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Barbara Hayley & Christopher Murray, eds., Ireland and France - A Bountiful Friendship: Essays in Honour of Patrick Rafroidi (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1992), 221pp. index. CONTENTS: A. N. Jeffares [poems]; Brian Moore [appreciation]; FX Martin [17th c. Irish Capuchins in France and Holland]; Seamus Deane [Burke & Montesquieu]; Richard Kearney [Irish heritage in French Revolution]; Claude Fierobe [Maturin’s Albigenses]; Bernard Escarbelt [John Banim in France]; Jacqueline Genet [Yeats’s Crazy Jane]; Brigit Bramsback [James Stephens & Thomas Bodkin]; Maurice Harmon [Mary Lavin, moralist]; Rudiger Imhof [Post-Joycean experiment]; Robert Welch [Denis Devlin & Montaigne]; Terence Brown [Derek Mahon]; Pierre Joannon [French perspect. on Irish identity]; Maurice Goldring [Paisley/Le Pen]; Mark Mortimer [Etudes Irlandaises & Rafroidi]; Desmond Egan [L’Oeuillet Invisible/The Invisible Carnation, ded. poem & trans.] There is a remarkable dearth of fresh criticism here. I: ‘So Manie
in the Very Prime and spring of their youth, manie of them heirs of the
land’: The Friars of the Irish Capuchin Mission in Northern France
and the Low Countries 1591-1641’ (pp.7-16) Bibl.: TW Moody, ‘Rules for Contributors to Irish Historical Studies’, Dublin 1968. Contains list of standard Irish historical references. E Hogan, Chronological list of the Irish members of the Society of Jesus, 1550-1814; Note also that E. Hogan has edited Henry Fitzsimon, Flowers of Comfort (Dublin 1881), in which the author, who was guardian of the Irish College, Douai, ‘entreat[s] your Paternity [the Pope] also to arrange that part of the money collected by F. Archer, all through Ireland, shall be given to the Irish College at Douay, where we have the flower of our students.’ E Hogan, Distinguished Irishmen of the Seventeenth Century (London 1894). Also, Hogan, ed., [anon.,] Description of Ireland, 1598 (Dublin 1878). H Foley, Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, vii, pt. 2 (1883). T.T. Westropp [sic], ‘The ancient castles of the County of Limerick’, in RIA Proc., xxvi (1906-07), sect. C. J Lodge, Peerage of Ireland, i (Lon 1754) 2: Seamus Deane,
Montesquieu and Burke (pp.17-29) Cites Burke, Abridgement of English History (1757); An Appeal frm the New Whigs to the Old Whigs (1791). Burke learned from Montesquieu the art of analysing policital systems in relation to their prevailing circumstances and [...] his capacity to produce, in epigrammatic form, general truths [...] which combined gravitas with elegance. [17] Deane identifies Book XIX as central to the Lois. ‘It is central because in it we learn the main differences between moderate and despotic systems. Despotism had neither past nor future; it is the instant production of the individual will. Moderate governments are essentially evolutionary systems, belonging in part to the physical world of nature and the historical world of culture. The are susceptible to analysis for an account of their differnt forms but they are organisms of such delicacy that any sudden intervention, any upsetting of the fragile balance of powers which generates their growth, leads to ruin and inevitable, to the rigidities of despotism. [...] Burke exploits this to the full [...] reads Monesesquieu’s version of Oriental despotism as a prediction of totalitarian rule [20] Burke was too much a man of 1688, too much the long-term opponent of George III and ‘the king’s friends’ to sponsor the cause of monarchy in so outright a fashion [as Montesquieu] [22] Catholicism less productive of liberty (Lois, XXIV, v.). Que la religion convient mieux a une monarchie, et que la protestante s’accomode mieux d’une republique. .. all these elements operate in Burke in a different manner and for a different purpose [23] Montesquieu may have thought the [British] Constitution beautiful, Burke sees it as sublime. [24]: ‘To avoid the perfections of extreme, all of its several parts are so constituted, as not alone to answer their several ends, but also to limit and control the others; insomuch that [...] you will find its operation checked and stopped at a certain point [...] From thence its results, that in the British constitution, there is a perpetual treaty and compromise going on, sometimes openly, sometimes with less observation. To him who contemplates the British Constitution, as to him to contemplates the subordinate material world, it will always be a matter of the most curious investigation, to discover the secret of this mutual imitation. (Works, III, p.110.) The hell-hounds of war, on all sides, will be uncoupled and unmuzzled. The new school of murder and barbarism, set up in Paris, having destroyed (so far as in it lies) all the other manners and principles which have hitherto civilised Europe, will destroy also the mode of civilised wared, which, more than anything else, has distinguished the Christian world. (Works, II, p.542-43.) [25] Concordia discors (Montesquieu); yet Deane argues [25-26] that Burke regarded the conception of separate powers in the British Constitution as a false analysis, and also had reservations about the balance of powers, which he considered ‘a contrivance full of danger’. ‘In your old states you possessed that variety of parts corresponding with the various descriptions of which your community was happily composed; you had that action and counteraction which, in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers, draws out the harmony of the universe. These opposed and conflicting interests which you consider so great a blemish in your old and in our present constitution, interpolate a salutary check to all precipitate resolutions.’ (Works, II, pp.308-090.) Burke fought against the priority of the king in the Constitution since Rockingham days. [27] ‘And first of all the science of jurisprudence, the pride of the human intellect, which, with all its defects, redundancies, and errors, is the collected reason of ages, combining the principles of original justice with the infinite variety of human concerns, as a heap of old exploded errors, would no longer be studied. Personal self-sufficiency and arrogance [...] would usurp the tribunal.’ (Works II, p.367). Deane comments: the new theory of the individual was his chief enemy. [27] He wanted to preserve ‘the fiction of ancestry in a corporate succession’. ‘Corporate bodies are immortal for the good of the members, not for their punishment. Nations themselves are such corporations. As well might we in england think of waging inexpiable war upon all frenchmen for the evils which they have brought on us in the several periods of our mutual hostilities.’ (Works II, p.411). In 1795, writing to William Elliot, Burke admitted Paine’s charge that he had defended the Constitution in its entirety, ‘.. loaded with all its incumbrances, clogged with its peers, & its beef; its parsons and its pudding; its commons, its beer; & its dull slavish liberty of going about just as one pleases ..’ Deane comments: that was just the point, the constitution, the old constitution of France, the system of European civilisation [...] were in accord with the unpredictable and complex nature of human history and personality. [28] Deane calls the use of Montesquieu in Burke and other followers an exemplary case of the reinvention of a text by the desire of its readers. [30] 3: Richard Kearney,
Irish Heritage in the French Revolution: The Rights of the People and
the Rights of Man Tone: ‘To unite the whole people of Ireland, to abolish the memory of all past dissensions, and to substitute the common name of Irishman in place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter.’ [32] Burke, letter of 1797: ‘The crimes of Jacobinism [are] unfortunately not disagreeable to the principles and inclinations of the majority of what we call Protestants of Ireland. [ ] The Protestant part of that Kingdom is representd by the British Government itself to be, by whole counties, in nothing less than open rebellion. I am sure that it is everywhere teeming with dangerous conspiracy.’ [3] Proceedings of the Society of United Irishmen of Dublin, 1792: ‘It was not till very lately that the part of the nation which is truly colonial, reflected that though their ancestors had been victorious, they themslves were now included in the general subjection; subduing only to be subdued, and trampled upon by Britain as a servile dependency. When therefore the Protestant began to suffer what the Catholics had suffered; when from serving as the instruments they were made themselves the objects of foreign domination, then they became conscious they had a country—Ireland’. [Cf. Davis]. They resisted British domination, renounced colonial subserviency and [...] asserted the exclusiv jurisdiction of this Island.’ [34] Thomas Emmet described the Presbyterians as ‘Lovers of Liberty, and almost republicans from religion, from education and from early habits.’ [34] Bibl., Liam de Paor, ‘The Rebel Mind, Republican and Loyalist’, in The Irish Mind, ed. Kearney. Kearney quotes a Defenders confessions to John Philpot Curran in the Louth trials of 1774: ‘I expected I would get what livings the likes of you have, for myself [...] We planned to knock the protestants on the head and take their places.’ [36] Kearney also quotes de Paor and Garvin, et al. to the effect that: ‘it is hardly necessary to add the qualification mutatis mutandis to equate Defenders [...] with the 20th c. Provisionals.’ [37] Tone: ‘When it comes to religion, my belief is that we should work for the overthrow of the official church, without erecting another in its place.’ Kearney cites Conor Cruise O’Brien’s essay in New York Review of Books (April 1989), in which he pushes his Burkean principles to the point of denouncing the French revolution as the original of a republicanism that overrides the rights of the individual in the name of the nation-state. O’Brien calls the Cult of the Nation ‘the bloodiest of all terrestial creeds’ and finds it ‘already present, already formed, in 1789 in France.’ The ‘distancing of God and consequent delegitimizing of monarchy’ left an unholy vacuum’; henceforth it would be in the name of the nation that men would be most likely to feel it legitimate to hate and kill other men and women and children.’ Kearney comments: what O’Brien says about the evils of German nationalism is characteristically acute. But his attempt to tar the French Revolution with the Nazi brush is as disingenuous as it is incredible. [41] Kearney seems to summarised Marianne Elliott’s ‘Watchmen in Sion’ essay in regard to Tone’s attitude towards Catholicism and its priests—‘low bred rustics of vulgar sentiment’, an ‘indigenous populace’ who had to be ‘educated’ in liberty; and the papacy, whose ‘predecessors had for so many centuries sucked dry the marrow of Europe’—when he concludes with a quotation from her, ‘[the] transformation of Ulster frm the heartland of arly Irish republicanism in the1790s to the later centre of bitterly anti-Catholic loyalism was not such a dramatic reversal as it may appear’. [43] Yeats thought that the enlightenment thinkers like Locke had ‘taken away the world and given us its execrement instead’. [44] In the context of discussing ‘romantic nationalism’, yoking Davis, Ferguson and Yeats as its chief exponents: Davis preached the rehabilitation of an ancient Celtic nation—to which Norman, saxon, Gael and Dane could belong [44] In this essay Kearney speaks of the hi-jacking of the word Republican by the Provos, whom he sees as Defenders, not republicans. ‘It is surely time to reawaken the debate on our republican heritage. [45] Bibl.: The Works of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, 8 vols (London [Bohn Edn.] 1881); M. Einaudi, ‘The British background of Burke’s Political Philosophy’, in Political Science Quarterly, 49 (1934), pp.576-98; C. Parkin, ‘The Moral Basis of Burke’s Political Thought: an essay (Cambridge 1956); JGA Pocock, ‘Burke and the Ancient Constitution: A Problem in the History of Ideas’, Camb. Hist. Journal III (1960), pp.123-43. On Montsquieu inter al, he cites CP Courtney, Montesquieu and Burke (Oxford 1943). 4: Fierobe Claude,
A Gothic-Historical Sermon: Maturin’s Last Novel: The Albigenses Maturin’s defence of supernatural tales, in Sermons, 1819: ‘The very first sounds almost that attract the ears of childhood are tals of another life—foolishly are they called tales of superstition; for, however disguised by the vulgarity of the narration, and the distortion of the fiction, they tll him of those whom he is hastening from the threshold of lif to join, the inhabitants of the invisible world, with whom he must soon be, and be forever. And what an echo does the narrative find in the sensibility even of infancy! Long before the child has sense to apprehend the distinctions, the distinction of life and death, and dreads the thought of the inmates of a future state, whom imagination paints like their remains—cold, pale, and frightful.’ (Sermons, Edin:Constable; Lon:Hurst, Rob. & Co., 1819, p.359) [47] Maturin, letter to the publishers Hurst & Robinson: ‘I have studiously avoided the faults so justly charged on Melmoth and tried to form myself on the style of my friend Sir Walter Scott. (Brit. Mus., MS Add., 41996.) [48] Fierobe cites four French works studied by Maturin in preparation for his Albigenses. [49] Maturin characterises the Roman Church as ‘the parent of inquisitors, persecutions and a hatred passing the hatred of man.’ (Sermons, p.400.) [...] Maturin’s sympathy for the Albigenses originates in his detestation of the Catholic Church, and it is therefore to be expectd that the Catharists’ tennts should be more puritan than manichean. [54] Maturin, in Melmoth, accused of blasphemy by J. W. Croker, reviewing it in The Quarterly Review, XXIV, 48 (Jan 1821). Maturin: ‘He who is capable of writing a good novel ought to feel that he was born for a higher purpose than writing novels.’ (Preface, The Wild Irish Boy, London: Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1808, vol. I, p.11.) [54] The Bishop, who is confronted with his evil by Genevieve in a characteristic exemplum of the relation between the spiritually bankrupt and the true transcendental [~56], dies consuming a poison host. [55] 5. Bernard Escarbelt,
An Irishman in France: John Banim, pp.57-66 In 1826 the ill health of his wife necessitated Banim’s taking her to France, where she remained while he returned to London and Ireland on field work for The Boyne Water, collecting his wife again after. [57] His own health problems, arising from the spinal disease of his youth, necessitated his visiting France in the late 1820’s, settling at Boulogne, the expatriate community—especially the scape-graces and refugees from civil prosecution at the Hotel d’Angleterre—which he characterises tongue-in-cheek in The Smugglers (1831; Bentley 1837, p.351) [58] .. succeeded only in frightening his audience with a stage rendition of The Fetches [58] The Sargeant’s Wife, set in France, though France is little more than this queer, foreign, alien, un-English place of gushing sentimentality and [...] loose morals, where crime threatens at every step for the frail young Lisette in search of her husband, Frederick Cartouche. Cf., however, Banim’s ‘sermon’ the English misrepresentation of that country in parts of The Smuggler—a comparison which shows the straights he was in for money: ‘But do our dar countrymen and countrywomen of Boulogne—and perhaps of other places in France—never think of conforming themselves to the genius of the people among whom they have fixed their residence?’ (Smuggler, p.357). Further: ‘It may be added, however, that the cant of French carelessness in morals, once so pat in England, and taken up by silly and inexperienced, as well as innately vicious English people (few, we know, they are—fewer may than be!)—taken up, conveniently, on trust, has greatly helped to sink—even below the level of a just estimation of the facts—our own character for behaving ourselves, in the eyes of our neighbour.’ (ibid., 357-358) [61] Escarbelt characterises the ‘Chaunt’ as a dramatic poem in ballad-stanza form (by quatrains) dealing with the advent of the cholera epidemic then coming across Europe from India via Russia, to which he subsequently fell victim, though surviving. Besides that, ‘it transmutes the inner world of the writer into a long, grim poem in which he tries to come to terms with his own individual physical and moral sufferings, his own inner world of impending chaos, sick and helpless in France. [62] At this time Banim considered himself as striken—according to a letter to Michael—by a ‘VISITATION OF GOD’ (cited in Murray, Life, p.217). [63]. ‘Chaunt of the Cholera’: ‘From my proper clime and subjects,/In my hot and swarthy East,/North and Westward I am coming/For a conquest and a feast.// [...] ‘and he hopeth to escape me -/Yet he is quaking still,/For he knows no watch can bar me,/When I would work my will!’ [he being the Czar, who is duly engulfed:] ‘And with my spume-lips kiss him -/and with my shaking hand/Press down his heart, and press it,/till its throb is at a stand -/Low laughing, while an horror/His despot eye-ball dims -/My knarled arms twined round him,/And my cramp’d and knotty limbs!’ ‘To chasten, by Destroying!/To spare not! till a Few,/Alone, be left, in tremblings,/Earth’s people to renew,/And to cry—There is a Godhead!/And man his anger braved!/And to raise a race to fear Him/We, lonely-ones, are saved!’ 6: Jacqueline Genet,
‘W. B. Yeats: The Crazy Jane Poems’, pp.67-92. The essay treats of narrators and heroes, or personae, of sexual abstinence and sexual ecstasy, of ‘road’ as sexual image, and of Yeats’s technical imaging of his meaning in prosody. Brigit Bramsback:
James Stephens and Paris: Insight [...] from Letters to Thomas Bodkin,
pp.93-106. Bibl., Thomas Bodkin, May it Please Your Lordships (Dublin 1917; 560 copies); Richard Finneran, ed., Letters of James Stephens [1974]. Bramsback lists the works of Stephens, viz, five novels, and eleven collections of poems—the most important—together with the collected Poems of 1926. She mentions the only published play, Julia Elizabeth, performed 1911, printed 1929; some unfinished plays in MSS, ‘The Snowall’, later called ‘Caprice, a play in 3 acts’; a play in 3 acts of The Demi-Gods, and a rough sketch of a play based on The Charwoman’s Daughter. A fragment of autobiograpy, ‘A Rhinoceros, Some Ladies and a Horse’ appeared first in Irish Writing I, pp.19-28. Learning French in Paris, with the help of Bodkin. [...] Stephens jumped with delight at the suggestion made to him by Bodkin in June 1915 to apply for the Registrarship of the National Gallery of Ireland [...] one of the Gallery governors fiercely resisted his candidature; he sent a letter of withdrawal via Bodkin which Bodkin however did not forward; appointed to the position in August 1915, first as Unestablished Registrar, then as Established Reg., and finally as Accounting Officer. Moved to London in 1925. Stephens broke with Bodkin after a flare-up at the Gallery in 1924, concerning the sell-on price of his MSS in America. After his death, Mrs Stephen’s supplied papers to Reginald Pound, son of Ezra, for Life and Letters of James Stephens, around Jan. 1954, but nothing came of it. The long and short of it is that Bodkin provided the advice in 1912 which brought Stephens to Paris to broaden his mind. 7: Maurice Harmon,
Mary Lavin: Moralist of the Heart, 107-123pp. ‘The story moves by a process of gradual revelation of the hidden areas of Mrs Latimer’s psyche. it is a form of unconscious confession by which the reader has increased access to her character. The style is attuned to her sensibility ... ‘ [111] In the Middle of the Fields (1961), stories of widowhood. The narrator’s clarity of mind and of memory, her scrupulous honesty, together with her sense of hope and her openness to love and to nature are signs of her worth. By her narrative manner we know her. [121] When Mary Lavin tells us that she has too much to say to be a novelist, she is being neither frivolous nor boastful. Quite clearly she has important things to tell us about ourselves and does so with sophistication, warmth and intelligence. [123 END] Note, this essay previously appeared at an in Gaeliana [q. date]. Bibl. cites Stories, 1964, 1974 [but not 1985]. 8: Rudiger Imhof,
Post-Joycean Experiment in Recent Irish Fiction, pp.124-136 Birchwood is not a big house novel [128] Remarks on Patrick McGinley: what is unique is that he strives towards combining the conventions of the comic novel with the murder story. Pespective of Englishman come to live in Ireland, in Bogmail, and The Trick of the Ga Bolga. Cleverly avoids convention of stage-Irishman not least by having the comic elements suddenly turn sinister. [130] Brian Coffey, The Big Laugh, an initiation story about cream-puff devouring Glutz, subtitled, ‘he who laughs laughs laughs laughs.’ [130-31] Remarks on Ralf [sic] Cusack’s Cadenza (1958), reissued by Dalkey Archive Press, US firm. Imhof considers that the notion of time in the novel is indebted to Eliot’s Burnt Norton.Desmond, the main character, locks himself up in a compartment of a train and lets himself be shunted back and forth on a certain track, his mind recollecting scenes from a receding past; recalls appointment with dentist; reminiscent of Proust. There is no characterisation of the plot here, and the frame story seems misapprehended. [132-33] Kiely prefaces Nothing Happens with some epigraphs including Joyce: ‘history is a nightmare ..’. [133-34] Remarks on Alf MacLochlainn, Out of Focus, slow motion technique, concentration on objects; a nameless narrator whose ‘principal hobby’ is ‘experimenting with the Alice glass’ looking at a world ‘in which an object may be seen in two places yet not seen double.’ [135] 9: Robert Welch,
MY Present Unresolved: Denis Devilin and Montaigne, pp.137-43. Devlin wrote an MA thesis on Montaigne,
NUI, 1933. His verse hankers for no doubtful suspensions; instead it is rammed with apprehension. [141] ‘asservations’ [139] Bibl: Beckett, review of Devlin’s Intercessions, in transition, rep. in Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment (London: Calder 1983), pp.91-94. 10: Terence Brown,
Home and Away: Derek Mahon’s France, pp.144-151. Pierre Joannon,
A French Perspective on Irish Identity Crisis, pp.152-62 Bibl. Brian Farrell, The Founding of Dáil Eireann (Gill & Macmillan 1971), p.84: ‘If Irish politics are maverick to Western Europe, this is perhaps because of the completeness of the country’s colonial status and the intensity of the decolonisation campaign [...] Certainly, it took a generation after independence not only for the scars left by independence to heal, but also for the political thinking engendered by the electoral politics following the divorce to be seen as obsolete.’ Also, CS [Todd] Andrews, Dublin Made Me (Mercier 1979); James Randall, ‘An Interview with Seamus Heaney, in Ploughshares, V, 3 (1979); Brian Farrell, Sean Lemass (Gill & Macmillan 1983); Maurice Moynihan, ed., Speeches and Statements by Eamon de Valera 1917-1973 (Gill & Macmillan 1980); Tom Garvin, ‘Nationalist Elites, Irish Voters and Irish Political Development: A Comparative Perspective’, in The Economic and Social Review, vol. 8, no. 3 (April 1977). Maurice Goldring,
Paisley - Le Pen, pp.163-172 The final piece is a tribute to Rafroidi by Mark Mortimer.
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