[...] That nationalism, unlike its eighteenth-century precursor, Patriotism, relies crucially on an awareness that Ireland is distinct and distinctive, culturally individual and discrete, and therefore deserving of political autonomy. What is more, this cultural individuality is linked specifically, and with increasing emphasis and exclusiveness, to the nation’s Gaelic roots. In other words, a Gaelic- oriented cultural and historical self-image takes shape which is quite literally central to the Irish drive for self-determination.
 It is this self-image which I set out to investigate. How was Ireland seen in the nineteenth century? How was Ireland’s cultural and historical profile silhouetted against other nations and, primarily, against the neighbouring isle? What specific individuality was ascribed to it? In tackling such a topic, it became clear that this self-image was something far more important and fundamental than a mere stereotype as to the Irish national character or similar commonplaces and cliches. ‘Imagining Ireland’ involved assessing and indeed constructing the nation’s history, and also involved the development of a historical awareness which situates Ireland, not just synchronically amidst the other nations from which it is distinct, but also diachronically in a historical development out of which it has grown and by which it has been shaped. As 1 argue in the following pages, the quest for a national sense of identity was twofold: it was national in its trans-partisan agenda, attempting to work out a shared sense of identity applicable to all Irishmen and transcending their internal sectarian and social differences; it was also national in that it attempted to distil such an invariant and universally shared awareness out of a contentious and conflict-ridden past, transcending thereby the violent vicissitudes of history and extracting from them an essential and unchanging principle of Irishness. The nineteenth-century history of the Irish imagination is characterized by a long and widespread quest for a Hegelian, authentic, trans- historical answer to the old question, ‘What ish my nation?’ ( p.4.)
  There is always the temptation to speculate whether or not such imaginings of Ireland were ‘true’ or ‘false’, or to pronounce judgement as to whether they were ‘right’ or ‘wrong’; that, I believe, is a misguided and misleading approach. The various imaginings of Ireland were, first and foremost, contentious; they formed part of a contemporary debate, evoked important and diverse reactions, and should therefore first and foremost be studied as part of that debate. Multiple ideas were advanced in many ways by different authors; the first task is to bring a sense of order into this chorus of voices, to see who echoed whom, who was contradicted by whom, and how the various patterns of imagination were distributed and transmitted, disseminated, received and licked into shape along different channels of communication. What we are dealing with is a manifestation of the imagination; to comment upon it in terms of its ‘truth’ or ‘falsity’ places the historian in a spurious position of quasi-superior insight into the nature of things ‘as they really are’. The imagination does not move in channels of truth or falsity. Is Wordsworth speaking the ‘truth’ when he states that there is blessing in this gentle breeze? Is it any use to establish whether or not the newspapers were really right in claiming that snow was general all over Ireland? By the same token, it [5] sees more useful to establish which images and imaginative patterns were most effective, most influential and most formative in later developments, at best, it becomes possible on that basis to spot inner tensions and rhetorical stratagems which to a latter-day reader may be more obvious than to contemporaries - i.e., to analyse the strategies of the discursive verbalization and expression of certain images.
[...] The challenge, as it appears to me, is to study the movement of ideas and attitudes, images and perceptions within the culture sphere, from journalistic to historiographical to literary and critical discourse, and to assess the specificity of the traffic around the the specific and somehow special genre of imaginative literature. Literary texts can be studied in the extent that to which they engage with ideas that are doing the rounds at the time, expressed in other non-fictional genres, and in the extent to which they disseminate and transform such ideas and feed them back, in a specific form and rhetoric, into the cutlural-political system.

[...I]t may be useful to reflect that Leopold Bloom had only two works of Anglo-Irish literatureon his bookshelf: the poems of Denis Florence MacCarthy and Allingham’s Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland, neither of them now in print [...]

The typical plot movement in romantic Anglo-Irish fiction is that of a cosmopolitan character moving towards Ireland; but that authentic Ireland is encountered through intermediaries, by hearsay, at one remove. The ontological remoteness, the liminal shadow-existence of an ideal, true Ireland means the westward progress towards Ireland will never really culminate in an arrival: it will be like one of Zeno’s paradoxes, where A never gets to B, because one must first get towards the mid-way point between A and B, or rather, first to the half-way mark between A and the mid-way point. Two inferences remain to be made. First: if there is an ineluctable, impassable mid-way rbetween the English point of view and the ultimate representandum, the Real Ireland, then that mid-way point is taken up by the representation itself: the text, which, as we have seen, purposefully exteriorizes itself from Ireland in order to mediate, to represent. Like an importunate tourist guide, the text says ‘Ireland is there; I am here to show it to you.’ The self-consciousness of the description (which devotes a good deal of space and attention to establishing its own credentials) interposes itself between reader and subject-matter, hides Ireland from view, indeed pushes it beyond the horizon. In this manner (and my second inference) Ireland is made exotic by the self-same descriptions which purport to represent or explain Ireland. Ironically, it is the Irish author who is responsible for the fancy exoticism of the Princes of Inismore and Counts O’Halloran, in a constant play where the request, ‘see how deserving of your attention’, shifts into ‘see how unusual Ireland is, how strange, how exotic’. That is the direct consequence of a regional literature which tries to establish its discreteness, its regionalism vis-&gravea;-vis an exoteric readership by means of local colour. It is in this aspect also that nineteenth-century (romantic) Anglo-Irish fiction distinguishes itself radically from eighteenth-century (Patriot) practice.

I have called this procedure one of auto-exoticism, a mode of seeing, presenting and representing oneself in one’s otherness (in this case, one’s non-Englishness [37]. This auto-exoticism is, I content, essentially post-Union, marking a sensible difference beetween eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discursive practice, marking a real shift in the articulation of an Irish cultural identity. [....]

[Remarking on The Story of Ireland (1881) - a pamphlet by Dion Boucicault [q.v.; espec. under Quotations - supra:] This is almost worthy of Michelet. The clever and highly apposite use of the vertebrate metaphor makes it possible to link the chaos of Irish history to the [156] country’s oppression under foreign rule and loss of nationhood, and to see the opposing principles of independence and bloody oppression, not only as a matter of historical fact, but also as a problem for Irish people to comprehend their own past. Under foreign dominance, even Irish history has fallen apart and loosed mere anarchy upon the historical record. Thus historical consciousness truly becomes a nationalist enterprise, and sorting out the past becomes a necessary step in the reconstitution of national independence.

And so, history was revived to inspire the present. Not only that, but the reviving of history was performed time and again, by writer after writer, each of them telling the old story afresh, like a needle stuck in the groove, in an uncanny, obsessive recycling process of the past, of the old familiar, oft-told story of the past. If history, from Griffin to Wills to Boucicault to Stephen Dedalus, is a nightmare, it is particularly so because of its uncanniness, which, following Freud’s intriguing essay on that subject, is characterized by a combination of familiarity, incomprehensibility and insistent recurrence. [Freud, “The Uncanny” (1919), in Art and Literature, ed. A. Dickson (Penguin 1985, pp.335-36.] in 242 Irish history is familiar, it is incomprehensible, and it re-occurs again and again, as in a nightmare or a neurosis. If extended to the adjoining sphere of the literary imagination, this would imply that it might be rewarding to see the imaginaire of nineteenth-century Irish fiction (especially Irish Gothic), not just against the background of the post-Burkean Sublime, but rather against the background of the Uncanny as typified by Freud. Nineteenth-century Irish history appears to shift from das Erhabene to das Unheimliche.

[Leerssen discusses the tendency of conservative politics to criticize the persistence of historical memory on the part of beaten peoples and espec. Edmund Burke’a view that “collective guilt cannot [...] outlast the lifetime of the individuals concerned” (Leersson dixit, p.180) ]:

In Hardiman’s case, that view is emphatically set aside. Collective guilt is remembered, shared oppression held up as an example, and an ethical debit-credit relation is used to establish continuity between past and present. This tendency was to be an indispensable ingredient in Irish nationalism, right down to the invocation of the dead generations, quoted, under God, as the most important legitimizing authority in Pearse’s 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic. [181]

It was precisely this aspect of Hardiman’s work which conservative, unionist opinion took its most violent exception to. In his famous four-part review ol Hardiman’s collection for the Dublin University magazine [1834; 3, 465-78; 4, 152-67; 444-67; 514-30, with sel. of trans. subjoined, 530-42; all given in Leerssen, p.277, n.47]. Samuel Ferguson engaged in a strenuous and brilliantly-argued contest for the question as to who could claim to be the natural heir and spokesman for the dead generations and ancient Ireland in general. What gives Hardiman, of all people, the right to impose on ‘Erin’s sons’, from first to last, a standard as to what it takes to be lrishmen’? What gives Hardiman, of all people, the right to claim for his own (to the exclusion of other persuasions in Irish society) the heritage of ancient Gaelic culture? Why should Irish Catholic nationalism be exclusively allowed to trace its parentage back to the native tradition, condemning all other persuasions in Irish society to a hateful lineage of foreigners and alien oppressors? The review flings down a proud challenge at anyone presuming to interpose himself between the Protestant Anglo-Irish intellectual Ferguson, and that Irish past which he, Ferguson, chooses to affiliate to. And there was nothing which angered Ferguson so much as Hardiman’s half-hearted acknowledgement of Catholic Emancipation:

[Hardiman] had written the greater portion of his notes and comments previous to Catholic emancipation; and, in them, had freely indulged in what those who would agree with Mr Moore would denominate natural indignation against England and the English. [. . .] [But even now, Hardiman] does not expunge an expression of inveterate and unchangeable hatred of Clan Luther, and the Saxon, but disfigures his book, and disgraces himself by flinging in the teeth of his manumission, the whole miserly hoardings of his hatred when a slave (Ferguson, op. cit., p.464).

Ferguson’s review (each of its four parts dealing with one of the sections in Hardiman’s anthology) accordingly follows a dual track: one, to congratulate Hardiman and to celebrate his way of making the native Irish tradition available io a latter-day reading public; the other, to challenge the Catholic, nationalist complexion that the Irish native tradition acquires in Hardiman’s presentation, and to advance an alternative mode of coming to terms with this heritage from the past. The review is one of Ferguson’s masterpieces (though overly florid and pugnacious in places; it is eighty-four pages long and was written when the author was twenty-four years old). In order to demonstrate his right to participate in the cultivation and appropriation of the native tradition, Ferguson adds a num ber of translations of his own, as opposed to the ones contained in Hardiman’s anthology which he dismisses as deficient in ‘poetical art’, though not in ‘poetical feeling’. These translations are the first efforts at what Ferguson was to publish much later as Lays of the Western Gael (1865). In order to recuperate a stake in the national, native tradition, Hardiman praises the selection of ancient material throughout while reserving his opprobrium for the translations. These are called ‘spurious, puerile, unclassical - lamentably bad’ and are blamed for attempting ‘to elevate the tone of the original to a pitch of refined poetic art altogether foreign from the whole genius and rationale of its composition’ (p.454n., p.455n.) In other words, whereas Hardiman’s translators had renddered the material according to contemporary taste, Ferguson sees this as a betrayal of the primitive, artless and spontaneous vigour of the originals. To that extent he follows Edward Bunting’s preference of genuineness over contemporary appeal. That is as may be; indeed Ferguson’s translations read better nowadays, to this author at least, than the ones he chided; but a political parti-pris in this criticism comes out when he exempts Drummond, among the translators, from his wrath. “Perhaps we are prejudiced in Dr. Drummond’s favour, in consequence of the absence of anything like political hatred or sectarian malignity in his contributions.’ ‘Accordingly, also, Ferguson refuses to see Roisin Dubh as a national allegory, choosing instead to take a provocatively Orangist view: it is a poem describing the plight of a love-stricken priest, who is caught between his tender passion and his vow of celibacy. Ferguson concludes with harsh, sectarian humour:

We sympathize with the priest’s passion, we pity his predicament; but we despise his dispensatory expedients, and give him one parting advice, to pitch his vows to the Pope, the Pope to purgatory, marry his black rose-bud, and take a curacy from the next Protestant rector?

Such occasional slips into bigotry fundamentally invalidate Ferguson’s criticism of Hardiman. Hardiman is blamed for sectarianism and ‘a spirit of petty anti-Anglicanism’ (p.515); yet what Ferguson offers instead is not some sense of trans-sectarian national harmony, but rather an alternative, aristocratic-sectarian partiality. True, there is some justification in his complaint that ‘Mr Hardiman has interposed between us and our countrymen at large’ (p.516), and that ‘he certainly holds out no very alluring prospect of reconciliation’ (p.515); and Ferguson hits the nail on the head when he points out that Hardiman, in alienating non-Catholics, perpetuates the very divisions he denounces:

Such, at least, is our impression of Mr. Hardiman’s feeling towards that portion of his countrymen [the Protestants], with whom we join in preferring things as they are, to things as we apprehend his party’s design would make them. It has ever been the policy of that party to affect the monopoly of native Irish sympathies, and, standing between the aristocracy and the people, to intercept the best charities of society (p.516).

- but what does Ferguson offer by way of an alternative? In voicing the attitude of the ‘aristocracy’, he speaks, not of ‘fellow-countrymen’, but of ‘natives’ and ‘peasantry’, as a charming but backward primitive society swayed by ingrained papist loyalty; he invariably uses the third person, and describes native Ireland as something to be led and improved (Ferguson calls for ‘Education based upon the only true basis - Scriptural education’, 448). Surely he cannot presume io blame nationalists for not entertaining a similar sense of superiority, for engaging in a closer identification with the peasant portion of society; nor is it fair on [183] his aloofness.

There is also some disingenuousness in Ferguson’s anger at Hardiman’s denunciations of penal oppression, charging him with ‘fretful, querulous, undignified malice’ and ‘rancorous and puerile malignity’ (p. 515). Ferguson is particularly outraged, as we have seen, at the fact that Hardiman did not mitigate his aggressive anti-English glosses after the enactment of Catholic Emancipation. But does he mean to imply that historians may no longer indict the eighteenth-century penal laws, since these laws are now revoked? Is Catholic Emancipation to be seen as a retroactive cancelling of all past sectarian injustice, which should therefore henceforth remain unmentionable, smothered under the cover of historical oblivion in the name of reconciliation?

Part of the animus is undoubtedly inspired by Ferguson’s refusal to be shut out from the solidarity between Hardiman and the native tradition. Ferguson was deeply and sympathetically interested in the Irish past, and felt alienated from his own loyalty by Hardiman’s enterprise. Witness the florid closing paragraph of his review, in which Ferguson triumphantly congratulates himself In almost duelistic terms at having savaged Hardiman, at having driven him from the field, and having uprooted his presumptions. The fierce and feverish rhetoric bespeaks an eagerness to claim his title to a shared Irish culture and Irish history:

Still great as is our remorse for Mr. Hardiman at death’s door [i.e., so severely battered by the hammering Ferguson has given himl, greater, we confess, would have been our chagrin had he, in spite of us, remained the mote in Ireland’s eye. [. . .| and therefore, while weeping Mr. Hardiman’s misfortune, we smile to behold our successful dislodgment of so formidable an eyesore, and take leave of our companion through some months, with a sincere hope that we may meet him again in his walk of native literature, even though he should sow his path with brambles as thorny as those which we have been trying to weed away from about the Irish Minstrelsy? (p.528-29.)

But how, precisely, does Ferguson himself see the native tradition and its verse remains? In Ferguson’s appreciation of Irish popular poetry, there is a good deal of patronizing primitivism. The rapturous lyricism of the love poems is linked to lilt! habit of the peasantry of marrying early, undaunted by the material inexpedience of such rashness: the young couples may not be able to live decently, but Irish swains and maidens are ‘unconscious of the shame of poverty’? There h loom for a condescending smile at this reckless charm-in-rags: ‘If he but justify his imprudence in such songs as Mary Chuisle and Ellen a Roon, we could forgive him’ (p.167).

This attitude of paternalist sympathy towards a charming but untrustworthy populace leads to a very complex stance when Ferguson has to face the fact that which Irish poetry, regardless of the way Hardiman chooses to gloss or translate it, is rebellious or seditious in nature. Ferguson, in trying to account for [184] the enduring loyally to native traditions and to the Stuart cause, again marshalls [sic] some condescending national psychology to his aid: the Irish character is marked by a tendency towards blind loyalty, as opposed to the more feudal, English type; ‘In fact, this self-encumbering excess of devotion characterizes every operation of Irish loyalty’. It means that, unlike England, Ireland never developed a parliamentary check on monarchical power; instead there was the abject celebration of the chief’s supremacy in bardic poetry. It accounts for the stubborn Catholicism of the country.

On concluding such a record of misplaced and insulated loyalty obstructing its own exercise by its own excess, and pressing that valour and fortitude which should have been applied to the preservation of the country, into the vexatious service of petty feuds and self-consuming factions, who can avoid lamenting the perversion of so noble, but so dangerous, a quality of the Irish heart? Had it centered on a monarch, it would have given the means of a vigorous and healthy government; but it never centered on a monarch; nothing but the tremendous engine of Roman Catholicism could ever collect or fire it (p.463).

This attitude is very close to the bigotry of someone like Tennyson (‘The Kelts are so utterly unreasonable! The stupid clumsy Englishman - knock him down, kick him under the tail, kick him under the chin, do anything to him, he gets on his legs again and goes on; the Kelt rages and shrieks and tears everything to pieces!’ [Allingham’s Diary, p.298].) Given such a sense of radical difference, why should Ferguson wish to identify with native Ireland at all?

Yet the need for a national, and Irish, identification is there. At the very outset of the review, it is stated that ‘We will not suffer two of the finest races of men in the world, the Catholic and Protestant, or the Milesian and Anglo-Irish, to be duped into mutual hatred by the tale-bearing go-betweens [...] (p.457); and remarkably, in the very year that Ferguson savaged Hardiman, he himself began a series of historical tales in the selfsame Dublin University magazine under the title Hibernian Nights’ Entertainments [Dec. 1834, pp.674-90, &c.], evoking the courage and derring-do of Red Hugh O’Donnell in his brave fight against English oppression, and lovingly adding a wealth of mythological and antiquarian detail, interpolating digressive myths and tales. The Hibernian Nights’ Entertainments are a remarkable effort at that almost-impossible genre, an Irish historical novel; Ferguson as much as announces this project in the first part of the Hardiman review, when he recounts the story of Red Hugh (pp.158-9). What is more, he tends to conclude the various instalments of that review with poignant celebrations of Ireland and his loyalty to that country. The first installment ends on an elegiac appreciation of Carolan (‘the last flicker of the expiring light, and all has been darkness since’), followed by a quotation of Moore’s “The harp that once” (p. 477); the third part ends with his translation of Mac Conmara’s Ban-chnoic Eireann oigh (“The fair hills of Holy Ireland”), concluding this homage with the addition ERIN GO BRAGH! (p. 67), and the same poem in a slightly different translation also concludes his final selection of translated specimens (p.542).

[185]

The reiterated choice of “The fair hills ol holy Ireland” as Ferguson’s own locus of Irish identity and Irish loyally is significant. It is already present in the review’s opening sentence, which pre-echoes its closure and announces its main theme: “O ye fair hills of holy Ireland, who is he who ventures to stand between us and your Catholic sons’ goodwill?’ (p.465). This bespeaks a sense of Ireland which is in the first place territorial: Ireland is a country. It is this sense of place which unites the loyalties of Milesian and Anglo-Irish:

This sacred loyalty |the native love of the country] we have reserved for our conclusion, as a green spot of neutral ground, where all parties may meet in kindness, and part in peace. We have prosecuted our inquiry after the nature of Irish sentiment through many a perplexing and many dangerous topic, ‘per ignes suppositos cinceri doloso’. Grateful to our parched feet is the dewy sward of shamrocks; and here, standing on the firm ground of love for our country, we call for a chorus of Irishmen of all denominations to “The Fair Hills of Holy Ireland” (p. 467).

Sentiment like this makes it clear why the topographical labour of love that was undertaken by the Ordnance Survey should have been invested with so much hope and enthusiasm, not in the last place by Ferguson himself? Indeed, given i hr political, religious and even ethnic dividedness of Irish society, the shared sense of place is one of the few neutral points of non-contentious loyalty left, and it is no coincidence that the great career of Petrie should have begun in landscape painting.

Ferguson’s political attitude emphatically endorsed, as we have seen, the Protestant Ascendancy. It appears that he would ideally like to see Ireland as another Scotland, Dublin as another Edinburgh: both countries led by a British-oriented, loyalist and English-speaking elite centered, next to London, on their own metropolis, loyal to their British status but proud of their non-English heritage, bound in benevolent paternalism to their hinterland of highland peasantry. As an Ulsterman, Ferguson seems to have been more open to the notion ol Ireland and Scotland as sister kingdoms, rather than seeing the relations with Britain purely as Irish-English ones. He was a committed Protestant and a firm aristocrat, i.e., a believer in the justness of hierarchical divisions of society. What is more, he endorses the post-Romantic belief in ethnic, inborn national character in racial-essentialist terms:

we believe that great [a] proportion of the characteristics of a people are [sic] inherent, not fictitious; and that there are as essential differences between the genius’s as between the physical appearances of nations. We believe that no dissipating continuance of defeat, danger, famine, or misgovernment, could ever, without the absolute infusion of Milesian blood, Hibernicize the English peasant; and that no stultifying operation of mere security, plenty, or laborious regularity could ever, without actual physical trans-substantiation, reduce the native Irishman to the stolid standard of the sober Saxon. (p.154-55).

Indeed, Ferguson attitude in the growing debate between Saxonists and Celticists is quite remarkable, and, again, bespeaks his desire of the right to identity with Ireland. In an (anonymous) article in the Dublin University Magazine in 1852, Ferguson argues the astounding case that it is wrong to call the Milesian poulation of Ireland Celtic. In fact, the Irish Milesians, so far from being the opposite of the English Saxons, are themselves of Gothic (i.e., Germanic) descent! The true Celts of Ireland were a bronze age culture of megalith-builders (so Ferguson’s case goes), who were ousted by the iron-age Gothic Milesians, their inferioirs in civility but more effient at warfare. Thsi idiosyncratic juggling of ethnic terminology effectively muddles the terms of the racis Irish-English opposition as it was conducted at the time; it allows Ferguson to celebrate the greatness of the ancient Celts without having to kowtow to Ireland’s later-day, boorish Milesians, and it means that etnically speaking, Milesians and Anglo-Irish are both representatives of the same category, neither having a superior title to the other in claiming right of presence. In the racial layering of the often-captured territory of Ireland, the older layers have become mere story. Tuatha D´e; Danann have become Allingham’s fairies, the Celtics have become Ferguson’s gold-working dommen builders, and the the Anglo-Irish are no less legitimate a presence than the Gaelic-speaking peasantry themselves; Ferguson’s implict parallel is the Saxon conquest of Celtic Britain which was being glorified in the neighbouring isle by Kemble, Froude, Freeman and Green. Ferguson’s modern divorces the present-day peastantry from ireland’s ancient civilization and givesn both "races" of modern ireland (Milesians and Anglo-Irish, Gothic one and all) an equal footing in their Irishness.

This is very much Ferguson’s idiosyncrasy, his attempt to establish his own national footing in irish-cum-Protestant terms; but even in its very idiosyncrasy, it formulates a sense of contradiction which was to haunt the Irish national awareness through the next half-century. Essentially Irishness should be contradictorily manifested in the two idealized but irreconcilable notions of past and peasant: the ancient, aristocractic society of pre-Norman Ireland, and the present-day, demotic community of the peasantry. (End sect.; p.186).