Quotes WBY: ‘I cannot probably be quite just to any poetry that speaks to me with the sweet insinuating feminine voice of the dwellers of the country of shadows and hollow images. I have dwelt there too long not to dread all that comes of it.’ (Letter to George Russell, 1904; Letters, Vol. I, p.434; here p.17.)

[...]

This chapter will argue that Yeats’s eventual rejection of Celticism as effeminate, blurred and melancholy represents a capitulation to imperial structures of thought rather than a move away from them. Yeats’s Celticism was complicit with and dependent upon imperialism in a general and very important sense. But the shape of that generally complicit relation changed over time, and different aspects of Yeats’s Celtic writings offered different forms of repetition, appropriation and critique in relation to imperialism. By breaking down Yeats’s Celticism synchronically and diachronically, this chapter will distinguish between the moments or structures within it that gesture towards vigorous critiques and radical departures, and those that reinscribe imperialist structures of thought more uncritically. Yeats’s earliest Celtic writings repeated, both overtly and covertly, the imperial gendering of the Irish as feminine, but in rejecting colonialism’s (and Irish nationalism’s) equation of femininity with inferiority and subordinate status they suggested a profound, though incomplete, departure from the axiomatics of imperialism. The incompleteness of that departure appears in the pervasive ambivalence about femininity that characterizes these writings. In Yeats’s later Celtic writings, and especially in his eventual rejection of the “sweet insinuating feminine voice” of the Celtic Twilight, he tried unsuccessfully to resolve that ambivalence, abandoned the fragmentary radical possibilities of his earlier writings, and brought his representations of gender and nationality into greater harmony with the deep structures of imperialism. This transition also produced a version of Celticism structured more closely around the class interests of the Anglo-Irish.

Much has been written about the flexibility and complexity of British imperial discourses on race and on their mutual embeddedness with other categories, especially gender and health/illness. Late Victorian representations of the Irish drew on a constellation of images, including simian savages, lunatics, women and children. This chapter will not survey them all; instead I will examine the relationship between Yeats’s Celticism and the particular strand of imperialist discourses on Ireland associated with Matthew Arnold’s liberal conservatism. This strand was shaped by several aspects of the colonial enterprise in Ireland. Their geographical proximity and racial and cultural similarity to the English rendered the Irish less [19] radically “other” than the inhabitants of other British territories. The Irish were white, Christian and partially anglicized culturally; they upset what Franz Fanon called the “racial epidermal schemas” that were crucial to imperialist discourses on Africa and India. While the Irish were sometimes compared to Africans, most representations of them, which contained some relatively positive and attractive features and which were not as obsessed with miscegenation as discourses on Africans, were more analogous to white representations of Native Americans. In addition, the Irish represented “home” rather than “empire” in British thinking about emigration. Many nineteenth-century intellectuals argued that one potential benefit of empire was that emigration to the colonies, especially white settler Colonies like Australia and Canada, provided a solution to the much discussed problems of poverty and over-crowding in Britain. It was largely in response to Irish over-crowding, and in an attempt to prevent the poverty-stricken Irish from emigrating to London, that the first systematic schemes for emigration and colonization were put forth in the 182os and 1830s. Thus in one important set of imperialist discourses, Ireland epitomized the domestic problems the British hoped the empire would help solve, rather than a foreign ground for expansion. Finally, in the nineteenth century British domination of Ireland entered a phase that relied increasingly on integrating the Irish into the state, resorting to coercion largely when conciliation and assimilation were perceived to have failed. Catholic emancipation made this development inevitable. Advocating integration was both a positive British strategy and a response to the Catholic and social integration for which Catholic emancipation paved the way.

Arnold’s pronouncements on Ireland and the Irish in On the Study Celtic Literature (1867) and the essays on Irish affairs written in the 1880s insisted that Ireland should remain within the empire, but they criticized England’s treatment of the Irish and urged the British to become a people capable of “attaching” Ireland and the other Celtic territories under British dominion in order to form a peaceful union with “its parts blended together in a common national feeling”. [Complete Works, ed. R. H. Super, Vol. XI, Michigan UP 1973, p.242.] There is a close relationship between his criticism of English attitudes towards Ireland and his criticism of British Philistinism in Culture and Anarchy (1869). The position Arnold and other liberal Victorian thinkers adopted was deeply indebted to the works of Edmund Burke. Burke’s unionism involved criticizing the corruption and [19] brutality of the Protestant Ascendancy, calling for a “true aristocracy” to replace it, and protesting against the penal laws and other forms of Catholic oppression. Later these positions became central to nineteenth-century efforts to kill Home Rule with kindness. [Seamus Deane, ‘Arnold, Burke and the Celts’, in Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880-1980 , Faber 1985.] Arnold cited Burke frequently and even edited an anthology of Burke’s writings on Irish affairs. The publication of On the Study of Celtic Literature coincided with an increase in “Fenian fever” in Ireland and the United States, an outbreak of Fenian violence in Ireland and England, an English crackdown on Irish unrest, and a rise in popular and media attention to the Fenian movement. In this political climate its enthusiasm for Celtic culture and its relatively benign form of imperialism made it a fairly radical document, and it made little impression on Arnold’s immediate contemporaries.

Arnold’s emphasis on sympathy and integration, his preference for conciliation over coercion, and the intermediate position the Irish occupied in the British hierarchy of races all helped make a particular version of nineteenth-century femininity a useful category for his construction of the Celt: a cultured, sensitive, middle-class femininity associated with hysteria. Arnold’s debts to the works of Ernest Renan, Henri Martin and W. F. Edwards have been well documented, and critics have often noted the importance of the Celt’s femininity to the imperialist ambitions of Arnold’s vision. Here I wish to emphasize a few points about how this version of femininity functioned in Arnold’s argument. It provided crucial support to a major aspect of Arnold’s formulation of Celtic otherness - complementarity. Femininity marked the Celt’s difference from the Saxon. but also placed her in a relationship of natural complementarity to him. Like man and woman, they were meant for each other, and should acquiesce in the dictates of nature and history, combining to form a more perfect whole. Both Celt and Saxon were radically incomplete. The Saxon possessed precisely the qualities the Celt lacked, and the Celt in turn could supply the Saxon deficiencies Arnold outlined in Culture and Anarchy. The Celt’s femininity stood, not merely for racial difference, but for a combination of racial difference and racial affinity in relation to the English. Robert Young has analyzed Arnold’s debts to nineteenth-century racial theory, and argues that theories of race were also “covert theories of desire” because they were largely based on the perceived results of sexual unions between different peoples. [Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race , NY: Routledge 1995, p.9.] Arnold’s essay contains a tension between two related models of complementarity that reflects a major nineteenth-century debate about the possibilities and results of racial hybridity. Arnold insists that the English race is a hybrid race, and that it already contains a Celtic element. Assimilation was prepared for by “affinity of race” [Arnold, Complete Works , Vol. XI, p.9] between Irish and English and was already under way. But while the essay lauds the mutual benefits of integrating Saxon and Celt, it also asserts their permanence as racial types. Complementarity as a natural tendency to fuse into a new, homogeneous whole conflicted with complementarity as the existence of mutually enriching, interlocking characteristics that remained distinct and identifiable. The dialectic between hybridity as the elimination of difference and hybridity as the intermingling of distinct entities was central to the period’s racial theory. Arnold’s version of this dialectic enabled him to use an argument about racial and cultural separatism in the service of an argument for political integration. As he put it in 1887, the Irish could be “a nation poetically only, not politically”. ['From Easter to August’, in The Nineteenth Century , XXII, Sept. 1887, p.321; quoted in Frederick Faverty, Mathew Arnold the Ethnologist, Northwestern UP 1951, p.142.] The gendering of Celt and Saxon also revealed the important role sexuality played in Arnold’s model of political integration as imperial romance and in his insistence that the English should become capable of “attaching” the Irish. [.; &c. ]

According to Arnold, the Celt was “quick to feel impressions ... keenly sensitive to joy and sorrow”; she possessed “quick perception and warm emotion,” and was subject to “penetrating passion and melancholy”. The Celt was “impressionable,” “sensuous,” “extravagant,” and “spiritual”. [ Complete Prose Works , Vol. III, severally at pp.343, 344, 370, 347 & 298]. Above all, the Celt was, in a phrase of Henri Martin’s which Arnold was fond of quoting, “sentimental - always ready to react against the despotism of fact.’ [Ibid., p.344]. These potentially attractive features shaded into the Celt’s nervous instability, sexual pathology, lack of “balance, measure and patience,”, and “habitual want of success”. [Idem].

[Quotes Renan:] we should have to say without hesitance that the Celtic race .. is an essentially feminine race. No human family, I believe, carried so much mystery into love. No other has conceived with more delicacy the ideal of woman, or been more fully dominated by it. It is a sort of intoxication, a madness, a vertigo.’ (Poetry of the Celtic Races and Other Studies, trans. & ed. William G. Hutchinson, London: Walter Scott, 1896, p.8.)

Quotes Arnold:] ‘[N]o doubt the sensibility of the Celtic nature, its nervous exaltation, have something feminine in them, and the Celt is thus particularly disposed to feel the spell of the feminine idiosyncrasy; he has affinity to it; he is not far from its secret.’ [Complete Prose Works, Vol. III, p.347.]

Quotes: [N]o doubt the sensibility of the Celtic nature, its nervous exaltation, have something feminine in them, and the Celt is thus particularly disposed to feel the spell of the feminine idiosyncrasy; he has affinity to it; he is not far from its secret.’ [Complete Prose Works, Vol. III, p.347.],

[...]

The version of feminity Arnold ascribed to the Celt allowed him to express at the same time the Celit’s valuable uniqueness and crippling inferiority, spiritual strength and practical weakness, energetic passion and the inability to govern it, imaginative richness and incapacity for sustained and balanced logical thought. It enabled Arnold to construct a Celit racial or national difference whose complementary relation to the Saxon combined cultural separation and political integration. The Celt alone was a specimen of maimed masculinity, of illness and lack, while the Celt coupled with Saxon could [22] become the angel in the British house of empire, sweetening and completing it. On the other hand, the Celt’s femininity also expressed fears about integration, revolution, and English weakness. Behind Arnold’s Celt lurk the degenerate, the hysteric, and the revolutionary. Arnold warned his fellow Englishmen, “perhaps if we are doomed to perish ... we shall perish by our Celticms [sic]” [Complete Prose Works, Vo. III, p.382.]

The Celt’s sensuous nature and emotional excesses had several political implications. They indicated her material ineffectiveness and incapacity for self-government; both Arnold and Renan explicitly included political ineptitude in their characterizations of the Celt. But the Celt’s sexuality and sentimentality also raised the Specter of the revolutionary. From Edmund Burke through the mileteenth century, a number of thinkers had linked the French revolution (and political revolutions generally) to particularly feminine depravities and sexual pathologies”. Burke associated the excesses of the French revolution with “the horrid yells, and shrilling screarns, and frantic dances, and infamous contumelies, and all the unutterable abominations of the furies of hell in the abused shape of the vilest of women”. [ Reflections on the French Revolution [1790], ed. Thomas Mahoney, NY: Bobs-Merrill, 1955, p.82.] Arnold described the Celtic political temperament as tending towards revolution and sexual pathology:

The Celt, undisciplinable, anarchical, and turbulent by nature, but out of affection and admiration giving himself body and soul to some leader ... is not a promising political temperament. [Complete Prose Works, p.347.]

Marx and Engels agreed about the Celt’s revolutionary potential; they took up the imperial definition of the Celt as a combination of femininity, nervous illness and emotional excess, and linked these traits to a potential for political effectiveness. By the late 1860s, Marx had reversed an earlier position and had concluded that ending the oppression of Ireland was the necessary precondition for advancing the catisc of the English working class. [Note as infra.] Like Arnold, Engels saw the Celt as unbalanced, nervous, sensuous, and prone to failure; in his in his description of Ireland, the land and the people shared the same feminine changeability. He claimed that “the Irish way of thinking lacks all sense of proportion,” that “[w]ith the Irish, feeling and predominate,” and that their “sensuous, excitable nature” rendered them unfit for the development of manufacturing. (Marx & Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question, ed. R. Dixon, London: Lawrence & Wishart, pp.397-98; 401, 407, see also pp.52; 253-5, 394, 407-08, 449-50]. Marx thought the Irish “more passionate and revolutionary in character than the English,” while Engels rhapsodized: “Give me 200,000 Irishmen and I will overthrow the entire British monarchy”. [Ibid., p.43-44.]

Ftn. quotes Marx: ‘For a long time I believed that it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working-class ascendancy . Deeper stud has now convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied in Ireland.’ [Ibid., p.397-98.]

Quotes Engels: ‘The weather, like its inhabitants, has a more acute character, it moves in sharper, more sudden contrasts; the sky is like an Irish woman’s face: here also rain and sunshine succeed each other suddenly and unexpectedly and there is none of the grey English boredom.’ [Ibid., p.276.]

In the 1860s, then, femininity and nervous instability could acquire political implications radically different from those Arnold attributed to them, albeit in discourses outside the bounds of traditional political theory. By the late nineteenth century, however, the cultural equation of femininity with pathology - medical, political and sexual - was even more firmly established than at mid century. In addition, the fact that the Celt’s racial otherness sprang more from an excess of civilization and culture than from a barbaric lack of it gave the sensitive, brilliant and unstable Celt something in common with a new figure that appeared on the late Victorian cultural horizon: the decadent. The Celt’s gender and the sexual excesses suggested by her emotionalism and sensuousness reinforced that connection. Sexual pathology and effeminacy were central to contemporary descriptions of decadence, as were the decadent’s similarities to the perceived depravities of the New Woman. Freud and Breuer notwithstanding, the Celt’s hysteria and decadence were also culturally linked to some late nineteenth-century theories of degeneration; as Daniel Pick has argued, such theories expressed fears about too much progress and civilization as well as too little. Many of Arnold’s Celtic traits were also the same qualities that were to charcterize Max Nordau’s 1895 portrait of the decadent artistic degenerate. Although Nordau acknowledged that degeneration afflicted both men and women, its symptoms, which resemled and often occurred in conjunction with those of hysteria, were particularly feminine. Arnold’s feminization of the Celt found further echoes in the work of Otto Weineger, whose “anti-feminine” and racist theories involved extensive comparison of Jews and women in his influential book Sex and Character (1903). Like Arnold, Weininger linked femininity to necessary and natural colonial status, insisting that the Jew, “like the woman, requires the rule of an exterior authority[”]. His formulation of femininity as racial inferiority lacks both Arnold’s sympathy with the inferior race, and his relative optimism about the causes and results of assimilation; the racial meaning of femininity had become less ambiguous, more decidedly damning. [Notes omitted.]

[...]

The early Yeats was acutely aware of contemporary cultural between Celtic character and a cultured, nervous, bourgeois femininity. In his copy of Renan’s The Poetry of Celtic Races, Yeats wrote three marginal comments next to Renan’s description of Ike Celt’s femininity: “Delicacy,” “a feminine race,” and “The Ideal of Woman”. [Edward O’Shea, Descriptive Catalogue of W. B. Yeats’s Library, 1985, p.223.] Yeats did not begin his engagement with Celticism by acepting the equation of femininity with racial inferiority and colonial status put forth by Celticists like Arnold. In struggles between opposing political and cultural discourses, including imperilist and nationalist ones, some signs or values prove more “convertible” than others, like foreign currencies. In his earliest Celtic writings, Yeats struggled to construct an Irish nationality that incorporated, explicitly and implicitly, a trait that had become so closely associated with weakness and pathology that it was virtually impossible to convert it into a positive attribute: femininity. For a brief period, Yeats followed Arnold and Renan’s gendering of the Celt without reproducing their political corollaries to it. In some of his earliest essays he outlined a version of the Celtic spirit that combined two contrasting models of Irish national character, one that was Arnoldian, feminine and particular, and another that was antii-Arnoldian, masculine and universalist. / This combination appears in Yeats’s 1886 review essay about Sir Samuel Ferguson. [.; p.25.]

[to be continued]