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In the body of this lecture, we considered Matthew
Arnold’s attitude to what he identified - with the French
critic Ernest Renan - as the Celtic spirit in literature. From
Arnold’s standpoint, facing political disturbances in Ireland
at the date of his famous lectures “On the Study of Celtic
Literature” - which actually resulted, as he planned, in
the foundation of a Chair of Celtic Literature at Oxford University
- the challenge was to identify and secure the role of those Celtic
regions and their cultural heritage in the wider embrace of the
spirit and traditions of English literature.
He did this by the dual strategy of defining Celtic culture as
a source of a certain kind of ecstatic natural description, emotionalism,
and - finally - magic wherever these are to be found in English
literature itself, as well as in the great Celtic originals of
the manuscript tradition then in process of being translated by
several contemporary scholars. In so doing, he characterised the
Celtic mentality as impractical and wilful, but also suggested
that it was “feminine” in essence, as opposed to the
“masculine” spirit of the Anglo-Saxon and the legalistic
mentality of the Roman.
All of this made it easier to conceive of the Irish world being
assimilated to the wider British Unioni as a peaceful tributary
stream; and, indeed, Arnold clearly considered himself to be bring
the word of peace to the Fenian agitators, whom he explicitly
identifies as “Philistines” - itself the term of opprobrium
he used for all those in England and elsewhere who were out of
harmony with the vision of “sweetness and light” that
stood at the heart of his idealising conception of the best Victorian
cultural.
Next we considered Yeats’s response to Arnold, in an essay entitled 'Celtic
Element in Literature' (1897; rev. 1902). In this, he virtually
turned Arnold’s tributary conception of the Celtic spirit
on its head, suggesting that what survived in Celtic literature
- and, by extension, in the minds of Irish people - was in effect
the original form of religion and mythology, replete with magic
and an appreciation of nature less as “beauty” but as
“mystery”.
In effect, therefore, Celtic literature and the Irish imagination
could provide a gateway to the fuller form of the human imagination
before the disociating effects of modernisation drove the “primitive”
communities to the periphery of the continent of Europe and, in
particular, the British peripheries of Scotland, Wales, Cornwall
and - the case the actually concerned him - Ireland.
Writers and thinkers who disparaged or otherwise qualified Yeats’s
claim that Irish literature, constructed on the basis of folklore
and myth and occultism as he proposed it should be, included the
critic F. R. Leavis,
the Ulster-born poet Louis
MacNeice, and the modern Irish critic Denis
Donoghue. [See “Older Critics”, infra].
Among these the tendency was either to point out that, for Yeats,
the appeal to a Celtic element at the foundations of his art was
less a claim made for the contemporary Irish nation - which was
actually a community of backward towns and farmlands - but a form
of “privacy” (in Donoghue’s term) which enabled
him to organise the materials of his own life and art.
A newer Irish generation of critics, centred on the Field Day
Company - founded by Brian Friel, Stephen Rea and David Hammond
- and chiefly published in its Field Day Pamphlet publication
series (inaugurated by the latest member Seamus Deane), set out
redefining Yeats’s place on the map of Irish modernity by
placing him quite firmly on the conservative side of a map divided
between revolutionary nationalism and literary unionism.
The connection betweeen this critical initiative and the Troubles
in Northern Ireland is significant, if not actually acute: critics
of Northern origin such as Seamus
Deane were keen to identify the Anglo-Irish - and essentially
hyphenated - nature of Yeats’s two-sides rapport with Irish
and with English literature as the highest instance of what Deane
has called “the pathology of literary Unionism”.
Several others have attempted to characterise him as a Moses-figure,
leading the Irish out of colonial bondage into the promised land
of national independence but not, himself, being able to reach
that land in his own person. The most polemical spokesman for
this view was Edward
Said; perhaps the most eloquent (and most forgiving) was Seamus
Heaney, who shares in his own cultural formation - a two-mindedness
that he has written of in his essay “The Frontier of Writing”
[For extracts from this essay, see the Heaney pages of ,
infra].
Declan Kiberd has also offered a modulated version of Yeats-as-prophet-of-Irish-independence
in a Field Day Pamphlet, and afterwards in his well-known essay-collection
Inventing Ireland (1995), while younger critics such as
Gerry Smyth
have actively charged Yeats with attempting to hijack Irish national
literature for the remnant of Protestant ascendancy in Ireland
to which he ethnically and psychologically belonged.
Amid such various opinions it is necessary for each reader to
form their own idea of the place of W. B. Yeats in the tradition
of Irish writing - national or simply regional. In doing so, moreover,
it is more than simply advisable to maintain a focus on the primary
fact for our consideration: the grandeur of the literary achievement,
poem by poem, play by play, and the magnitude of the imaginative
energies from which they sprang.
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