing gave Irish writers the necessary resolution, or if they rejected the political tenets of nationalism, the necessary excitement to find in Ireland the stuff of their work’, p.136; touches on George Moore and Synge; ‘‘It the most creative period of Anglo-Irish literature (from about 1890 to 1920) the writers saw Irish life, in the main, romantically. It was as a poetic people that they introduced themselves to the world, and it is as a poetic people that we are still mainly known abroad’, p.137; ‘Most Irish literature since 1922 has been of an uncompromising scepticism, one might even say ferocity’ [cites Liam O’Flaherty], p.138; ‘It is probably that a greater proportion of native writers of note has been banned in Ireland than in Russia’, p.138; ‘an emotional Nationalism that is at least a quarter of a century out of date’, p.139; ‘the greatest curse of Ireland has not been English invasions or English misgovernment; it has been the exaggeration of Irish virtues - our stubbornness, conservatism, enormous arrogance, our power of resistance, our capacity for taking punishment, our laughter, endurance, fatalism, devotion to the past, all taken to that point where every human quality can become a vice instead of a virtue’, p.139; ‘Our Nationalism has been our Egoism. It was our lovely, shining youth’, pp.139-40 [See peroration on ‘Nationalism’, infra.]

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‘Nationalism, according to Marx, withers away when the national ego is satisfied. Any Irishman, looking at Britain and the British Empire, could only remark, with a certain dryness, that it certainly withers very nicely into Imperialism. Any Irishman, looking about him to-day in Ireland, can only remark wearily that Nationalism is an appetite that grows by what it feeds on. I see no signs of a withering of Irish Nationalism: but I record with satisfaction that it has bloated into xenophobia and chauvinism, and that what devoured Irish literature a hundred years ago is precisely what is vainly attempting to choke it to-day. I say it ‘with satisfaction’ because the great difference between a normal patriotism and a dropsical chauvinism is not so much that the one is healthy and the other is a disease as that the one is common property and the other is private property; by which I mean that I do not believe that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, but I do believe that chauvinism is, and although I have never studied the life of the original Sergeant Chauvin, who caused himself to be lowered into the grave by knotted tricolours, I should be greatly surprised if he did not also climb in the world under cover of the flag. Nationalism does not wither away, there are always too many people eager to water it with their tears. What happens is that when the true patriot has done his necessary work he carelessly leaves the Tree of Liberty to every crook and scamp who comes in his wake, and they, being false priests, neglect it and abuse it. The Tree of Liberty is not a thing of nature, it is a work of art, a much-grafted and tended plant, and when the faux-patriot gets it the old stock shoots up from below the graft, the scion dies, and you get nasty little crabs instead of ‘the apple-tree, the singing and the gold.’

 We will alway’s find true and unassuming and selfless patriots, in Ireland, and England, and every country in the world; but we will recognise them only in times of crisis, such as war, when patriotism is an expensive virtue; less often in times of peace when patriotism is profitable. Now that Ireland has achieved her Peace she has no temptation to exploit any other country under cover of ‘patriotism,’ but there are great temptations to Irishmen to exploit one another under cover of ‘patriotism,’ and pietism and goodness, and sweetness, and purity, and innocence, and the devil only knows what other hypocrisy; and small but virulent numbers of them have been doing this for the last twenty-five years. Since the last stage of a disease is always the worst one welcomes the foulness of Chauvinism, would have it, indeed, get worse and worse until it kills its victim. Blimpism, Jingoism, and all such impostures, were not killed in Britain until they reached their peak of folly, and a peak it was, a Capitoline Hill, to which the old guard retreated step by step waving the flag more and more wildly as commonsense and human decency pursued them. When Shaw was attacking them in England in the Preface to John Bull’s Other Island nobody, they least of all, paid any attention to him; and the domination of the politician by the militarist not only went on, unnoticed, but probably still goes on though now in a greatly attenuated way. They do not die badly, these ruffians, and they die slowly.

 If, then, chauvinism is still powerful in Ireland to-day, as it still is, and will probably go on being for a long time to come, it is not because it is widespread - it is not - but because it is the racket of the powerful few, and this one welcomes because to have arrived at a stage where the true patriotism, as the property of the many, and this false patriotism as the property of the few, thus clearly define themselves is to have arrived at that civilised state of tension when men of reason can at last appeal, in the name of a sensible and possible and decent and tolerable concept of nationality, not to the few against the many as it was in the days of Ireland’s slavery, but to the many against the few in these days of her liberation.

 This, at least, Irish writers have done: they have forced a concentration of power to expose itself, they have in part defined the conflict. The groups take shape - liberals, chauvinists, bureaucrats, pietists, professional peasants, native middle-classes, the frank and brutal racketeers, ‘friends’, ‘enemies’, tensions that are at last intelligible and recognisable. The enemy (however each group thinks of it) is no longer external, so that every Englishman now visiting Ireland has the pleasant experience of being received with open arms as a ‘friendly neutral,’ and will either be told not of the perfidities of John Bull but of the wickednesses of Paddy Citizen, or be told nothing at all except the latest joke or gossip, and so entertained with laughter and, blessedly unaware of subterranean conflicts, he will leave behind him the most good-humoured country in the world.