Authors: Declan Kiberd
The British professed themselves baffled by the twists and turns of Irish political history. They complained that whenever they seemed close to solving the Irish question, the Irish had a dreadful habit of changing the question – first
Catholic emancipation, then the holding of land, then home rule and repeal The manifestation of official bafflement had been a policy which oscillated crazily from coercion to conciliation. This was, in part, a mimicry of the Irish capacity to veer from insurrectionary to constitutional methods, from political excitement to sober cultural self-questioning; but the policy had even deeper psychological roots in the ambivalent feelings of English people about their Celtic "Other". The stereotypical Paddy could be charming or threatening by turns. The vast numbers of Irish immigrants who fetched up in England's cities and towns throughout the nineteenth century found that they were often expected to conform to the stereotype: and some, indeed did so with alacrity. "The Irish are sensible of the character they hold in England and act accordingly to Englishmen", observed the poet
John Keats as early as 1818.
1
Such tendencies had been in evidence for decades by the time he noted them. Coming from windswept, neolithic communities of the western Irish seaboard to the centres of industrial England, many found it easier to don the mask of the Paddy than reshape a complex urban identity of their own. Acting the buffoon, they often seemed harmless and even lovable characters to the many English workers who might otherwise have deeply resented their willingness to take jobs at very low rates of pay Their English gaffers and fellow-workers would, for the most part, have found the traditional culture and ancient pieties of these immigrants baffling beyond belief. The stereotype had indeed certain short-term advantages. It permitted some form of elementary contact between the immigrant and the native English: but it necessitated only a circumscribed relationship, which the Irish could control
and regulate at will An art of fawning duplicity was perfected by many, who acted the fool while making shrewd deals which often took their rivals unawares. The Irish in England were compelled to "read" their host country's codes in their attempt to study its defects, for it was from their defects that the English derived their way of seeing, and not seeing, them.
Through the centuries from Spenser's View to Arnold's Irish
Essays,
most English persons who visited Ireland did so as colonial administrators, warmongering soldiers, planters or tourists. Their contacts with the natives were inevitably attenuated. What the real Ireland or Irish were like, few of them could have known. Many experts, indeed, were able to set themselves up without the indignity or inconvenience of first-hand experience,
Matthew Arnold being the outstanding example. As so often happens in such cases,
Irish Studies were pursued in England under pressure of a political crisis. Just as
Charlotte Brooke had published her
Reliqucs of Ancient Irish Poetry
(1789) as an attempt to introduce the Irish to the English muse, and thus to stave off an impending uprising, so Arnold's call for a chair of Celtic Studies at
Oxford and a "Union of Hearts" policy came on the verge of the Fenian rebellion of the 1860s. Handwringing in the wings of revolution has been perhaps the central pastime of experts in Irish Studies.
By Arnold's day, the image of Ireland as not-England had been well and truly formed Victorian imperialists attributed to the Irish all those emotions and impulses which a harsh mercantile code had led them to suppress in themselves. Thus, if John Bull was industrious and reliable, Paddy was held to be indolent and contrary; if the former was mature and rational, the latter must be unstable and emotional; if the English were adult and manly, the Irish must be childish and feminine. In this fashion, the Irish were to read their fate in that of two other out-groups, women and children; and at the root of many an Englishman's suspicion of the Irish was an unease with the woman or child who lurked within himself. Oscar Wilde's exploration of the inner world of childhood, no less than his flaunted effeminacy, may well have been his sly commentary on these hidden fears. The political implications were clear enough in that age of severely limited suffrage: either as woman or as child, the Irishman was incapable of self-government. Such a notion of the
Anglo-Irish relationship was nothing other than a neurosis, as grandly reactive as that which still afflicts those men who define masculinity in purely negative terms as not-feminine, and who fail therefore to construct themselves from within. Victorian imperial theorists were especially prone to these drastic self-repressions, using neighbouring peoples, notably the French in their sexual habits, as equivalent versions of not-England.
There was, inevitably, a more benign interpretation of these slot-rolling
mechanisms, and it was offered by Matthew Arnold as a celebration of the Celtic personality which, he hoped, might yet save the Philistine English middle-class for poetry and high feeling. "The Celtic genius had sentiment as its main basis", he explained, "with love of beauty, charm and spirituality for its excellence, ineffectualness and self-will for its defect".
2
Such a genius flourished in short lyric bursts, but not in "the steady, deep-searching survey".
3
Arnold showed remarkably little patience for the steady, deep-searching survey himself, basing most of his ideas on the radical theories of
Ernest Renan, who had contended that the Irish, quintessentially Celtic, had worn themselves out taking dreams for realities and were, in consequence, incapable of political progress. Of actual Irish-language texts themselves, which might or might not have borne out his notions, Arnold was almost entirely ignorant.
This did not prevent his generation of Celticists from asserting that Irish glories were all in the past, a past which invariably turned out on inspection to have been a disguised version of the contemporary British imperial present. So the ancient hero Cuchulain died strapped to a rock, single-handedly defending the gap of the north after a lifetime spent knocking the heads off his rivals' bodies; and as his life ebbed away, a raven alighted and drank his blood. This combination of pagan energy and Christ-like suffering was of just the kind recommended for the production of muscular Christians at Rugby, suggesting that the revivalist Cuchulain was little more than a British public-schoolboy in drag. In a famous poem of the period it was said of the Celts that "they went forth to battle and they always fell"
4
: the lament is for an heroic distant past and for the sense of failure in every subsequent challenge to empire. These laments, and the allied myth of a golden age, were
allowed
by the imperialists, and sometimes even encouraged when, as in
Shaemas O'Sheel's much-anthologized poem, they were uttered in the occupiers' language.
Matthew Arnold, like his exemplar Burke, was never an Irish nationalist: indeed in 1886, during the
Home Rule crisis he proclaimed himself a staunch critic of Gladstone's proposal, arguing that the "idle and imprudent" Irish could never properly govern themselves.
5
Scholars have demonstrated that even when his intention was to praise some positive qualities in the Celt, Arnold never ceded his authority: he was the consummate surveyor, the Celt the consummately surveyed. Those who came after him, and who actually studied Irish persons and places at closer quarters, often sought evidence to bear out his theories. Any recalcitrant complexities had to be converted back into a more familiar terminology in a tyranny of books over facts. And yet it was with the tyranny of facts that Arnold had proclaimed the Celt quite unable to cope!
Arnoldian ideas won support among
bien-pensant
English liberals, who agreed that Celtic spirituality and poetry might repair many gaps in the English personality. If the Irish had failed to master pragmatic affairs, that was simply attributable to their superiority in matters of the imagination. "Saving England" became a perennial revivalist theme. It is remarkable, in retrospect, how durable such drinking proved, even among those Irish who fancied that they had exploded it. Many embraced the more insulting clichés of Anglo-Saxonist theory on condition that they could reinterpret each in a more positive light The modern English, seeing themselves as secular, progressive and rational, had deemed the neighbouring islanders to be superstitious, backward and irrational The strategy of the revivalists thus became clear: for bad words substitute good, for
superstitious
use
religious,
for
backward
say
traditional,
for
irrational
suggest
emotional.
The positive aspect of this manoeuvre was that it permitted Irish people to take many images which were rejected by English society, occupy them, reclaim them, and make them their own: but the negative aspect was painfully obvious, in that the process left the English with the power of description and the Irish succumbing to the pictures which they had constructed The danger was that, under the guise of freedom, a racist slur might be sanitized and worn with pride by its very victims; and that the act of national revival might be taken away from a people even as they performed it. Sometimes in their progress the revivalists would seem to reinforce precisely those stereotypes which they had set out to dismantle: nevertheless, this was an inevitable, nationalist phase through which they and their country had to pass
en route
to liberation.
The story of the Irish
risorgimento
begins, perhaps surprisingly, with Oscar Wilde, a man who saw England as a holy place to be conquered by force of intellect and imagination. The problem never fully confronted by the English was that much of their history had happened overseas, and so they could easily deflect attempts to discuss its meaning. Céitinn had told them in uncompromising terms, but in an Irish-language narrative which they could softly ignore. Burke had, in turn, hinted at certain corruptions of empire which might, one day, come home to roost. Wilde, however, was perhaps the first intellectual from Ireland who proceeded to London with the aim of dismantling its imperial mythology from within its own structures. He saw that those who wished to invent Ireland might first have to reinvent England
.
"Was there ever an Irish man of genius who did not get himself turned into an Englishman as fast as he could?" asked
Henry Craik in an immortal line;
1
and no better illustration could be found than the career of Oscar Wilde, which began with his arrival as a student in Oxford in the autumn of 1874. Having put the Irish Sea between himself and his
parents, the young genius proceeded to reconstruct his image through the art of the pose. According to Yeats, Wilde in England "perpetually performed a play which was in all things the opposite of all that he had known in childhood and youth. [He] never put off completely his wonder at opening his eyes every morning on his own beautiful house and in remembering that he had dined yesterday with a Duchess . . ."
2
The home which Wilde had left in Dublin was, on the other hand, "the sort that had fed the imagination of
Charles Lever, dirty, untidy and daring",
3
and it was presided over by two eccentric parents who seemed to have stepped out of a bad stage-Irish melodrama.
Sir William Wilde, although a most eminent surgeon and scholar, was reputed to be the dirtiest man in Dublin. "Why are Sir William's nails so black?" asked the mordant students who assisted at his operations, and the answer was "Because he has scratched himself'.
4
The Lord Lieutenant's wife one evening refused the soup at the Wilde home, because she had spotted her host dipping his thumb into the tureen. That same hand, it was alleged, on one notorious occasion administered a whiff of chloroform to a female patient as a prelude to an amorous overture.
5
Lady Wilde turned a blind eye to the peccadilloes of her husband, just as he indulged the strident patriotism of his wife, who wrote under the pen-name "Speranza" for nationalist journals. His monumental studies of the antiquities and archaeology of Ireland were matched by her collections of folklore and outpourings of nationalist verse. To her second son, Lady Wilde bequeathed a love of the pose and a theatrical personality.
From the outset, her attitude to Oscar was ambivalent. She had longed for a girl and so, when the boy-child arrived like an uninvited guest, she was somewhat miffed. Thereafter, this ardent feminist and radical alternately pampered and neglected him. His love for her was melodramatic but genuine, as was his repeated espousal in later writings of her doctrines – especially her belief in a woman's right to work and to engage in political activity. Persistent rumours about his parents' sexual adventurism may, however, have given rise to doubts about his own legitimacy, which would ultimately be put in the mouth of Jack Worthing in
The Importance of Being Earnest.
I said I had lost my parents. It would be nearer the truth to say that my parents seem to have lost me ... I don't actually know who I am by birth ... I was . . . well, I was found.
6
The mild fear of technical illegitimacy concealed in Wilde a far deeper concern to establish his true personal
identity. His famous parents were probably too busy to offer the one commodity that is signally lacking in all his plays, that continuous tenderness and intimacy which might have given him a sense of himself.
The future master of paradox was already wavering between national extremes, emulating his mother's Irish patriotism in one poem, only to salute Keats as "poet-painter of our English land"
7
in the next. Already, he was evolving the doctrine of the androgyny of the integrated personality, which would find immortal expression in the wisecrack that "All women become like their mothers – that is their tragedy. No man does – and that is his".
8
The loutish sexism of the first half of the proposition is fully retrieved by the sharp intelligence of the conclusion.
The sexual uncertainty induced by a neglectful but dominant mother was heightened by the massive disappointment of Wilde's first love for
Florence Balcombe, the beautiful daughter of a retired naval officer. Having met her in the summer of 1876, he wrote to a friend: "She is just seventeen with the most perfectly beautiful face I ever saw and not a sixpence of money".
9
That he was serious about her is confirmed by the characteristically flippant reference to cash: but she spurned the young dandy for the more Gothic thrills of life with a minor civil servant named
Bram Stoker, thereby causing Wilde to fire off a letter in which he vowed to "leave Ireland" and live in England "probably for good".
10
Here was yet another nightmare from the Irish past to be suppressed by a famous career in England. Wilde easily cut the cord which bound him to the land of his parents, for Sir William died while
he was at
Oxford. The loss of one parent was a misfortune, but the loss of two might indicate carelessness, so Wilde installed his mother in proximity to himself in London after his graduation, but at a chaste distance from his own quarters. He announced to startled guests at their weekly
soirées
that mother and son had formed a society for the suppression of virtue. It was only later that they saw what he meant.
In the meantime, he busied himself with the task of arranging a pose based on the art of elegant inversion. All the norms of his childhood were to be
reversed. His father had been laughed at by society, so he would mock society first. His father had been unkempt, so he would be fastidious. From his mother he had inherited a gigantic and ungainly body, which
Lady Colin Campbell compared to "a great white caterpillar"
11
and which recalled all too poignantly the gorilla-like frame of the stage Irishman in
Sir John Tenniel's cartoons. To disarm such critics, Wilde concealed his massive form with costly clothes and studied the art of elegant deportment. His mother had sought to reconquer Ireland, so he would surpass her by invading and conquering England. She had wished to repossess Irish folklore and the native language, but he would go one better and achieve a total mastery of English.
"I am Irish by race", he told Edmond de Goncourt, "but the English have condemned me to speak the language of Shakespeare".
12
It was not the most onerous of sentences and he admitted as much to an audience in San Francisco: "The Saxon took our lands from us and made them destitute . . . but we took their language and added new beauties to it".
13
Decades later, the same diagnosis would be offered by James Joyce: "In spite of everything Ireland remains the brain of the United Kingdom. The English, judiciously practical and ponderous, furnish the over-stuffed stomach of humanity with a perfect gadget – the water closet. The Irish, condemned to express themselves in a language not their own, have stamped on it the mark of their own genius and compete for glory with the civilized nations. The result is then called English literature".
14
Wilde's entire literary career constituted an ironic comment on the tendency of Victorian Englishmen to attribute to the Irish those emotions which they had repressed within themselves. His essays on Ireland question the assumption that, just because the English are one thing, the Irish must be its opposite. The man who believed that a truth in art is that whose opposite is also true was quick to point out that every good man has an element of the woman in him, just as every sensitive Irishman must have a secret Englishman within himself – and
vice-versa.
With his sharp intelligence, Wilde saw that the image of the stage
Irishman tells far more about English fears than Irish realities, just as the "
Irish joke" revealed less about Irishmen's innate foolishness than about Englishmen's persistent and poignant desire to say something funny. Wilde opted to say that something funny for them in a lifelong performance of "Englishness" which was really a parody of the very notion. The ease with which Wilde effected the transition from stage-Ireland to stage-England was his ultimate comment on the shallowness of such categories. Earnest intellectuals back in Dublin missed this element of parody and saw in Wilde's career an act of national apostasy: but he did not lack defenders. Yeats saw Wilde's snobbery not as such, but as the clever strategy of an Irishman marooned in London, whose only weapon against Anglo-Saxon prejudice was to become more English than the English themselves, thereby challenging many time-honoured myths about the Irish.
15
The costs of such a gamble, however, might be too high, entailing a massive suppression of personality. In rejecting the stage-Irish
mask, Wilde took a step towards selfhood, but in exchanging it for the pose of urbane Englishman, he seemed merely to have exchanged one mask for another, and to have given rise to the suspicion that what these masks hid was no face at all – that the exponent of "personality" was fatally lacking in "character". To his mortification and intermittent delight, Wilde found that his English mask was not by any means a perfect fit. The more he suppressed his inherited personality, the more it seemed to assert itself. "The two great turning-points of my life", he wrote in
De Profundis,
"were when my father sent me to Oxford and when society sent me to prison".
16
It was a revealing equation, for in bom institutions he learned what it was to be an outsider, an uninvited guest, an Irishman in England.
To his friends in Oxford, he was not so much an Anglo-Irishman as a flashy and fastidious Paddy with "a suspicion of brogue" and "an unfamiliar turn to his phrasing". At the university's gate-lodges, he took to signing himself "Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde", filling two lines of the roll-book with the indisputable proof of his Irish identity. His flirtation with
Roman Catholicism at Magdalen College was rather more serious and much more costly than that of his English peers: for an Englishman the Catholic Church evoked incense and Mariolatry, but for an Irishman it was the historic faith of an oppressed people.
17
As a consequence of his devotion to the Scarlet Lady, Wilde was punished by exclusion from his half-brother's will at a time when he was sorely in need of funds. Yet he refused to deny his interest in Catholicism, which may have been enhanced by the dim recollection of
having been brought as a child, at the whim of his mother, for a second baptism in the Catholic Church at Glencree. It is possible that the "desire for immediate baptism" expressed by the two leading men of his greatest play may arise from that experience: certainly, the playwright made sure to have a Dublin Passionist Father at his bedside just before he died.
At all events, Oxford strengthened in Wilde the conviction that an Irishman only discovers himself when he goes abroad, just as it reinforced his belief that "man is least himself when he talks in his own person" but "give him a mask and he will tell you the truth".
18
Years later, when Parnell was at the height of his power in 1889, Wilde wrote in celebration of
his
Celtic intellect which "at home . . . had but learnt the pathetic weakness of nationality, but in a strange land realized what indomitable forces nationality possesses".
19
Wilde saw his own career as running parallel to that of Parnell, another urbane Irishman who surprised the English by his self-control and cold exterior. Always a separatist, Wilde poured scorn on the latest English debate on "how best to misgovern Ireland" and wrote a mocking review of one of
James Anthony Froude's books on the subject.
In his view, Froude on Ireland was a perfect example of all that was amiss with Britain's attitudes: "If in the last century she tried to govern Ireland with an insolence that was intensified by race hatred and religious prejudice, she has sought to rule her in this century with a stupidity that is aggravated by good intentions". The man who complained that the modern attempt to solve the problem of slavery took the form of devising amusements to distract the slaves saw the political version of such distraction in the endless rehearsals of the Irish Question at Westminster. He closed a review of Froude's
The Two Chiefs of Dunboy
with a straight-faced inversion of the author's purpose: "as a record of the incapacity of a Teutonic to rule a Celtic people against their own wishes his book is not without value". (West Indian islanders coined the term "Froudacity" to describe Froude's lofty condescension: in
The English in the
West Indies
[1888] he had found it impossible to think that the former slaves of the area could ever hope to run their own government.) Wilde brilliantly glossed the latest Froudacity: "there are some who will welcome with delight the idea of solving the Irish question by doing away with the Irish people". His solution was more complex and daring: to become a very Irish kind of English man, just as in Ireland his had been a rather English kind of Irish family. The truth, in life as well as in art, was that whose opposite could also be true: every great power evolved its own opposite in order to achieve
itself, as Giordano Bruno had written, but from such opposition might spring reunion.
Wilde's art, as well as his public persona, was founded on a critique of the manic Victorian urge to antithesis, an antithesis not only between all dungs English and Irish, but also between male and female, master and servant, good and evil, and so on. He inveighed against the specialization deemed essential in men fit to run an empire, and showed that no matter how manfully they tried to project qualities of softness, poetry and femininity onto their subject peoples, these repressed instincts would return to take a merry revenge. Arnold's theory had been that the Celts were doomed by a multiple selfhood, which allowed them
to see so
many options in a situation that they were immobilized, unlike the English specialist who might have simplified himself but who did not succumb to pitfalls which he had not the imagination to discern. Wilde knew that in such Celtic psychology was the shape of things to come.
Wilde was the first major artist to discredit the romantic ideal of sincerity and to replace it with the darker imperative of authenticity: he saw that in being true to a single self, a sincere man may be false to half a dozen other selves.
20
Those Victorians who saluted a man as having "character" were, in Wildes judgement, simply indicating the predictability of his devotion to a single self-image. The Puritan distrust of play-acting and the rise of romantic poetry had simply augmented this commitment to the ideal of a unitary self. This, along with the scope for psychological exploration provided by the novel, may have been a further reason for the failure of nineteenth-century artists before Wilde to shape a genuinely theatrical play,
Shelley's
The Cenci
being far better as poetry than as drama. Wilde argued that these prevailing cultural tendencies also led to some very poor poems written in the first person singular: all bad poetry, he bleakly quipped, sprang from genuine feeling. In the same way, he mocked the drab black suit worn by the Victorian male – Marx called it a social hieroglyphic – as a sign of the stable, imperial self. He, on the contrary, was interested in the subversive potential of a theatricality which caused people to forget their assigned place and to assert the plasticity of social conditions. Wilde wrote from the perspective of one who sees that the only real fool is the conventionally "sincere" man who fails to see that he, too, is wearing a mask, the mask of sincerity. If all art must contain the essential criticism of its prevailing codes, for Wilde an authentic life must recognize all that is most opposed to it.